Tag Archives: Political Anthropology

Blog

József Böröcz: Out of Place

Spectators at the final concert of the World Social Forum, Mumbai 2004 (author: Claudio Riccio, https://www.flickr.com/photos/ilriccio/135304963/in/photostream/)

From Andheri to Goregaon—it’s five kilometers. Half an hour by Ambassador in the north Mumbai traffic. Windows down—through them, the usual fumes: chai, wood smoke, diesel exhaust. Plus, the blinding, crunchy, almost chewable dust of the industrial area, a landscape half abandoned, half under-construction. Taxiwala grows edgy—why, Toma can’t fathom. Dumps passengers on an impulse: “New Standard Engineering Grounds”, he says, “ahead.” Ahead it is, indeed—a twenty-minute walk. Add the heat to the scents and more of the dust.

About twenty paces in the queue for registration at the entrance stood the founder of world-systems analysis. He was invited to the event to address the crowd. Toma missed him somehow, couldn’t say “hi.”

There was no category for Toma at the event. He was hoping for “attendee” or “participant,” but—no, no such thing. He became, thanks to the helpful student worker at the registration desk, a “delegate.” The best she could do. So it said on the vibrantly designed tag, hanging from Toma’s neck. Two names: Toma and country.

Speaking of which, he is from two countries, at least. One of those is a titanic, the other a dinghy. She chose the dinghy for him. Upon exit at the end of a long day, another nice person at the same desk confirmed—there were no other “delegates” from country dinghy.

Toma had given a lot of thought to the very idea of this jamboree. How do you organize a “social forum”—for the world, no less, without an underlying theme—other than, supposedly, a vague call for resistance, so to speak, to global capital? And what does it do to that event of resistance that it is sponsored by major multinational corporations? Mind you, a counter-event, held just across the highway, asserted that exact critique. The two events together seemed to “cover” much of the political left of south Asia.

Indeed, how to be “anti-Davos?” besides, what do they do in Davos in the first place? Toma had no idea. The Mumbai event turned out to be a pageantry of all the worthwhile causes good people could think of. Attendance was expected to be 75 thousand. Conversation on the ground went up to as high as 130.000 “delegates” from 130 countries.

“I didn’t quite realize Mumbai was this far,” a group of people chatted in a cluster that somehow ended up including Toma. “Far . . . from where?”, he interjected an old joke from Budapest. Polite amusement, a smile or two. They had an accent Toma could not quite place within the UK.

There was breathtakingly little water for so many people. Toma saw two taps on the entire grounds. Plus, there were of course the drinking water tanks provided by the municipal authority. Neither to be had without boiling. Everybody ran around, hence, with store bought drinking water in plastic bottles, half a dollar per liter—at an event that deplored, among other things, the depletion of the environment, the commercialization of a basic human necessity like drinking water, and pollution of the planet with single use plastic containers.

The Forum was a gigantic café—without tables. A global / adda. \

Toma chatted with hundreds of other “delegates,” mainly young people from Asia. Gaped at Vietnamese students parading with a two-story flag of their country. Talked with South Indian and Latin American activists fighting the good fight against Coca Cola robbing their regions of drinking water. (Or was it Pepsi? Toma can never tell those two apart.) People who organize artisanal cooperatives. Artists of all kinds. Activists for NGOs of people displaced by hydroelectric dams, airports, shopping malls. A gentleman presented a contraption that looked like an aluminum wash basin but glittering inside: It gathers the rays of the Sun to cook a meal. He demonstrated that on the spot. Toma was distracted by something, he didn’t stick around to taste it.

A man with a broad smile approached Toma. He had a mustache and was wearing gauze-thin white cotton tied around his head, a linen shirt and a dhoti. He was very interested in the status of the agrarian question in “Toma’s country.” How peasants are doing in country dinghy. It was important to him, he said, because he knows the peasantries of their two countries could learn much from each other.

Toma made a quick calculation. As far as he knows, eleven of his sixteen great-great-grandparents were born serfs. Then came the abolition of serfdom, capitalism—of Kakanien, the Habsburg variety—two world wars, fascism, holocaust and socialisms, in the plural. Then back to a neoconservative, deeply confused, angry and desperate kind of capitalism. Now everyone in Toma’s extended family lives in cities. The most sweeping form of social change in country dinghy over the last century is that there are hardly any peasants left—other than in one-step removed, virtual forms as cultural movements aim to “preserve” and “re-cycle” peasant culture, especially music and dance, in urban life. In the country of Bartók—who railed against this kind of appropriation—the culture of the peasantry is now re-used as folklorism, exoticizing the lives of the descendants of the people who created that art in the first place.

They discussed the legacies of serfdom and the “peasant question” in Soviet history. And that more-than-half of the peoples of south Asia that hover precariously between peasant near-self-sufficiency and market-driven farming. How the average Indian peasant walks to polling stations to be able to cast a vote. Two hours, both ways. GMO seed. Child malnutrition. Toma’s new comrade had read Chayanov enthusiastically and mentioned Lenin a couple of times. He gave Toma a card. “Secretary General of the Peasant Trade Union Confederation of India.”

There was visible discomfort—among the Europeans. Not so much because of the heat or the dust. Two other things. One was unspoken but Toma felt it. The weirdness of standing out: Their head loomed above almost everyone else in the great sea of global “delegates.” Comrades in terms of politics, moral values, aesthetics, all the good things, with their pink and sweating heads sticking out. Because of their infrequency at the event, they seemed to feel on display. It’s not just that there was staring—there is much more of that on a tram in Kolkata or in a bus in Delhi. They came here to swim in the sea of comrades from the global south, after all. To be in the company of the like-minded from the rest-of-the-world. That was the whole point. There they are now, this is it.

The truly unpleasant thing was realizing that they had not even thought about the possibility of feeling strange. Their own reaction seemed to be a genuine surprise to them. They may well have traveled outside Europe before. But that’s not like this. They saw crowds in Istanbul or Cairo. But this is not that. The crowds on earlier trips were at a distance. Possibly behind windows of buses, or hotel lobbies. Here, everyone is so exposed to a truly intense mix of languages—bodily and spoken—that it is easy to feel lost. More body-to-body contact on a January afternoon than they have in an average year. And all that is driven by rules they don’t quite understand. They could, of course have read about those rules—but they didn’t quite think of it. It didn’t occur to them.

Losing the ability to sort everything out—who is who and what is what—they could neither wipe the discomfort away nor give it a name. For, that might be considered “rude”. . . Too honest. Not to mention admitting defeat, the thought that this corporeal idea of solidarity is not working for them.

There was, then, the second discomfort— and that one was indeed spoken of very much. A metaphor for all other metaphors.

“Child labor.”

The horror.

Who could be in favor of child labor? The abysmal life. The barefoot, scantily dressed, small bodies toiling in the crowd. “They should be in school.”

Mind you, at the event, begging was not allowed. Panhandlers were chased away by the private jawans, armed with long batons, very eager to use them, stationed visibly at each entrance. Toma wondered to what extent the jawans-with-truncheons “solution” to “the begging problem” was cleared with the organizing committee—whose charge it was to assure the event stayed on course toward its haughty goals of global equality. For sure, the clubs were used in the outside world—the world that these seventy-five thousand to one hundred and thirty thousand people all came to protest.

“Are the beatings OK if they happen outside the gates?” Toma is asking questions like that. “I could never bear being on that Organizing Committee.”

There was, however, plenty of tea and coffee on offer everywhere, brought to everyone—a little more to the “delegates” with lower levels of melanin, a skin color situation the hot beverage workers were very familiar with. Mumbai is a truly tourism-infested city. Those delegates might even give a 100% tip on the 5-rupee price—for the tea poured from large pots to small throwaway plastic cups, a nice counterpoint to the event protesting plastic pollution. All that service was rendered by tiny, unbearably cute children.

It struck Toma, as he stood there, amidst all the chatter about child labor, that the conversation never went past the initial revulsion and moral panic. All those people, supposedly the best the global north has produced, armed with sharp critiques of hydrocarbon colonialism, or global militarism, or product chains, using their privileged access to knowledge for the best possible political purpose, had a hard time discerning what it is that they are looking at when they see five-six-year-old proletarians doing truly labor-intensive service. For them. That the children’s toil might be supporting the ambitious strategies—of rising above the rural survival threshold—of entire families in a village a stone’s throw away. That the 100% tip—the generous transfer of 14 instead of 7 dollar-cents in exchange for a small cup of tea—will teach those children, and their adult relatives, that they should be selling tea for the rest of their lives. To low-melanin strangers.

That is where the global critique came to a complete halt. Right at the line around the European “delegates’” own global selves. The thought of the violence of their own retirement portfolios, amplified by the privileges bestowed upon them by their melanin-deficiency, just didn’t seem to come to them. They had spent the equivalent of ten, twenty times each of those children’s extended families’ total annual income—just flying to Mumbai.

“Was I the only person having those thoughts?”, Toma ponders today. Maybe they also had them—and filed them along with all other instances of discomfort, under a rubric labeled “not-to-be-talked-about.”

The plenary session took place on the maidan—a meadow the size of several football fields. It consisted of a large stage before a giant audience space, the latter covered with industrial tarp sheets tied together, a quilt to seat the righteous of the world. An enormous navy-blue arena of plastic—encircled, once the crowd descended on it, by layers upon layers of sandals, shoes, flip-flops. Footwear of all kinds. As if entering a person’s home, or a temple, the participants took off and left “outside” their foot covering. A show of respect. And keeping the oilcloth perhaps a tiny bit less dusty.

A group of ten-fifteen Italian students arrived, chatting merrily. Guessing from the clothes, on a return leg of a roundtrip flight between Milan and Kathmandu. Locs, woven sacks, the works. Asserting the power of a supposedly righteous kind of appropriation galore. Leaving their shoes on, they entered the field. The crowd opened for them, forming a human alley. They took the offer matter-of-factly, went right to the middle, and sat down. Shoes on, soles facing outward. The crowd absorbed them. Toma lost sight of them.

Speeches: politicians, progressive intellectuals, strongly encouraging the audience that “we should do more.” Toma is not sure who the “we” is, and more of what. Then came Junoon, a politically engaged band from Pakistan. Performing in India. A geopolitical first. Palpable excitement overall and an exuberant audience response, especially among the crowd from the Subcontinent.

On the last day, the shift of the jawans-with-the-truncheons at the gates ended at six pm. The World Forum became even more social, with the arrival of a thousand or so panhandlers through the now un-jawan-ed, truncheons-free gates. Likely not the sociality the organizers had in mind.

Toma flew back to country dinghy from Mumbai two days later. At the airport, he was selected for a “detailed customs check” by a gentleman dressed in an immaculate white uniform. He took Toma to a separate room—his luggage had already been placed on a table. The officer reached into Toma’s now-open suitcase and, with the gesture of a magician, he pulled out Toma’s tag—Toma’s name and country dinghy—and asked, “you like that kind of thing?”

A rhetorical question. The officer turned to his men and quipped, half-Hindi-half-English—Toma could make it out, the officer probably wanted it that way—how Toma came here “to allay his White guilt”. A real joker. Polite giggles from the men to their superior officer, fixed stares at Toma. He liberated Toma from his remaining rupees. A “processing fee,” he winked. He tossed a small tip to the man who “handled” Toma’s suitcase. The rest disappeared into his uniform. Very politely he walked Toma to his gate, doing small talk in a self-ironical tone. He had a truly sharp and witty sense of humor.

By the time Toma arrived at his gate he learned that his seat got re-assigned. On board he realized he was sitting next to a passenger who kept talking to him nervously throughout the entire eight-hour flight.

The World Social Forum has never returned to Mumbai.

Rumor has it—it’s the child labor.

The World Social Forum (WSF) is a global social movement organized as an open environment, a meeting space for activists, NGOs and progressive social movements committed to democracy, equality and preservation of the planet, in opposition to the “World Economic Forum”—the meetings of owners and management of big capital and top brass of the world’s most powerful states held annually in Davos, Switzerland. The first WSF meeting was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001. The event in Mumbai, India—held twenty years ago—was the first time WSF had its global assembly outside Brazil.

József Böröcz is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is the author of ”’Eurowhite’ Conceit, ’Dirty White’ Ressentiment.” A recent, “reflexive sociology” interview with him about socialisms, history and ‘race’ is ”Society—Instead of Apartheid. Interview with József Böröcz.” Most of his written scholarly work can be found here.

Cite as: Böröcz, József 2024. “Out of Place” Focaalblog 14 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/10/14/jozsef-borocz-out-of-place/

Blog

Julia Soul: Between Confrontation and Silent Discipline: Working-Class Dilemmas under Javier Milei’s Far-Right Government in Argentina

With the triumph of Javier Milei in Argentina’s November 2023 national election, the country has followed the contemporary global trend of electing far-right governments. Through his frequent television appearances as an “economic expert”, Milei successfully mobilized voters against the country’s dominant political elites, which he denigrated as “la casta” (“the caste”). Ordinary Argentines, in this narrative, were being cheated and disserved by an elite class who benefited from a wasteful and inefficient state. Milei’s rhetoric, which solicited votes from workers and the poor, invoked a utopian vision of society driven by free competition between agents whose performance in markets is the only cause of their success or failure. In this vision, the capitalist market naturally rewards the best, while the “State” and other “collectivist” forms of what Milei deems to be “autocracy” corrupt the market and nourish what Milei labels “parasites”.

Through a virulent and aggressive discourse, the newly elected government and its followers have recoded social cleavages to divide and cast in opposition different sections of labor. Those employed by the State and by cooperatives, whose incomes come from social assistance, are deemed “lazy,” “useless,” and “unproductive” and are accused of taking advantage of “good people” who are oppressed by excessive taxes and regulations. Thus, cooperative “Popular Economy” organizations (known as piqueteros) and public sector workers (including teachers, scientists, and medical doctors) are both deemed responsible for State waste. Social leaders and union representatives, in particular, have been designated as part of “the caste” and accused of defending their personal interests over those of workers. Arguing in this way, libertarians, like Milei, have denied that individual interests can be advanced by collective organization.

This Manichean vision of evil collectivists and angelic individualists underpins Milei’s idea of crisis. In arguing that the nation was in a “terminal crisis” because of the political and economic order of “la casta”, Milei has promised respite for suffering Argentines by radically reshaping the relationship between the “economy”, “society”, and “politics”. In presenting himself as an outsider, he capitalized on the widespread social discontent, frustrations, and disappointments of ordinary Argentines. Milei sought consent for radical liberalization schemes, and his November 2023 electoral victory appears to have validated his agenda. Judging by the electoral results, consent to these policies seems firmly rooted in working people. According to survey data, Milei gained the vote of over half of informal and formal workers and almost 64% of the self-employed. However, only 45 days after Milei took office, 1.5 million people mobilized across the country in a general strike against the liberalisation program, preceded and followed by a series of local and sectoral protests and strikes.

Image 1: Screenshot from Indymedia report on the 24 January 2024 protests against Milei’s attack on the Argentinian populace; featuring a placard portraying Milei defecating on the nation. (source: https://periodicoelroble.wordpress.com/2024/01/26/24-de-enero-huelga-general-en-argentina/; accessed Feb 22, 2024)

This scenario raises some questions: Do voting patterns in the election indicate that Argentine workers have taken a profound “right turn”? Alternatively, is Milei’s victory only a contingent rejection of the prior government at a critical conjuncture? Are post-election protests an expression of fear by “the caste” (as the government claims)? Or have workers broken with the assumption that radical marketization is the answer to their individual problems? And what lessons can we draw about working-class dynamics from prior moments of popular consent to liberalisation? In this post, I attempt to answer these questions by revisiting an earlier moment in Argentina’s history, when President Carlos Menem took office and implemented sweeping liberalisation measures.

Memories of Yesterdays: The 90s reloaded?

In many respects, the current sociopolitical scenario resembles the early 1990s, when Menem began his first term in office amid a hyperinflation crisis and launched an aggressive program of economic liberalisation. It was a time of “globalization” when the pro-market “Washington Consensus” was globally ascendent. The neoliberal road that Argentina took was part of a global attempt to stabilize a shaky geopolitical order. The program was broadly supported by Argentina’s main corporations and the entire capitalist class, which launched a broad offensive against labor rights and working conditions, backed by a narrative of “cultural change”, which mirrored official discourses about “modernization” and “being integrated into the world”. During two terms in office, Menem’s government reshaped the conditions of reproduction of Argentina’s working people, deepening their monetization and privatization, while reconfiguring the country’s labor markets.

There are significant commonalities in working people’s experience between the moment of contested “restructuring” of global capitalism in the 1980s-1990s and now. Revisiting that earlier moment can therefore help us better understand popular consent to Milei’s pro-market, right-wing policies in the present. Below, I outline these commonalities, drawing on data from fieldwork conducted in 2000-2002, 2005-2007, 2010-2012 and 2014-2018 with steelworkers (Soul 2015), their communities and their unions, as well as data from ongoing fieldwork with workers and communities linked to the agro-industrial sector.

The politics of Argentina’s neoliberal (Menem) and libertarian (Milei) governments are distinguished by their sweeping attempts to eliminate all state-backed and collectively shaped conditions that support the reproduction of working people. Upon taking power in 1989, Menem sent to Congress two bills that deregulated state education, health, and security institutions, and enabled labor flexibilization. Similarly, President Milei issued a “Decree of Necessity and Urgency” (DNU) and has sent to Congress an ambitious bill entitled “Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines”. Together, these measures aim to enact a massive social-political reset by removing all “collectivist” and “regulationist” mechanisms, while de-regulating the economy, privatizing social provisions, and dismantling institutions that mediate market competition in areas like health services, education, sports, and cultural production. Both the Menem and Milei governments promoted far-reaching labor reforms aimed at facilitating dismissals, extending probation periods, making working hours more flexible, and expanding informal labor relations. They also intended to restrict the right to strike and union activity in the workplace, to impose individual bargaining over collective bargaining, and to cut unions’ financial resources.

In the “private” sphere, enterprises and companies during both periods entered a dynamic characterised by workplace closures, employee lay-offs and mass dismissals, new managerial strategies and technological innovations, and prominent claims about “cultural change” by managers and businessmen. Both then and now, corporate spokespersons asserted a need for radical changes. Recently, Paolo Rocca, the CEO of Techint Group, one of Argentina’s major industrial corporations, expressed support for the government’s plans for “resetting” Argentina’s economic structure, and asked other businessmen to commitment to “sacrifices” that would be needed to enhance national performance in a competitive world market. In workplaces, employers are already enforcing the bill’s provisions, overruling those stated in existing collective agreements, and thereby undermining the working conditions of new employees.

These measures, implemented amid a post-pandemic employer offensive and rising inflation, have been justified on the basis of three ideological claims, which I have also identified among steelworkers and will examine below. However, the outcome has not been unambiguous consent to these measures by ordinary workers. This is because the threats posed to their material conditions of reproduction have also motivated workers, even individuals who voted for Milei, to struggles against these measures.

Changes are “necessary and unavoidable.”

When I discussed the Menem years with anyone employed in the state-owned steel plant where I conducted my research in the 2000s and 2010s or in the surrounding community, it was surprising how persuaded they were about the necessity of restructuring. A common refrain was: “We knew it was this or nothing. Things could not continue as they were. There were no other solutions.”

In 1989, when Menem took office, annual inflation was over 3000%. In 1990, it was over 2000%. As a result, it was impossible to schedule industrial production. But it was also impossible to budget for family expenses, like food, schooling, holidays, or the purchase of household appliances. A Thatcherist belief that “there is no alternative,” which working families immersed in chaotic hyperinflation adopted, paved the way for consent to Menem’s reforms. Workers knew the offensive was coming. But they felt it was pointless to resist.

After COVID-19 restrictions ended in 2021, Argentina’s economic situation worsened. The government’s financial difficulties and escalating inflation became topics of everyday discussions. In 2023, when Milei won the election, formal employment and incomes for ordinary workers were decreasing. Most new jobs created in recent years have been informal, self-employed, or based on individual, unprotected contracts (monotributistas). The increased precariousness of ordinary Argentines has fed into a sense of suspension, instability, and “dislocation” (Polanyi 1947; Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018).

As in the 1990s, the popular assumption is that regressive restructuring is necessary to restore stable conditions of reproduction. Milei has turned this assumption into a government program, while endeavouring to transform the silent resignation of ordinary Argentines into active consent.

Sacrifice is necessary to recalibrate the effort-reward equation.

Both, Milei’s and Menem’s governments asked the population to “sacrifice” for the nation in order to remedy a terminal national crisis. When he took office, Milei asserted that it would take two years of sacrifice to abandon decadence and to embark on the road to prosperity. On Christmas Day 2023, the Minister of Economy posted on X a message to the population, thanking them for their sacrifice and support for austerity measures. By “sacrifice” he meant enduring the negative impact of a 118% devaluation of the Peso Argentino, the deregulation of prices for basic goods, and the cutting of food assistance to community organizations.

The notion and logic of sacrifice is at the core of many workers’ effort-reward equation: the renunciation of immediate pleasure, wellbeing, and fun will allow for future material, social and affective achievements. The concrete contents of “sacrifice” change from generation to generation, and between different labor situations. However, “rewards” remains quite the same: better living conditions, understood as owning a house, getting a car, and raising children without privations. The relationship between efforts and rewards mediated by “sacrifice” is intimately connected to a valuation logic: getting valuable things requires effort. Therefore, working people’s well-being is always related to “sacrifice”, and sacrifice is linked to hard work.

As increasing aspects of workers’ daily reproduction are monetized and privatized, neoliberal hegemony has restructured the effort-reward equation. This reinforces individualistic assessments of the effort-reward equation and devalues remaining collective practices and institutions involved in daily reproduction. Over the last years, the neoliberal effort-reward equation has been cracking due to increasing inflation, decreasing power purchase, and worsening working conditions. Therefore, many workers have experienced a sense of their own effort being under-valued, while that of “lazy and useless” people is overvalued (Kalb 2022).

Milei promised to restore the effort-reward equation after a period of “sacrifice” marked by austerity policies. Far from rejecting Milei’s appeal as unfair and manipulative, working people in Argentina see it as a call for collective sacrifice necessary to restore the real value of things and of effort. The assumption that public workers or popular economy cooperatives “steal” a share of the social product that they do not contribute to producing underpins the moral vindication of personal deprivation: “I pay what I can afford; nobody gives me anything.” The perceived need for a temporary sacrifice thus informs social acceptance of Milei’s agenda.

Order must be restored to market relations.

Menem and Milei both advocated radical social marketization as the path to a social order that promised individual fulfilment, well-being, and happiness. To this end, private property is key. The logical chain of private property – market relations – freedom was established by classic liberalism. Neoliberal and libertarian discourses have intensified this claim and its relevance for establishing social order. Consequently, Milei’s government has attempted to remove regulations on prices and on public service fees that have been crucial to working people’s reproduction. In claiming that these regulations create a social fiction that devalues peoples’ efforts, Milei argues that their removal is necessary to the restore the “natural” market order of things—that is, to restore the “true” value of individual effort.

Managerial policies have similarly promoted individualization as a way to erode collective practices that support the power of unions in workplaces. An assumption shared by workers in the 1990s and now is that their effort is devalued because of conditions that trade unions have created to protect lazy people. For example, subcontracted workers see the devaluation of their own effort as correlated to the “privileges” enjoyed by permanent workers. Consequently, in times of crisis, competition among workers (for a job, promotion, or bonus) intensifies.

The power of this logic lies in its general character: the “people” are abstract market actors who can become rich through their independent effort. The centrality given to individual initiative partly counteracts the daily sense of powerlessness and failure that working people feel when trying to achieve their goals and obtain “rewards”. The promise of success through individual effort is thus attractive not just for informal precarious workers, but also for formal workers suffering deteriorating working conditions, unfair taxes, and the devaluation of their wages.

The persuasiveness of this logic is based on the material aspects of social reproduction under capitalism. Currency devaluation and inflation not only de-structure everyday lives but are powerful mechanisms for increasing the appropriation of surplus value from working people to corporations, managers, and business owners. By presenting “free market” relations as objective and natural, neoliberals before and libertarians today can present the full deployment of “the market” as a condition for resetting conditions of reproduction, and for re-situating individuals in their appropriate social location. This entails a fabulous recoding of relations of exploitation, dispossession, and violence, and the de-legitimization of collective solutions to common problems.

Silent consent and popular unrest

In sum, I argue that recent dislocations in Argentina underpin consent for pro-market policies. On the threshold of neoliberal and libertarian governments, Argentinian working people experienced dislocations rooted in the “impersonal” and “abstract” mechanisms of inflation, stagnation, and devaluation. Hyperinflation, conceived as “monetary violence” (Bonnet 2008), paved the way for neoliberal consent, while steady stagnation, deepened by the pandemic, eroded the “market” capacities of ordinary people. Since capitalist market relations are the background of social reproduction, the crisis created serious obstacles to ordinary people’s everyday reproduction. That is why the “normalisation” of market relations – even if it entails “sacrifice” – appears to be a viable route to a fair equation of effort and reward. The individualisation that this logic promotes is understood by people as increasing their control over their lives. This logic seems to be especially persuasive for young informal workers. However, in promoting marketization, competition, and individualization as the driving forces of working people’s reproduction, the government must destroy the dense network of cooperative and collective links that underlie working people’s everyday lives.

The general strike on 24 January 2024 was the highest point of post-election popular mobilization. Since then, a series of collective actions have raised a broad array of demands over, for example, public education, social assistance, protection for community organizations, and public transport tariffs. These demands go beyond labor conditions and wage claims. They highlight working people’s desire to preserve a non-commodified sphere of reproduction, and for core democratic rights. For the time being, resistance to Milei’s policies lacks a more expansive political agenda to contest “market relations” as the core of everyday reproduction. Nonetheless, Milei cannot easily discredit the social unrest as just “the caste” defending its “privileges”. It is too soon to assume that consent for market liberalization has been eroded and that those who voted for Milei are now mostly in the streets. But at the very least, the general strike has shown that complete marketization is a contested project. Hopefully, in the days ahead, in the struggle over capitalist restructuring, working people will manage to forge their own “resetting”—one that goes beyond the market as “the natural order of things”.

Julia Soul is a researcher at CEIL – CONICET Argentina. Her current research is about crisis and transformation of the working class in Argentina and Latin America since neoliberalism. She has conducted fieldwork with steelworkers in Argentina, and México and in international unions for more than 15 years, and with agribusiness workers since 2022. She has been a member of Taller de Estudios Laborales since 2002.

References

Alberto, Bonnet (2008) La hegemonía menemista. El neoconservadurismo en la Argentina. Editorial Prometeo. CABA

Kalb, Don (2023) “Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 23(1), 204–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12484

Soul, Julia (2015) SOMISEROS. Configuración y devenir de un colectivo obrero. Editorial Prohistoria. Rosario

Cite as: Soul, Julia. 2024. “Between Confrontation and Silent Discipline: Working-Class Dilemmas under Javier Milei’s Far-Right Government in Argentina” Focaalblog 8 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/03/08/julia-soul-between-confrontation-and-silent-discipline-working-class-dilemmas-under-javier-mileis-far-right-government-in-argentina/

Blog

Giorgos Poulimenakos & Dimitris Dalakoglou: Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece

On March 1st 2023, an impromptu protest rally took place outside the headquarters of Greece’s only railway company, Hellenic Trains (HT). HT is the passenger carrier of the recently privatized and formerly publicly owned carrier of Hellenic Organization of Railways. The word ‘Assassins’ and the phrase ‘Your profits, our deaths’ were written on the walls of the headquarters amidst clashes with the police.

On the morning of that day, Greece had woken up to devastating news. During the night, a passenger train headed to Thessaloniki from Athens, mostly carrying students, collided with a freight train traveling in the opposite direction. The collision was so fierce that the first two wagons were literarily pulverized, leaving 57 dead. As it turned out, an inexperienced Stationmaster with limited equipment at his disposal had manually put the two trains on the same track by mistake. For a full twelve minutes, passengers and personnel on both trains were on collision course without any human or non-human intelligence detecting it. In the following days much more serious and larger rallies and riots followed.

 ‘Mitsotakis, fuck you!’ – the original condition

The crowd, amongst others, was chanting a melodic slogan ‘Mitsotakis, fuck yοu!’. This vulgar slogan had first emerged during the big forest fires of 2021 when the wooded northern region of Evia Island and the forests of Parnitha mountain in the north of Athens had been abandoned to burn due to a peculiar “general evacuation” policy. New Democracy, the conservative governing party, had won the elections of 2019 to an extent by utilizing another horrible catastrophe, the fires of Eastern Attica in 2018. At that time, New Democracy blamed the governing SYRIZA party for failing to save the lives of the 103 who died in the fire. However, instead of trying to reinforce the civil protection infrastructures and increase the budget for fire brigades and forestry service, New Democracy has preferred to recruit a few thousand new police officers and thus enforce a heavy policing of forest fires. With the new policy, entire municipalities are evacuated by force so as to avoid deaths by all means in order to come out with a lower body count than the previous government.

The consequence of this policy of evacuation and abandonment was not only the destruction of forests, but also of agricultural land, flocks of animals, bees and entire villages that burned to ashes as nobody was there to protect them (on the fires and the archaeological heritage see Poulimenakos & Dalakoglou 2021 in FocaalBlog). As TV channels sent their crews to report from the evacuated towns and villages of Evia, someone videobombed a live broadcast and stood behind the reporter shouting, ‘Mitsotaki, fuck you!’, in a spontaneous expression of anger towards the evacuation policy that had destroyed his livelihood. Soon, “Mitsotakis, fuck you!”, became a slogan with a melody, chanted by football fans during games and by audiences at music concerts. To understand the rapid nationwide spread and popularity of this anthem, we now take a closer look at the New Democracy government record.

The Mitsotakis government had applied the same principle of minimum death tolls at any cost during the Covid-19 pandemic by enforcing one of the hardest lockdowns in the western world with curfews and severely restricted mobility under state surveillance. For many months, every citizen had to send a text message to the Ministry of Interior Affairs and give a “valid” reason before leaving their house. Defectors were heavily fined by the police. As with the forest fires, now the systematic destruction of health care infrastructures under the austerity regime imposed after the financial crash was offset by calling in the police as a civil protection mechanisms and the government’s main tool for controlling the pandemic.

“Mitsotakis, fuck you!” – the current condition

These structural continuities of policing (rather than resolving) an infrastructural crisis explain why one week after the train crash tragedy, on March 8th, Greece saw the biggest popular mobilization since the 2010-2015 era of insurrections against the imposition of structural adjustment programs by the IMF-EU-ECB troika. The main rallying cry of the protests was the phrase “text me when you get there”, a reference to the overprotective Greek family relations symbolized by frequent parental requests to send messages when travelling (even for over-30s). Now used by the protesters, the phrase is a tragic and powerful reference to mourning parents who will never receive a reply from their children who were on the train.

Image 1: Photo from one of the many demonstrations on the 8th of March. The sign reads: “text me when you get there”. Source: alphavita blogspot

The protests were so massive and persistent that they forced the Prime Minister to postpone the upcoming elections for an undetermined period. Meanwhile, the government’s political communication experts massively underestimated the train tragedy’s impact on Greek public opinion. Mitsotakis’ initial government statement blamed the accident on the stationmaster and omitted any reference to years of chronic under-investment in traffic infrastructures during the privatization of the railway company. This only increased public anger. An alliance of trade unions declared a general strike, whilst pupils occupied their schools and students their universities. Within five days, the government’s public relations experts advised Mitsotakis to accept partial responsibility to calm things down. Yet again the obnoxiousness and arrogance of the PM and his cabinet led to another PR catastrophe when Mitsotakis stated that the 57 victims of the train crash had ‘sacrificed’ themselves in order to improve national railways, flanked by the Minister for Development who called the 57 deaths ‘an opportunity’ for the country. With no time left for the government or the railway company to come up with another damage control strategy, people on social media, in neighborhoods and work places saw the train crash as an emblem of the precarization of everyday life after more than 13 years of extreme neoliberal government budget cuts.

“Don’t you dare to put the blame on an isolated human error”, or, “we live by chance in this country”, and, “this was not an accident but a murder”, were popular expressions that linked mourning and anger with a demand for exposure of underlying causes of the incident such as chronic degradation of railway infrastructures, budget cuts, staff shortages, lack of automated security systems that could correct human errors and prevent accidents. The poor state of other hard infrastructures came to light, contradicting the neoliberal mantra that service standard would skyrocket after privatizations. The German-owned airports in Greece’s peripheral cities suffer from staff and electronic equipment shortages while foreign equity investment in the Chinese-owned port of Piraeus never reached the promised level. The carefully crafted hegemonic narrative of private sector supremacy over the old state-controlled economy that had gradually gained control of hearts and minds (Mavris 2017) since the Greek crisis fell apart like a house of cards. Recent opinion polls show a reversal of political preferences with the ruling party losing significant ground amongst a general decline of trust in capitalist democracy.

Greece’s Inverted Shock Doctrine

What is happening in Greece today seems to be the exact opposite of what Naomi Klein argued in her stellar book on the “Shock doctrine” (2007). According to Klein, the severity of an immense collective trauma leads to numbness and disorientation that freezes collective action and presents excellent opportunities for the ruling classes to impose otherwise highly unpopular policies. In Greece, disorientation and numbness characterized society during the long period of inflation, privatizations, budget cuts, and impoverishment since 2008. Yet, these processes seemed abstract, confusingly linked to both local and global economic processes, and, hence, difficult to pinpoint in space and time. That vagueness certainly ended with the collective trauma of the train crash. The tragic crumble of a very material and tangible element of public transport infrastructure, similar to the earlier case of the Evia Island forest fires, turned into a metonymy for the crumbling relations between the Greek public, society, on the one hand, and the alliance of private capital and the state apparatus on the other hand. As we know from ethnographic research, “infrastructures are a principle materialization of the relationship between people (citizens and non-citizens alike) and otherwise abstract state and supra-state authorities” (Dalakoglou 2016:823). Infrastructures consist of the realm where the social contract between a state and its citizenry is taking tangible forms and is felt in the everyday life. It is the realm where the game of hegemony is most likely to be gained or challenged (Srnicek 2014).

Another crucial dimension of the conjuncture within which the massive mobilizations against the state-capital ruling class alliance now take place is that in recent weeks Greeks learned that for the first time in history residential properties are no longer protected by law from dispossession even at rather insignificant household debt levels. The Greek Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of private equity funds, allowing property auctions to redeem household loans purchased from banks as initial lenders, leaving hundreds of thousands who have struggled to repay their mortgages in despair about their future and another crucial aspect of the national social fabric in distress.

The residential house in Greece is more than bricks and mortar that put a roof over one’s head. It represents intra-generational solidarity and strong family bonds, with parents struggling to buy a house to provide economic security for their children. In other words, the house represents a form of informal social security provided by the family rather than the state. Typical to the substitution of an absent welfare state with informal family solidarity in Mediterranean societies, Greece never had significant numbers of council housing like the UK for example. Family solidarity provided a safety net in difficult times and certainly so during the recent 13-years long crisis with people in their 30s or even 40s living with their parents or grandparents.

Infinite density and the specificity of neoliberal austerity

We argue that the tragic train crash made visible the specific and tangible failure of public infrastructure and thus gave austerity specificity in time and space. The disaster encapsulates an “infinite density” of societal deadlock between the protagonists of privatization and austerity on the one hand and the very fabric of the social contract in Greece on the other hand, in which every form of social consensus is collapsing. With the neoliberal state’s privatized public services failing to fulfill the promises of upgraded public infrastructures to the benefit all and the informal forms of social reproduction gradually dismantled, the Greek nation-state moves towards a power vacuum. It is no coincidence that the majority of protesters are young people from the so-called generation z. This generations feels that all aspects of the social contract are expiring and they will not enjoy the benefits and stability of the public sector that their parents had. Instead, they will have low-paid jobs in the private sector and will probably not inherit a house to live in because they cannot afford to pay the increased inheritance taxes (Knight 2018) or because their parent’s house will be disposed by private equity funds. The train accident made shockingly evident that in today’s Greece even a routine train journey is not safe, that nobody “is there” for the people. “We live by chance in this country”, one of the protest slogans states.

Yet, a careful observer of public transport users after the train disaster sees this realization of state negligence turn into an increased care for each other. People now help older passengers and others in need on and off busses in the absence of special ramps. They talk to each other and give courage to each other for the day ahead while ranting against the government (perhaps even using the public slogans discussed in this article). “We are the infrastructures” is what we are often told during recent ethnographic research. Maybe this new confidence will create a vision of new social organization beyond the state, capital and also beyond the family. One new slogan points in this direction; “Mono o laos tha sosei ton lao” (“only people can save the people”).

References

Dalakoglou, D. (2016) “Infrastructural gap: Commons, State and Anthropology. City, 20:6, 822-831, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1241524.

Dalakoglou, D. and Poulimenakos, G. (2021). “The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%.” FocaalBlog, 30 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/30/dimitris-dalakoglou-georgos-poulimenakos-the-past-is-on-fire/

Klein, N. (2007) The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. London: Allen Lane.

Knight , D M 2018 , “The desire for disinheritance in austerity Greece “, Focaal , vol. 80 , pp. 30-42 . https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2018.800103

Mavris, G. (2017) “The Rise of Conservatism: Political Ideologies in Greece after the Memorandum” (in Greek), available online at https://www.mavris.gr/4943/political-ideology/.

Srnicek, N. (2014) “Infrastructures and Hegemony: The Matter of Struggle” in Fall Semester. Available at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56ec53dc9f7266dd86057f72/t/581f3f704402439b560ff0b4/1478442864809/BookletNS.pdf

Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is director and PI of the research project infra-demos (funded from NWO-Vidi grant) and co-director of the Lab on Infrastructures Sustainability and the Commons.

Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University and a MA from University of Sussex, UK. He is currently a PhD fellow in the ERC-funded project PORTS, based in the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo. He is investigating the increasing significance of ports and maritime logistics in globalized, contemporary capitalism through the case study of Piraeus, an emerging Greek port in the global market bought recently by Chinese interests.

Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris & Poulimenakos, Giorgos 2023. “Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece” Focaalblog 14 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/14/giorgos-poulimenakos-dimitris-dalakoglou-disaster-infrastructures-and-the-inverted-shock-doctrine-in-greece/

Blog

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/

Blog, The Latin American Pink Tide

Elena Maria Reichl: End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST

On 30/10/2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of the Workers’ Party won an exceptionally close runoff election against the current far-right president of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. For volunteers of a community kitchen (Cozinha Solidária) of the leftist Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), Lula’s victory represents an enormous relief and a hope after the long period of anxiety during the election campaign. Nevertheless, his victory does not mean “the end of hell or the entrance into paradise”, as Maria (all names are pseudonyms), one of the volunteers cooking in a Cozinha Solidária noted.

The hell she speaks of means the years of the Bolsonaro government, in which almost 700,000 people in Brazil died of Covid-19, while the president made jokes about patients with respiratory distress. Hell, moreover, means the hunger that the women themselves experience and fight in their volunteer work. In recent years, Brazil has returned to the world hunger map of the United Nations. According to the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty and Security, circa 30% of Brazilian households are currently food insecure. In addition to the Covid-19 pandemic, suspension of state welfare programs, inflation and price increases have led to this development. The aftermath of this period will not be over when Lula takes office early next year.

Hell and paradise are metaphors that reflect the volunteer’s worldview, which is strongly influenced by the Christian system of belief. The all-female chefs of the Cozinha Solidária where I conduct ethnographic fieldwork since March 2022 regularly frequent Catholic or Evangelical churches. Besides that, the women are also part of the political struggle for housing in demonstrations and occupations of urban land. In their everyday lives, they balance left-wing political militancy and religiosity. They are politicized through the social movement and entrenched in their peripheral community. All the kitchen’s volunteers working there currently are also mothers and most of them work or worked in paid cleaning jobs in addition to their volunteer work.  

In this article, I portray the period between the first round of voting on 2/10/2022 and the runoff. How did the cooks negotiate the fear of a second electoral victory by Jair Bolsonaro? A look at the Cozinhas Solidárias sheds light on the positioning of hunger and domestic labor within the election campaign. The perspective of the cooks’ stresses the importance of religiosity to people’s lives and political decisions. After localizing the Cozinhas Solidárias within the Homeless Workers Movement and explaining their emergence and functioning, I consider reflections and concerns about the election, starting from the perspective of the cooks, to arrive at an assessment of the consequences of the election results.

Cozinhas Solidárias of the Homeless Worker’s Movement

The Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) was officially founded in 1997 as the urban counterpart of the rural reform movements of the Landless Workers Movement (MST). The first occupation took place in Campinas, a city close to São Paulo. Nowadays, the MTST is present in 13 Brazilian states, but most occupations are still concentrated in and around the city of São Paulo. The strategy of the movement is to occupy unused land in the periphery of large cities and to obtain expropriation with reference to the legally established duty of fulfilling a social function of the inner-city areas.

Victor Albert traces the history of the movement: In the first decade after its founding, it had little success with the strategies of the Landless Workers Movement. This changed, on the one hand, because of social mobilizations during the housing market crisis and the 2013/2014 World Cup, and on the other hand, primarily through cooperation with the Lula government’s state housing program Minha Casa Minha Vida. The movement was often able to obtain home ownership for the squatters through the State Program and thus acted as an agenda for identifying new building land for the state program.

During Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, which replaced the Minha Casa Minha Vida program with the Casa Verde e Amarelo loan program and classified the MTST as terrorism, their construction projects from the Minha Casa Minha Vida era continued to be completed, such as 216 apartments in São Paulo’s West Zone in March 2021.

Figure 1 Kitchen as part of occupation
Figure 1 Kitchen as part of occupation, Photo: Elena Reichl March 2022
Figure 2 Cozinha Solidária at lunch time
Figure 2 Cozinha Solidária at lunch time, Photo: Elena Reichl October 2022

The idea of Cozinhas Solidárias was already inherent in the community kitchens that are part of every land occupation of the movement.  The occupations of new land areas begin with the construction of tents made of tarpaulins and bamboo. In newly emerged occupations, community kitchens are the first shanties to be set up to nurture the squatters and provide a place of political organization and community economy. Each occupation has numerous of these kitchens, which are the heart of the groupings, the small neighborhoods within the barrack settlements. The kitchens inside the squats are primarily for the squatters who run and finance them.

What is new about the Cozinhas Solidárias is that they now address the peripheral neighborhoods outside the occupations. Diverse people from the nearby neighborhoods frequent the cozinhas solidárias, for example schoolchildren, old people, or workers at their lunchbreak. They pick up hot lunches for free that were prepared and distributed by volunteers like the women mentioned in the beginning of this article. The Cozinhas Solidárias acquire their donations in the form of money from large-scale campaigns and as crops by collaborations with, for example, supermarkets and the MST. Cozinha Solidarias’ dependence on food has brought the MST into close contact with its urban counterpart.

The Homeless Workers Movement founded the first Cozinha Solidária in São Paulo in March 2021, during the peak of the Covid-19 Pandemic, under the motto highlighted by MTST coordinator Guilherme Boulos, “we do what the government does not“. The movement now operates 31 of these kitchens throughout Brazil. By expanding to peripheral neighborhoods in general, the movement claimed a direct confrontation of the cutbacks in state welfare programs under the Bolsonaro government.

Hunger was particularly central to Lula’s election campaign, highlighting how his earlier government had helped to remove Brazil from the United Nations world hunger map, on which the country turned back after the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. In fact, it was through Bolsa Família, as Massimiliano Mollona elaborates,that this government from 2003 to 2008 reduced the population rate below the poverty line from 36 percent to 23 percent. Bolsa Família incorporated the preceding Zero Hunger “Fome Zero” program in 2003 and, as Anthony W. Pereira argues, promoted the democratization of citizenship claims through effective, relatively unbureaucratic redistribution. On the other side, Bolsonaro has introduced the social program Auxilio Brasil at the end of 2021, which is modeled on Lula’s Bolsa Familia but without any long-term strategy or monitoring and therefore has beencriticized as an election campaign method.

Before the Runoff Election

A morning a few days after the first round of voting in one of the cozinhas solidárias in the periphery of São Paulo: In addition to preparing rice, beans, chicken, and fried cassava, we talked about Bolsonaro’s visit to the Freemasons. The video is from Bolsonaro’s 2017 election campaign but gained popularity only in October 2022 via its rapid spread on social media. The context mattered little. Bolsonaro had been campaigning for votes among Freemasons and rumors were spread that he might be a member.  We chatted about the experiences some of the women had as cleaners for members of the Freemasons whom they accused of performing diabolical rituals. On the subject of religion, we also came to a remark that one of them had overheard during services in their parishes: Their pastor had announced that whoever voted for Lula would go to hell.

Ludmilla was indignant: “The place for priests is in the church. What is this about politics?” “They won’t vote for him [Jair Bolsonaro] because of the Freemasons” Retorted Maria.  Ludmilla: “I am afraid that they might do it after all.”

Jair Bolsonaro has many evangelical supporters who, as some of the cooks, consider the Freemasons a diabolical sect and hence expressed their disappointment. On a more general level, religiousness played a key role in the election campaign. Padre Kelmon, who was denied the recognition as a priest by the Catholic Church, ran for president as one of the eleven candidates of the first electoral round. He just received 0.07 % of the valid votes and was called a “folkloric candidate”. For Bolsonaro’s election campaign, his candidacy nevertheless had an important function. He supported Bolsonaro during the first TV Globo debate, to which all candidates were invited. Instead of asking critical questions, he accused Lula of wanting to establish an anti-religious dictatorship in Brazil. Lula, meanwhile, tried to win over conservative church followers through critical statements on abortion and Christian affirmations, as he recently did in a letter to evangelicals.

In the community kitchen, I hear different Christian songs sung by the women every day. “God bless you” is a common phrase used by those receiving the hot lunches, to which the cooks respond with “Amen”. Unlike the students and coordinators of the movement, for whom religion takes a back seat to communist utopias, the cooks and squatters balance left-wing political commitment and the struggle for housing with religious affiliations in their work.

A domestic worker comments on the election

For Lula’s election campaign, starvation, but also ‘gusto’, was a central theme. During this election, Lula’s repeated statement that the people must be able to eat picanha and drink beer again became famous. Ludmilla, a cook at the community kitchen before the runoff election, said she talks to Lula when she sees him on TV. “Lula, stop talking about picanha. When did I eat picanha? Lula, I cleaned the toilet of my patron [where she worked as a maid] during your government.”

Figure 3 Banner that says “First domestic worker in the Legislative Assembly of São Paulo” at the event “Women from the periphery with Lula and Haddad”, in which some cooks of Cozinha Solidária participated, Photo: Elena Maria Reichl, October 2022

Although she supports Lula, she feels unrepresented by his promises of the return of expensive barbecue after the huge price increase during the Bolsonaro regime. Actually, picanha has never been part of her lifeworld. Domestic workers, who are for the first time politically represented in Brazil, gain more political and class-consciousness. In the first round of voting, PSOL candidate, former domestic worker, and occupant of the MTST Ediane Maria, won the post of State Representative in the Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo as the first domestic worker to occupy this political position. Like Ludmilla, Ediane Maria had migrated to São Paulo from Brazil’s northeast to work as a domestic worker. Ediane Maria will now represent Ludmilla’s perspective in São Paulo. No easy task in a parliament where the PL, Bolsonaro’s party, won by far the most votes.

Anti PT and “anti-establishment” propaganda

The outcome was close, with Lula winning 50.9% and Bolsonaro 49.1% of the vote. Bolsonaro’s party’s most effective campaign method still seemed to be the “anti-corruption agenda” Flávio Eiró already analyzed after the 2018 election.

Although the court case that led to Lula’s conviction was annulled as illegal in 2021, opposition to Lula’s PT party because of corruption scandals remains widespread. This is despite the fact that Bolsonaro has also been accused of institutionalized corruption, namely the use of public funds in the form of secret budgets to buy approval in Congress.

Bolsonaro still manages to position himself as ‘anti-establishment’ in front of large segments of the population, who spread the slogan “PT never again” and in the aftermath of the election “crimes pay off in Brazil” on the internet. Widespread among his electorate is also a rejection of conventional media and academia. Election forecasts predicting a higher approval rating for Lula than he actually received in the first round of voting confirmed this skepticism. The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral’s decision to cut Bolsonaro’s TV time due to fake news also fuels the debate about media bias. Bolsonaro supporters were already acting violently in some cases, such as federal deputy Carla Zambelli, who a few days before the election chased a black journalist with a firearm under the pretext that he had pushed her.

The End of Hell?

During this interim period between the two votes one clearly sensed the fear that Bolsonaro might not recognize the election results, as he had already spread rumors that the ballot boxes were rigged.  On day one after the elections, while Bolsonaro remained without statement about his loss, his supporters blocked roads within the country to protest alleged electoral fraud. Attempts at electoral fraud did indeed occur, but not on the part of PT supporters: The electoral court investigates against the federal police, who blocked roads for hours in the northeast and near indigenous communities, from where most votes for Lula were expected, under the pretext of carrying out road controls.

Even without a coup, Lula’s victory will mean hard work against right-wing fronts in state and federal parliaments, but above all against what is called ‘bolsonarismo’ in society. The cooks of Cozinha Solidária are well aware of this. Nevertheless, there will be relief for their movement when Lula takes office next year. He has already announced his intention to rehabilitate the program Minha Casa, Minha Vida. Fighting hunger was moved again to the center of the political agenda. Currently, discussions are underway within the MTST to make Conzinhas Solidarias a public policy and to hire the cooks on a regular basis until the acute hunger crisis is resolved. This would mean the end of dependence on donations and volunteerism. Lula, who had already visited a Cozinha Solidária this year, nurtured hope for this possibility.

Elena Maria Reichl is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology of the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany, and member of the Project „Sorting with Care. Human Categorization in Post-Humanitarian Contact Zones“ that is part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1482 “Studies in Human Categorisation” funded by the German Research Foundation.

References:

Albert, Victor. 2018. “Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement is an assertive social work organization.” FocaalBlog, 30 November. www.focaalblog.com/2018/11/30/victor-albert-brazils-homeless-workers-movement-is-an-assertive-social-work-organization

Balloussier, Anna Virginia; Seabra, Catia and Victoria Azevedo. 2022. Lula Releases Letter to Evangelicals and Rejects Abortion and Lying Pastors. Folha de São Paulo, 20 October. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/10/lula-releases-letter-to-evangelicals-and-rejects-abortion-and-lying-pastors.shtml

Boulos, Guilherme. 2021. “Cozinhas Solidárias: fazendo o que o governo não faz” Instituto para Reforma das Relações entre Estado e Empresa (IREE), 22 March. https://iree.org.br/cozinhas-solidarias-fazendo-o-que-o-governo-nao-faz/

Campos Lima, Eduardo. 2022 “Brazil presidential contenders slug it out over who’s the real ‘enemy’ of the church” Crux, 1 October. https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-americas/2022/10/brazil-presidential-contenders-slug-it-out-over-whos-the-real-enemy-of-the-church

Eiró, Flávio. 2018. “On Bolsonaro: Brazilian democracy at risk.” FocaalBlog, 8 November. www.focaalblog.com/2018/11/08/flavio-eiro-on-bolsonaro-brazilian-democracy-at-risk.

Extra. 2022. Padre Kelmon recebe mais de 81 mil votos pelo Brasil; relembre outros ‘candidatos folclóricos’ que marcaram eleições. Globo Extra 3 October https://extra.globo.com/noticias/politica/padre-kelmon-recebe-mais-de-81-mil-votos-pelo-brasil-relembre-outros-candidatos-folcloricos-que-marcaram-eleicoes-25582731.html

Folha de São Paulo. 2022. O que a Folha pensa: Recauchutagem ruim. Folha de São Paulo, 28 October. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/opiniao/2022/01/recauchutagem-ruim.shtml

Globo. 2022. Grupo denuncia Carla Zambelli por racismo em caso que ela apontou arma para homem em SP; ‘Eles usaram um negro pra vir em cima de mim’, diz a deputada. Globo, 29 October. https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2022/10/29/grupo-denuncia-carla-zambelli-por-racismo-em-caso-que-ela-apontou-arma-para-homem-em-sp-eles-usaram-um-negro-pra-vir-em-cima-de-mim-diz-a-deputada.ghtml

John, Tara. 2022. Brazil’s election explained: Lula and Bolsonaro face off for a second round in high stakes vote. CNN, 27 October.

Mollona, Massimiliano. 2018. “Authoritarian Brazil redux?” FocaalBlog, October 6. www.focaalblog.com/2018/10/06/massimiliano-mollona-authoritarian-brazil-redux.

Netto, Paulo Roberto. 2022. TSE cobra explicações da PRF sobre operações durante eleições após decisão. UOL, 30 October. https://noticias.uol.com.br/eleicoes/2022/10/30/tse-explicacoes-prf.htm

Pereira, Anthony W. 2015. Bolsa Família and democracy in Brazil. Third World Quarterly 36 (9): 1682-1699, doi: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1059730

Phillips, Tom. 2022. Fears Bolsonaro may not accept defeat as son cries fraud before Brazil election. The Guardian. 27 October. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/27/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-election-fraud-claim

Romani, André. 2022. Com Bolsonaro ainda em silêncio, bloqueios de caminhoneiros ganham força e se espalham pelo país. UOL Economia. 31 October https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/reuters/2022/10/31/protestos-interditam-br-163-e-trecho-da-dutra-apos-eleicoes.htm

Rizek, Cibele and André Dal’Bó. 2015. The Growth of Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement. Global Dialogue. 22 February https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/articles/the-growth-of-brazils-homeless-workers-movement Soprana, Paulo. 2022. Bolsonarists Freak Out over Video of President in Freemasonry. Folha de São Paulo. 4 October. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/10/bolsonarists-freak-out-over-video-of-president-in-freemasonry.shtml

Cite as: Reichl, Elena Maria 2022. “End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST.” Focaalblog 2 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/11/02/elena-maria-reichl-end-of-hell-brazils-election-and-a-community-kitchen-of-the-mtst/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Nonini: The China Conundrum and The Current Conjuncture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deconstructing Socialism’s Deconstruction, Chinese Style

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

A Post-Socialist Developmental State with Chinese characteristics

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

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

Morphing into the Chinese Corporate Party-State

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

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

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

Political Crisis and Economic Stagnation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making China Great Again? – The Costs of Revanchism

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog

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

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

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

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

Post-coup precarity

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

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

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

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

Migrant domestic workers in the post-coup moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Blog

Markus Virgil Hoehne: Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia

Presidential elections will happen in Somalia on Sunday, 15 May 2022. This will most likely not bring peace and stability to the war-torn Somali society. To the contrary, the elections and their aftermath will, in all probability, perpetuate and even worsen to political crisis in the country. On the one hand, the electoral process has already dragged on for almost two years, producing violent clashes between government and opposition forces and instigating vote buying and other forms of political corruption (Gaas and Hansen 2022).  On the other hand, and this might even be worse, the country’s “democratization process” is out of tune with important political realities in Somalia, namely with the fact that the government only holds nominal power in parts of Somalia.

Militant Islamists control much of southern Somalia; the northwest of the country has declared its independence 30 years ago and exists since as the secessionist Republic of Somaliland. Other areas in central and northeastern Somalia are to some degree autonomous, partly controlled by clan militias. This means that the government controls only around 20 percent of Somalia’s territory. Foreign troops have to assist the government to hold its areas. Southern Somalia, where most of the resources and the economy of Somalia are concentrated, is still in a phase of active war (EASO 2021).

It can be assumed that the government in Mogadishu would, without external support, collapse even quicker than the Afghan government did in the wake of the US-withdrawal in mid-2021. Moreover, in the areas controlled by the government and its external allies, hardly any services are delivered to the ordinary population. The hallmark of the nominal Somali governments since many years is internal wrangling and massive embezzlement of the state’s budget including the income from foreign aid. The question is: what does the presidential election bring at all? My answer is: it helps to keep up a façade, which serves external actors, including the USA, Ethiopia, the EU and many INGOs and UN organizations, in that it allows the conduct of “business” (development business, counter-terrorism business, political stabilization business, humanitarian business) which enriches a few international and local elites, while it keeps the bulk of Somalis in extreme poverty and caught up in protracted conflict.

A story of many missed deadlines

Somalia should have had a new parliament and a new president long ago. The term of office of the current president Mohamed Ali Farmajo ended in February 2021. The UN and western donors including the USA and the EU have been pushing for free elections already for years (since around 2018). At the same time, the “one person one vote” formula introduced into Somalia’s politics was and remains unrealistic. While external actors, mainly UN officials, tried to push this voting-scheme through, President Farmajo actively undermined it by not taking any steps to prepare elections. This led to conflicts between the president and the prime minister, with the latter trying to steer the preparations of the elections. Eventually, as ACLED (2021) outlined, also in the face of ongoing war in southern Somalia, the major political actors agreed in mid-2020 to holding indirect elections in Somalia – in a similar way as the last elections in 2017.

This indirect election process is complicated: At the local level, family elders nominate a total of almost 30,000 electoral women and men. These then determine the 275 members of the lower house of parliament, the seats of which are not distributed according to party-membership, but according to belonging to patrilineal descent groups (and according to personal networks and who can pay which bribes). The 54 members of the upper house are nominated by electoral committees of the Somali federal member states. Together, the two houses then elect the president (Elmi 2021). President Mohamed A. Farmajo prefers indirect elections because they are strongly controlled by the presidents of the federal member states, some of whom are his supporters. Yet, he even did not push very energetically for the completion of this process. When his term ended on 8th February 2021, no members of parliament had been elected so that Farmajo was able to extend his mandate by decree for two years. This was, I would argue, the easiest way for him to stay in power.

However, it led to violent reactions. Temporarily, armed opposition supporters occupied parts of Mogadishu. The crisis finally calmed down in mid-2021 when Somali elites and external supporters agreed on indirect elections to be concluded by the end of February 2022. Although this deadline was missed, by the end of April 2022 all members of both houses had finally been elected and nominated. During the indirect election process, massive influence (buying of votes and exercising political pressure, even intimidating members of the electoral committees, elders or candidates) was exercised. The complete parliament can now vote for one of the more than thirty nominated presidential candidates. Again, much money is clandestinely changing hands these days in Mogadishu; and gun-prices are going up on the capital’s markets, according to The New Humanitarian.

Elections in a long-term battlefield

Violence in Somalia escalated from the end of the 1970s. In the context of the Cold War, first the Soviet Union and then the US and their respective allies (such as German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany) supplied arms to the dictatorship under Siyad Barre (1969-91) – even when it was evident that human rights violations would be committed with them. In 1991, rebels overthrew the dictatorial regime, but they were unable to agree on a new government. The state arsenals were broken open, and the population armed itself. Chaos and violence led to a famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of victims by the end of 1992. As a result, the USA and the UN intervened with up to 30,000 blue helmets to guarantee the supply of the civilian population with humanitarian aid and to restore political order. It was the first time in the history of the UN that blue helmets were deployed in a country without the government’s consent. The operation failed: the famine was alleviated admittedly, but the armed intervention intensified the fighting. The USA and the UN cooperated with some warlords and attempted to capture others, such as Mohamed Farah Aideed.
This led to the solidarity of many Somalis with Aideed, who, as a former army officer, was involved in the overthrow of dictator Barre. When American special forces tried to seize him in October 1993, fighting broke out in Mogadishu. Hundreds Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed in the house-to-house fighting (depicted, albeit with an extreme US-centric [and racist] bias, in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down). Subsequently, all intervention troops withdrew from Somalia by May 1995. The weapons and the warlords remained. The latter made “dirty” deals with foreign companies, for instance for dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast (VOA 2009).

Only after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Muslim nation of Somalia returned to the attention of Western governments. The USA and its allies – in the Horn of Africa especially Ethiopia – cooperated with several warlords to capture and eliminate Islamist terrorist suspects in southern Somalia. At the same time, the international community initiated a peace conference for Somalia in Kenya, at which, in mid-2004, former militia leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was elected president by a Somali interim parliament. However, he and his government could not enter the capital because the local population rejected him. Most Somalis were now aligned with the lslamic Courts, which promised an alternative political and economic order for Somalia, based on Sharia law. These lslamists were the only ones to ensure peace in the urban neighborhoods under their control and offered effective jurisdiction (Ibrahim 2018).

Image 1: Elections in Somalia through the lens of the United Nations (their caption: “Members of the Somali Federal parliament queue to cast their ballots for round two during the presidential election held at the Mogadishu Airport hangar on February 8, 2017. UN Photo/ Ilyas Ahmed”)


From early 2006, tensions erupted into fighting between the Islamists on one side and the government and allied warlords on the other. The militias that fought for the Islamic Courts finally gained the upper hand. They soon controlled large parts of southern Somalia. The Ethiopian army intervened in December and dispersed all but a small core of Islamist forces. This was the nucleus from which Al-Shabaab (The Youth) emerged in 2007. In the following years, Al-Shabaab evolved into the strongest Somali force, which temporarily (between 2009 and 2011) ruled southern Somalia including Mogadishu and other urban centers and was then from 2011 driven out by a massive campaign of more than 10,000 African Union-troops deployed to Somalia. As of 2022, some 22,000 AU forces are stationed in southern Somalia. Together with around 10,000 Somali National Army soldiers and a smaller number of USA special forces (waging drone war) they have not managed to defeat Al Shabaab, which not only fights a guerilla war against the Somali government and its allies but actually also governs substantial rural areas, delivering justice and security at the local level and building-up some basic legitimacy in this way, despite the fact that the violence of the extremists, exercised through harsh punishments of (alleged) criminals or enemies and through regular terror attacks with many civilian casualties mainly in Mogadishu appalls many Somalis (Hoehne and Gaas 2022; Bakonyi 2022).

No one is legitimate

While a new war – one characterized as “counter-terrorism war” – escalated in Somalia and has cost tens of thousands of lives between 2007 and today, international actors have been trying to establish a government in Mogadishu, based on a new federal constitution (which was partly drafted by German legal specialists working for the Max Planck Foundation, which contrary to the name is not a basic research institute but a consultancy firm). Based on that constitution, indirect elections were held for the first time in 2012, and Hassan Sheikh Mahamoud became president. He sought to implement the federal constitution and establish federal states. The idea was to achieve some division of power in the state and between (patrilinear descent) groups through federalization. Traditionally, in Somali society, affiliation is regulated less by territory than by descent in the paternal line. Mahamoud’s government succeeded in establishing some federal states, at least nominally. Nonetheless, Al-Shabaab still controlled the hinterland of southern Somalia.

Also Mahamoud’s government was extremely corrupt. Approximately 70 percent of the funds given from outside disappeared into the private pockets of government actors, as documented by the World Bank, among other sources. The term of office of the following president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, was accompanied by massive accusations of corruption as well. Farmajo negated the federal model of government and worked toward the centralization of power.

Given the limited function and low legitimacy of Farmajo’s government and the state in Somalia as a whole, the question arises why elections are nevertheless organized at great expense. It is common knowledge how corrupt the political actors are and that they have little support among the population. A leading UN representative said in a briefing end of 2021, at which the author participated, that “no matter how the election process turns out, it will not contribute to any improvement”. A German NGO worker told an expert panel in January 2022 (again, the author was present at this meeting) that his biggest concern was how the losing side would react after the corrupt election. Some fear a new escalation of violence.

One explanation is that Somali elites and external aid workers benefit from elections. Somali elites make sure that they get well paid for their participation in the farce that the elections are. In order to continue to carry out projects in the crisis-ridden country, Western aid organizations need administrative partners to sign off on projects – which is obviously an end in itself, because the aid often does not benefit the ordinary population, but the external actors and their Somali elite partners. Moreover, the elections formally support the narrative of Western governments that things are “getting better” in Somalia. In the end, even Al-Shabaab benefits from the election disaster. Although the militant extremists do not have a broad basis of legitimacy either, they only need to do things a little better than the government, and they can gain some support from the conflict-weary population.

Instead of holding elections, Somali political actors should seek reconciliation and strive for political dialogue with all relevant powers in Somalia, including Al Shabaab. Yet, in Somalia, this seems to be made impossible by an (informal) doctrine of military counter-terrorism mixed with a focus on formal democratization and institution building, no matter how hollow the construct of the thus erected “government” is.  

Markus Virgil Hoehne is a social anthropologist at the University of Leipzig researching on conflict, identity, state-building, and dealing with the violent past in Somalia and Peru. He has been working on Somali issues since 2001. He is the author of Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (Nairobi: Rift Valley Institute) and the co-editor of Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological encounters (New York: Berghahn).

Bibliography:

ACLED 2021: A Turbulent Run-up to Elections in Somalia. https://acleddata.com/2021/04/07/a-turbulent-run-up-to-elections-in-somalia/

Bakonyi, Jutta 2022: War’s Everyday: Normalizing Violence and Legitimizing Power. Partecipazione&Conflitto Vol. 15, No. 1: 121-138

EASO 2021: Country of Origin Information Report: Somalia Security situation. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/2021_09_EASO_COI_Report_Somalia_Security_situation.pdf

Elmi, Afyare 2021: The Politics of the Electoral System in Somalia: An Assessment. Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies: Vol. 21: 99-113, available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/bildhaan/vol21/iss1/10

Gaas, Mohamed Husein and Stig Jarle Hansen 2022: A Near End to Somalia’s Election Conundrum? RAAD Policy Brief 1:2022.

Hoehne, Markus Virgil and Mohammed Hussein Gaas 2022: Political Islam in Somalia: From underground movements to the rise and continued resilience of Al Shabaab, in J.-N. Bach and Aleksi Ylönen (eds.): Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa. London: Routledge, pp. 411-427.

Ibrahim,Ahmed Sheikh 2018: The Shari’a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and

“Islamic Law”.  Dissertation, the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology, City University of New York.

Somalia Corruption Report July 2020, available at: https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/somalia/

The New Humanitarian 12 May 2022: Gun prices soar ahead of Somalia’s presidential elections https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2022/05/12/gun-prices-soar-ahead-of-somalias-presidential-elections

VOA 30.10.2009: Waste Dumping off Somali Coast May Have Links to Mafia, Somali Warlords, available at: https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-15-voa34/306247.html

Cite as: Hoehne, Markus Virgil. 2022. “Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia.“ FocaalBlog, 13 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/05/13/markus-virgil-hoehne-perpetuating-conflict-through-democratization-presidential-elections-in-somalia/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism

The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order.  While the fundamental tenets of postwar geography—that national boundaries would not be moved, that each country had the right to territorial integrity, and that every nation-state could govern its own territory without interference—might have been weakened before, now they have been quite literally blown up. Making sense of these world-historical changes will take time. A recent article on FocaalBlog by geographer David Harvey argues that the post-Cold War policies of the West played an important role in pushing Russia towards the current war in Ukraine. Harvey argues that the West’s failure to incorporate Russia into Western security structures and the world economy led to Russia’s political and economic “humiliation,” which Russia now seeks to remedy by annexing Ukraine. By focusing on Western imperialism, however, Harvey ignores the politics of the USSR’s successor states as well as regional economic dynamics. It is Russian neoimperialism, not the West’s actions, that motivates the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Harvey’s argument rests on the idea that in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Western institutions inflicted grave “humiliations” on Russia. He argues that “the Soviet Union was dismembered into independent republics without much popular consultation.” But this begs the question of consultation with whom. Estonia declared national sovereignty in 1988, and both Latvia and Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in 1990–all of them before the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 (Frankowski and Stephan 1995:84). All three of these countries were independent prior to 1940, and, like Ukraine, were forcibly incorporated into the USSR; all three saw declarations of independence after 1988 as a restoration of previous national sovereignty.  Georgia, too, elected a nationalist government in 1990 and formally declared independence in 1991. Like Ukraine, Georgia claimed a restoration of national sovereignty that was held prior to forcible incorporation in the USSR in 1921.  Like Ukraine, each of these countries held referenda on independence which passed with over 74% percent of citizens voting to leave the USSR permanently. Ukraine’s own referendum passed with 92.3% of the population voting “yes”  (Nohlen and Stover 2010:1985). There was thus plenty of consultation with the people who mattered–the citizens of countries formerly colonized by Russia who demanded the right to decide their own futures. Why Russia should have been consulted on the independence of nations that had been incorporated into the Russian empire and the USSR by force is unclear; colonizing countries are rarely asked for permission when their colonies declare independence.

Dimly lit firefighters stand amid smoke and ruined buildings.
Image 1: An apartment block in Kyiv (Oleksandr Koshyts Street) after shelling, 25 February (Credit: Kyiv City Council, Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine?fbclid=IwAR3ieAzQ7Nt8LBf62tYs1P2fORG-QVNV1uP-8DNiZqlZ6j1tJHFRaI1Rrzg#/media/File:Житловий_будинок_у_Києві_(вул._Кошиця)_після_обстрілу.jpg)

Second, Harvey argues that Russia was “humiliated economically.”  He writes,“With the end of the Cold War, Russians were promised a rosy future, as the benefits of capitalist dynamism and a free market economy would supposedly spread by trickle down across the country. Boris Kagarlitsky described the reality this way. With the end of the Cold War, Russians believed they were headed on a jet plane to Paris only to be told in mid-flight ‘welcome to Burkina Faso.’”

Harvey blames the collapse of the Russian economy in the early 1990s on the Western-led practice of so called “shock therapy,” or rapid marketization, saying that it resulted in a decline in GDP, the collapse of the ruble, and disintegration of the social safety net for Russian citizens. But an explanation of economic collapsed based solely on “shock therapy” negates the internal dynamics of state-socialist economies, which were already in free-fall as the supply-constrained planned economy succumbed to its own internal contradictions (Dunn 2004:Chapter 2). As the Hungarian dissident economist Janoś Kornai aptly showed, soft budget constraints, which allowed state socialist enterprises to pass their costs onto the state, and thus prevented them from ever failing, led to intense cycles of shortage and hoarding. In turn, endemic shortage led to limited and low-quality production, which in turn led to more shortage and hoarding. All of this disincentivized investments in industrial modernization. Why invest in modern equipment or production methods, when a firm could sell whatever it made, and when there was little incentive to improve profit margins? It was the Soviet economy that kept Soviet industry technologically behind, not the West. The result of the dynamics of state-led planning meant that when Soviet industries were exposed to the world market by shock therapy mechanisms eagerly adopted by reformers in their own governments, they were not at all competitive. Thus, the deindustrialization of the USSR was a product of state socialist economics.  

Shock therapy, too, was largely a local production rather than one led by the West, despite Jeffrey Sachs’ relentless advocacy of it. The point of shock therapy was not just to make East European economies look like Western economies as quickly as possible. Rather, local non-communist elites argued that it was a tool to prevent a Communist restoration. They argued that if the Communist nomenklatura, which controlled both politics and production, was allowed to dismantle state owned enterprises and repurpose state-owned capital for their own private gain, its members would oppose political reform or seek to regain political power (Staniszkis 1991). As Peter Murrell, an ardent critic of shock therapy, writes, shock therapy was thus pushed most heavily by East Europeans:

“These reforms were condoned, if not endorsed, by the International Monetary Fund; they were strongly encouraged if only weakly aided, by Western governments; and they were promoted, if not designed, by the usual peripatetic Western economists.” (Murrell 1993:111).

The result, as we now know, was the destruction of state-owned enterprises, the rise of mass unemployment, and the creation of oligarchs whose wealth was founded on formerly state-owned assets.  But this was not the result of policies pushed by the West, but rather of the devil’s bargain necessitated by internal political dynamics in Soviet successor states, including Russia.  As Don Kalb points out in his response to Harvey, “When all modernist projects had collapsed in the East, as it seemed in the mid 1990s, the supposedly universalist Western project of democratic capitalism was simply the only available project left. The post-socialist East was happily sharing for a while in Western hubris.” This was as true about free-market ideologies as it was about the political support for NATO that Kalb discusses.

Third, Harvey decries the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, citing this as a further humiliation as well as a security problem. His formulation of this problem is odd: he seems to assume that NATO expansion is entirely a question of relations between the Western powers and Russia, which can make decisions on behalf of smaller countries without consulting them. Nowhere in all this are the security imperatives of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, the three countries who wanted to join NATO at the Bucharest Meeting of NATO in April, 2008, each of whom had legitimate reason to fear Russian invasion (Dunn 2017). The right of smaller countries to decide their own foreign policy and to join alliances for their own strategic reasons is entirely absent from Harvey’s account. This absence of the Ukrainian state as an actor in determining the country’s future is an implicit acceptance of Putin’s claim that the former Soviet republics are rightfully in Russia’s sphere of influence. But imagine this argument applied in a different context: Should Canada’s security interests give it the right to occupy upstate New York? Is Arizona rightfully in Mexico’s sphere of influence, given the dangers that US military adventures might pose? Both of those propositions are obviously untenable. Yet the same argument, which is most often made by Vladimir Putin, is taken by many on the Western left as a legitimate basis for Russian action in Ukraine (Shapiro 2015, cf. Bilous 2022).

The notion that the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Ukraine again now are defensive actions on the part of Russia is deeply wrongheaded. They are pure aggression. They are first of all aggression towards the peoples and territories forcibly incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As the experience of Chechnya shows, Russia is willing to utterly destroy places and people that seek to leave the empire (Gall and DeWaal 1999). Russia continues to signal that willingness with the presence of the Russian 58th Army in South Ossetia for the past 14 years, where it has been poised to overrun Georgia at the first sign that it is unwilling to be controlled by Moscow (Dunn 2020).  Likewise, the current invasion of Ukraine is not defensive. There was no realistic possibility of Ukraine joining NATO in the foreseeable future, and Ukrainian sovereignty posed no credible threat to Russian security. (As German Chancellor Olaf Schultz said, “The question of [Ukrainian] membership in alliances is practically not on the agenda”). The invasion of Ukraine is about Russian control of what it believes is its historical sphere of influence, rather than any particular defensive imperative.

David Harvey clearly believes that his analysis is anti-imperialist. But it is in fact a pro-imperialist argument, one that supports Russian irredentism and the restoration of empire under the guise of a “sphere of influence.” (As Derek Hall points out in his response, nowhere in Harvey’s argument does he condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.) Russian imperialism has always worked on different principles than Western imperialism, given that it has been largely non-capitalist, but it is imperialism nonetheless, in cultural, political and economic senses of that term. Blaming the West for “humiliating” Russia occludes Russia’s own expansionist ideologies and desires for restoration of empire, and justifies the violent military domination of people who can and should decide their own destinies.  

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University.  Her work has focused on post-Communist Eastern Europe since 1992.  Her first book, Privatizing Poland (Cornell University Press 2004) examined the economic dynamics of post-socialist property transformation.  Her second book, No Path Home (Cornell University Press 2017) looked at the aftermath of the 2008 Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia and the effects of Western humanitarian aid on IDPs.  Dunn also serves on the board of two refugee resettlement agencies.

References

Bilous, Taras. 2022. “A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv”, Commons, February 25, https://commons.com.ua/en/letter-western-left-kyiv/

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2020. ” Warfare and Warfarin: Chokepoints, Clotting and Vascular Geopolitics”. Ethnos https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2020.1764602

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen.  2017. No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004.  Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor.

Frankowski, Stanisław and Paul B. Stephan (1995). Legal Reform in Post-Communist Europe. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Gall, Carlotta and Thomas De Waal. 1999. Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus. New York; NYU Press.

Hall, Derek, 2002. “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to Harvey.” https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/28/derek-hall-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-a-response-to-david-harvey/

Kornai, Janoś. 1992. The Socialist System. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Murrell, Peter. 1993. “What is Shock Therapy? What Did It Do in Poland and Russia?” Post-Soviet Affairs 9(2):111-140.

Nohlen, Dieter and Philip Stöver (2010) Elections in Europe: A Data Handbook, Baden-Baden: Nomos

Shapiro, Jeremy. 2015. Defending the Defensible: The Value of Spheres of Influence in US Policy. Brookings Institution Blog, March 11. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2015/03/11/defending-the-defensible-the-value-of-spheres-of-influence-in-u-s-foreign-policy/.

Staniszkis, Jadwiga. 1991. .Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: the Polish Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cite as: Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2022. “When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism.” FocaalBlog, 3 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/03/elizabeth-cullen-dunn-when-western-anti-imperialism-supports-imperialism/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Kalb: “Fuck Off” versus “Humiliation”: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East

Image 1: Czar Vladimir, by BakeNecko.

I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-statism should be the only national flag allowed in the 21st century. It was always already essential to make that point against the  environmental and public health catastrophes we are facing. It has become even more essential now that humanity is obviously sliding into a deadly phase of imperial competition of which Russia’s criminal assault on Ukraine is a first episode; as is the West’s emerging reaction to it, and the duplicitous self-serving pro-Russia position of China as well (I am writing 27 February). We should be aware that these are just early moments in a developing story that has been incubating in the dying post-1989 world order for some time.

Continue reading →