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Gavin Smith: Peru: the Uncertain State

Zavaleta: “[Apparent states] appear to be Western… in all respects but somehow they are not. What misfires here is a structural concept of sovereignty that is ultimately incompatible with the condition of non-centrality in the world, at least in history such as it has occurred until now…. They have only a vague sense of self-certainty, that is identity. We can therefore also call them uncertain states.” (2018: 69 Itals mine)

In the 28 January issue of Viento Sur Pepe Mejia writes, “The dismissal of [Peruvian President] Pedro Castillo, on 7 December, was the starting signal for the organization and celebration of mobilizations that began in Puno, a territory rich in lithium and uranium and the target of large extractive companies.” (Mejia, 2023) He goes on to provide a concise summary of the situation in Peru and sets it within a brief history of the relationship between the rural people of the Andes and the Lima pitucracia on the one hand and the contracts with foreign-owned extractivist corporations that go back to the guano era on the other.[1] By contrast, in an article by Tom Phillips in the Observer two months after the outbreak of events, headed ‘My city is destroying itself’: Juliaca under siege as death toll rises in Peru’s uprising, a kind of crazed self-destruction is described as victims of ‘corruption’ burn tires and the military holes up at the airport. There’s no discussion of Peru’s history, no exposure of the contracts Mejia mentions nor the least attempt to explain to the unfamiliar reader why the re-writing of Peru’s constitution is a central demand of these people.

On the other hand, perhaps the reason the established press writes so little about Latin America’s fourth largest nation is because Peru, as such, does not really exist. Writing about Bolivia and Peru’s war with Chile from 1879 to 1884, Rene Zavaleta Mercado, ‘the Bolivian Gramsci’ as he was sometimes called, ascribed Chile’s victory to the failure of its allied adversaries to constitute coherent states, the ‘integral state’ to which Gramsci had referred. For Zavaleta the effect of the war was to produce for Chile what he called a ‘constitutive moment’ the elusive essence that may or may not bring forth a coherent national social formation, “something potent enough to interpolate an entire people….it must bring forth a replacement of beliefs, a universal substitution of loyalties, in short, a new horizon of visibility.” ([1986] 2018: 75). His historical method was to seek to identify such moments their momentary success and, so often, the failure of their promise.

Image 1: “Even despite Argentinian promises Chile outweighs Peru and Bolivia.” (Cartoonist. El Barbero. 1879; Source: Wikimedia Commons

For Peru it may be that there has never been such a constitutive moment, elusive, temporary or otherwise. Writing of the hundred years following the war the economists Thorp and Bertram subtitle their book, Peru 1890-1970 (1978) ‘an open economy’. It was a society controlled from Lima that was open for business and closed for the ninety-percent of its citizens living in the Andes or their kin struggling in the shanty towns of the capital. In the strictest sense, in the Durkheimian sense, it wasn’t even a society. Perhaps it still isn’t. Writing a quarter century after Thorp and Bertram Debbie Poole and Gerardo Renique (2003) referred to it as “the privatized state.” And here we are twenty years later with Peru scarcely ever mentioned in the European or North American press and when it is the treatment is superficial and pathetic, an ignorance of history and a kind of willful refusal to ask the kinds of questions one would need to know about an open economy and a state so privatized as to be incoherent.

Dismissing Castillo to renew the ‘surplus without a state’

Apparently, the rural working people of Peru and their kin and comunaros/as living in Lima’s shanty towns are unhappy with the school-teacher president they elected, Pedro Castillo, being declared a traitor and thrown in prison by the Congress. Why? Is there some history that might help us to understand – even quite recent history like the fact that the President of the distrusted Congress that impeached Castillo is José Daniel Williams Zapata, an ex-army general who at the rank of colonel was involved in the massacre of 61 people (23 of them children) in Accomarca back in 1985? Or still more recently, the fact that the constitution for which they want the same kind of re-working that got so much attention in the western press when it occurred in Chile, is the one Fujimori, like Pinochet before him, produced to give legal form to his authoritarian neo-liberal regime.

Meanwhile in a country so entirely open to foreign privatized interests surely more useful for the inquisitive reader than the burning of tires and the frying of a cop in his car, is the fact that 2023-24 will be the period when a vast array of the contracts Fujimori signed with foreign companies will come up, not just the extractive ones in oil, gas, copper, lithium etc. but the banks and hedge funds that financed them. There are more than 900 contracts up for renewal. Could this be newsworthy for the likes of the Observer and other western media? Apparently not. Yet, speaking of the proposed renewal of these contracts Mejia notes in the above-cited reporting from Viento Sur, “The term of the contract is generally 30 to 40 years and no one can change the term. This contract law cannot be modified for any reason. Nor can it be modified even if the people go on strike or the congressmen want to annul it.” He adds that in these contracts the ratio of the profits retained in the country to those exported is 18:82 (Mejia, 2023)

Image 2: Graphical depiction of Peru’s product exports 2019 (source: By Datawheel – Interactive Visualization: OEC – Peru Product Exports (2019) Data Source: BACI – HS6 REV. 1992 (1995 – 2019), CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107580340)

Zavaleta spoke of “Peru, the paragon of a surplus without a state.” (2018: 71) Reflecting on the elusive ‘abstract state’ that momentarily may achieve a kind of coherence in a conjunctural moment, a bedrock that might give character to subsequent national projects, Zavaleta spoke of the ‘fruitfulness’ of the surplus to produce a constitutive moment. Among other things sterility results from two factors: the inability to produce coherence when such vast amounts of surplus value are being sucked out of the social formation; and the distributive failures by the national bourgeoisie of what little is left (Zavaleta, 2018; see also Marini, 1981, 2011). Is it then possible that it is not Peru that is ’uprising’ but a variety of regions of Peru each having to deal with its own particularities: a past made up of histories of distinctive struggles not as yet combined nationally; and a present characterized by the distinct contracts each has with the capitalist firms extracting local resources be it the decades old experience with copper in the central Andes or the incubating ones around lithium in the south.

I want to put meat on the bones of such a suggestion by first describing a period I am familiar with in the central Andes when, in Zavaleta’s terms Peru failed to produce a constitutive moment, and then provide brief descriptions of the kinds of contracts that are so determinant of regional conditions from one part of the country to another.

Criollos and Montoneros

Let me turn back to that failed ‘constituent moment’ for Peru during the Pacific War of 1879 to 1884 with Chile that Zavaleta spoke of. Lima, that is to say ‘Peru’ fell ignominiously soon after the war began. But when General Caceres retreated into the central highlands a different kind of war ensued. (Manrique, 1981) Apart from anything else just who was fighting whom. On arrival in the Mantaro Valley it was in part through the influence of his cousin the hacendada Bernarda Pielago that he was able to raise a force of guerrilleros from among the pastoralists that worked in and around her properties in the highlands. In those initial days the emerging montoneros referred to Caceres as taita (familiar term: uncle); by the end, in response to a demand that they descend to the valley to report to the general, their leader sent the message, “Tell Caceres I am as much a general as he is and will be dealt with equal to equal.”[2] It’s the kind of story so familiar throughout Peruvian history, one to repeat itself again and again. Speaking of the Pacific War in the highlands in 1989 I wrote, “The war thus gave birth to a fatal combination – a self-confident peasantry and an expansionist landlord.” (Smith, 1989: 67)

Plus ça change: in the context of what we read about today, it sounds familiar: a situation in which expansionist landlords perhaps have been replaced by expansionist extractive companies. As the following paragraph makes clear it was for the highland people of the central region ‘a constitutive moment’.

[As the war wound down] the montoneros, once mobilized, remained so. But the composition of their enemy shifted. At the beginning of hostilities these montoneros were fighting the foreign invaders; at the end they fought alone against a wide range of opponents – landlords, the commercial classes of the valley, and the agents of the state [especially Caceres]. Such an experience made a profound impression on their culture of opposition, colouring their attitude toward political confrontation for the century that followed. (ibid:68)[3]

Nevertheless, the ability to divide and conquer saw the end of that moment then, as perhaps today too.

Yet in a sense the period of the montoneros has the elements of a constituent moment for the highland regions of the central Andes. When Mejia remarks of Peru’s Andean people, “No necesitan tener un título para salir a la calle y conseguir sus reivindicaciones,” he is alluding to the many times when rural people have resisted by simply occupying space: “They don’t need title deeds to go to the streets and recuperate what belongs to them.[4]” In 1948 the Huasicanchinos of the central highlands faced off against the army to occupy the lands of Hacienda Tucle and Hacienda Rio de le Virgen resulting in the concession of considerable territory by the latter hacienda. The 1956 reivindicacion in the province of Cuzco in which Hugo Blanco played a major role was written up by Eric Hobsbawm as a case of neo-feudalism. The labour relations and strategy of resistance was quite different from the 1948 confrontation in the central highlands that I had described (for the framework of resistance strategies see also Hobsbawm, 1969). Yet, it planted the seeds of widespread land occupations in Cusco in 1962. Even within regions themselves tactics differed. On the west side of the Mantaro Valley in the central Andes, the massive campaign of endurance carried out by the Huasicanchinos from 1968 to 1972 resulted in the complete occupation and destruction of Hacienda Tucle and Rio de la Virgen. (Smith 1989; 2014) Yet it differed from the insurgence around Comas to the east of the valley in the late sixties, which itself was different from that of the Tupac Amaru guerrilla close by. (Hobsbawm, 1974; Flores Galindo & Manrique, 1984) A difficulty then, in making a broad assessment of what is going on in ‘Peru’ as a whole is the persistent differences that its many Andean regions face, surfacing time and again in moments of crisis.

From guano to copper to lithium

Currently over forty mining contracts in southern Peru, almost all of them copper, have been paralyzed by popular occupations and blockages, reducing Peru’s copper output by 30% at a time, Bloomberg reports, when copper prices are at their highest. The effect is to halt any attempt at renegotiating Fujimori’s contracts this year. “About $160 million of production has been lost in 23 days of protests” it reported on 27th January. The article concludes “The unrest also jeopardizes the rollout of $53.7 billion in possible investments at a time when the world needs to accelerate decarbonization and boost minerals required for electromobility, according to BTG Pactual analyst Cesar Perez-Novoa.” (Attwood, 2023) The analyst is speaking here of course not of Peru’s longstanding role as a copper exporter but the future contracts for the extraction of lithium.

Agreements for regional resource extraction projects to fund local development such as schools, medical facilities and of course infrastructure (the latter as vital to the miners as to the communities) are pathetic from the outset and unfulfilled to the point of fiction as they unfold. The process is facilitated by mining companies like the giant four, Southern Peru, Yanacocha, Antamina, and Chinalco, signing contracts with Peru’s national police. (EarthRights International, 2019) Use of the police obviously enables the terrorization of locals but has the additional advantage that it allows for the criminal prosecution of protests stoppages and so forth rather than the more cumbersome civil cases that would otherwise be needed.

Meanwhile if brute force isn’t enough, a common practice in sidestepping social contracts of this kind is to offload one mining company to another (often a subsidiary), the conditions of the sale being the abandoning of the obligations of incomplete components an existing social contract. Meanwhile tying up issues of ownership, profit-sharing and social responsibility in lengthy legal proceedings is so common that formulaic contractual obligations to communities can be written into contracts with the full knowledge that they will be held up indefinitely in legal wrangling.  

Typical is the following: in 2021 the Macusani Yellowknife lithium extraction project, the largest in Peru, owned by Plateau Energy Metals, itself recently acquired by the Canadian American Lithium Corporation, was disputing 32 out of the 151 concessions it has in southern Peru midway between Cusco and Juliaca. Even so its CEO was able to reassure Resource World Magazine, “While it is standard practise for the legal departments of regulatory bodies in Peru to appeal rulings such as this, the company is confident that, given the strength of judgements in the past the appeals will not be successful,” assuring investors that “common sense will prevail,” and that anyway, while locked up in the courts, the company would push ahead with the mobilization of drill rigs to commence the next phase of development. (Resource World, 2022)

Meanwhile in the much older copper and zinc mines and refining centres to the north – La Oroya and Cerro de Pasco – where foreign contracts are so longstanding that social responsibility conditionalities have to be fought as rear-guard actions, the issues frequently have less to do with recently unfulfilled obligations than generations-long threats both to rural livelihoods and to the possibilities for ongoing social reproduction, in short life itself. On the one hand the pastures in the highlands proximate to those fought over by the montoneros of the past have been so poisoned or simply disappeared as a result of the smelters at La Oroya that endless legal battles for compensation are simply a way of life. On the other hand, in Cerro de Pasco, one of Peru’s main mining cities, children have high blood lead levels, anemia, learning problems, headaches, and nose bleeding leading to endless requests for medical help given that demands for better living conditions over generations have produced only minor results. (Cabral, E & M. Garro, 2020)

Image 3: The impact of mining on Cerro Pasco (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mina_cerro_pasco.jpg)

The contracts are ubiquitous from one part of Peru to another, be it the southern Andes, the new and old extractive industries of the centre and north, or the oil deposits of Amazonia. But the past histories and present experiences of resistance have their own characteristics.

As the Mexican journalist Luis Hernández Navarro remarks (2023), Peru “is a disabled State that cannot do anything, because everything has to be contracted with private companies.” He refers to Peru’s Quechua name Tawantinsuyo ‘The Four Adjoining Regions,’ And such is the case, four or myriad, Peru remains an incoherent state each of whose regions has had its distinct struggle that from time to time resulted in an all but ephemeral constitutive moment but failed to combine into a synchronous national movement.

Gavin Smith is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and has worked in South America and Western Europe.  Apart from ethnographic monographs he has published two books of essays, Confronting the present, 1999; and Intellectuals and (counter-)politics, 2014.

References Cited

Attwood, James. 2023 “Peru’s violent protests imperil 30% of its copper output.” Bloomberg Anywhere 27 Jan. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-27/protest-surge-imperils-30-of-copper-supply-in-no-2-miner-peru?leadSource=uverify%20wall Accessed 23 Feb 2023

Cabral, E & M. Garro, 2020: “The bleeding children of cerro de pasco are expecting justice.” Aliados/as: OjoPublico https://ojo-publico.com/2281/bleeding-children-cerro-de-pasco

EarthRights International, 2019: Convenios entre la Policía Nacional y las empresas extractivas en el Perú. Instituto de Defensa Legal, Lima

Flores Galindo, A. and N. Manrique, 1986: Violencia y campesinado. Instituto de Apoyo Agrario. Lima.

Hobsbawm, E.J. 1969, “A case of neo-feudalism: La Convencion, Peru” Journal of Latin American Studies 1,1: 23- 47

Hobsbawm, E.J. 1974: “Peasant land occupations” Past and Present. 62. 120-52.

Manrique 1981: Las guerrilleras indigenas en la Guerra con Chile. Centro de investigacion y capacitacion. Lima

Marini 1981, Dialectica de la dependencia Ed. Era Mexico D.F.

Marini, 2011 “La accumulacion capitalista mundial y el subimperialismo.” Revista Ola Financiera. UNAM. 4,10: 183-217

Mejia, Pepe 2023: “Un huaracazo a la oligarquia” Viento Sur 28 Jan. https://vientosur.info/un-huaracazo-a-la-oligarquia/ Accessed 23 Feb 2023.

Navarro, Luis Hernández 2023: “Movimiento popular destituyente” Viento Sur; https://vientosur.info/movimiento-popular-destituyente/

Poole, D & G. Renique, 2003: “Terror and the privatized state: a parable.” Radical History Review 83:150-63

Resource World Magazine, 2022; https://resourceworld.com/american-lithium-on-dispute-over-peruvian-concessions/ Accessed 23 Feb 2023

Smith, Gavin. 1989:  Livelihood and resistance: peasants and the politics of land in Peru. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Smith, Gavin. 2014 Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: essays in historical realism. Berghahn. Oxford.

Thorp, R. and G. Bertram, 1978: Peru 1890-1977: growth and policy in an open economy. Columbia University Press, New York.

Zavaleta Mercado, Rene. 2018: Towards a history of the National-Popular in Bolivia 1879-1980. Trans. Anne Freeland. Seagull Books. Calcutta

[1] Pitucos/as is a familiarity used to describe the posh, lazy and shallow elite of Lima. Guano is the Quechua word for sea dung high in nitrates used for fertilizer. The so-called Guano Era during which nitrates were extracted in vast quantities by foreign companies ran from 1802 to 1884 and was a key factor in the War of the Pacific from 1879 to 1884, sometimes referred to as the Saltpetre War.

[2] This was in response to Caceres’s invitation to descend to Huancayo for a war conference. On arrival he and his lieutenants were put up against a wall and shot.

[3] The extent of the montoneros’ successful mobilization against the haciendas over the period is reflected in the number of livestock held before and after the campaign by the two largest of them. Laive: 38,000 sheep before, none after; Tucle 42,000 sheep before, 3000 after. (Smith: 1989: 74) Needless to say in the period that followed the haciendas of the central highlands, most of them owned by those who had collaborated with Chile, expanded without interruption until the 1960s

[4] There is no proper translation for reivindicaciones a term used frequently in the context of rural labourers’ occupation of lands stolen from them.

Cite as: Smith, Gavin 2023. “Peru: the Uncertain State” Focaalblog 3 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/03/03/gavin-smith-peru-the-uncertain-state/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Felix Lussem: Alienating “facts” and uneven futures of energy transition

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

We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.

Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes, “contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009), as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal industry in the Rhineland region.

Despite this decrease of economic significance in the region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers. To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.

Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)

Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.

Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.

The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.

Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.

Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities. Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’ capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.

Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy company.

This carbon-democratic entanglement of political institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific path of options in their interest.

In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.

Photo of solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)

Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon.  But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.

Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.

This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.

Around the same time, the energy company came to an agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the energy company is directly involved.

So instead of being perceived as a successful step towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area, the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the face of impending coal exit.

While the lignite industry will disappear in the foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area – will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.

Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.

This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014) to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.

A coalition of local actors more attuned to the socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the Rhineland.

Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de

Bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Eriksen, Thomas H. 2016. Overheating. An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. London: Pluto Press.

Fortun, Kim. 2014. From Latour to late industrialism. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 309-329.

Hornborg, Alf. 2009. Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50 (3-4): 237-262.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. Carbon democracy. Economy and Society 38 (3): 399-432.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews & Nils Bubandt. 2019. Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology. Current Anthropology 60 (Supplement 20): S000.

Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/

Features, How Capitalists Think

Eeva Kesküla: How capitalists think about labor dynasties and corporate ethics

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).

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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