In the midst of India’s extensive urbanization, with more than 34% of the population dwelling in urban areas as of 2021, as per the World Bank, the complex relationship between urban transformation, poverty dynamics, and the impact of capitalism gains prominence. Amidst this swiftly urbanizing landscape, it is relevant to ask about the enduring significance of street shrines and the deities they embody. This blog post unravels the complex interplay between urbanization, poverty dynamics, and capitalism in shaping the evolving narrative of street shrines in Delhi. By examining specific examples, we seek to contribute to the understanding of the socio-political implications of religious transformations, shedding light on the informal mechanisms that influence the cultural and political dimensions of urban India.
As Hindu deities increasingly dominate street shrines, such as those near Jama Masjid, Red Fort, and Chandni Chowk, the very essence of these spaces undergoes an accretionary conversion over time. This transformation is not merely a happenstance but a result of a complex collusion involving diverse social and economic players who shape the city’s evolving political, religious, and cultural landscape. Old Delhi, with its labyrinthine lanes and historical significance, is undergoing a palpable cultural reshaping as Hindu dominance unfolds within its streets.
Street shrines, once reflective of the syncretic blend of Hindu and Islamic traditions, are now marked by a pronounced prevalence of Hindu deities. This is largely due to the ongoing influx of labor migrants from the neighbouring states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh into the city who are reshaping the sacred spaces in both their structure and function. The diverse backgrounds, cultures, and religious practices of the migrants contribute to a rich tapestry of beliefs that find expression in the street shrines. The choice of the deities is a reflection of their faith. Migrants, seeking a sense of community and continuity with their cultural heritage, often contribute to the embellishment and maintenance of these shrines. The shrines may adapt to serve not only as religious spaces but also as community hubs where migrants find support, share experiences, and build social networks.
Icons like Shirdi Sai Baba and Hanuman, along with other Vedic motifs, have become the visual protagonists, signifying a transformative narrative that overrides the Islamic heritage that was historically ingrained in this part of the city. In the intricate lanes of Old Delhi, the evolving narrative of cultural transformation is discernible through the gradual transition of temporary religious symbols into enduring fixtures. Local spaces, once harmoniously shared, now bear markings that define them for specific purposes, subtly alienating those who traverse them and instilling a sense of unease. This shift, woven into the fabric of the city, holds profound implications for understanding the social and ethnic conflicts that manifest within its boundaries.
The multifaceted nexus signifies that as urban centers burgeon, various economic and social forces come into play, fostering both economic opportunities and disparities. The growing number of street shrines might be interpreted as a reaction to the changing cityscape, complexly influenced by issues of poverty, capitalism, and religious practices. The chosen field sites in New Delhi were intentional selections, serving as gateways into regional politics entwined with land acquisitions, unraveling layers of influence on the transformation of public shrines and art.
Image 1: A Shrine for Hanuman right behind Connaught place in New Delhi (Photo by Smytta Yadav)
The following provides some examples of street shrines and the changes they have undergone.
Hanuman’s Ascendance: In the heart of Old Delhi, near the iconic Jama Masjid, street shrines that were once adorned with Islamic calligraphy and symbols now prominently feature the figure of Hanuman. This ascendance of Hanuman in the visual landscape signals a shift in religious and cultural prominence, eclipsing the Islamic heritage that was historically intertwined with this area.
While administrative authorities recognize that these religious shrines can be leveraged for land acquisition, the marginalized inhabitants dwelling in their vicinity perceive them as a safeguard against eviction, highlighting the intrinsic connection between religion, politics, and commerce —exemplifying the strategic integration of religious practices and turning these humble street shrines into vibrant expressions of cultural and spiritual amalgamation while at the same time legitimising the ownership of the marginalised communities residing in the slums of the capital.
Image 2: An Ancient Muslim Shrine; Hasrat Sheikh Imadudin Firdousi at Nizamuddin (photo by Smytta Yadav)
Furthermore, demolition notices have been issued by authorities to mosques located on land that the Delhi Waqf Board asserts as its own. The board has filed a challenge to two of these notices in the High Court because of the Places of Worship Act 1991 of the Indian constitution, according to which a mosque, temple, church or any place of public worship that was in existence as of 15 August 1947 will retain the same religious character that it had on that day – irrespective of its history – and cannot be changed by the courts or the government. It is worth noting that these actions targeting Muslim sites transpired simultaneously with other initiatives, such as the purported demolition of dwellings in squalor areas prior to the G-20 summit that was hosted in Delhi on September 9 and 10.
Image 3: Hanuman Statue near the famous Chandni Chowk in a heavily Muslim neighbourhood. (Photo taken by Smytta Yadav).
Some other examples of dominance of Hindu street shrines in predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods are:
Symbolic Transformation near Red Fort: Walking towards the iconic Red Fort, another bastion of Delhi’s historical legacy, one can observe a symbolic transformation in the street shrines that line the route. Hindu deities, particularly Hanuman and Shirdi Sai Baba, now take centre stage, subtly overshadowing the Islamic architectural marvels and their associated religious symbols.
Syncretism Eroded in Chandni Chowk: Chandni Chowk, renowned for its historical syncretism, is experiencing a erosion of this syncretic cultural tapestry. Street shrines in this area, once a testament to the harmonious coexistence of Hindu and Islamic traditions, now showcase a pronounced prevalence of Hindu deities. The visual language is evolving, rewriting the narrative and erasing some of the syncretic elements that defined Chandni Chowk.
Influence in Kinari Bazaar: Kinari Bazaar, a market known for its traditional charm, reflects the broader influence of Hindu dominance in Old Delhi. Street shrines along the narrow lanes prominently feature symbols associated with Hinduism, subtly reshaping the cultural and religious landscape of this historic market.
The evolution of Hindu street shrines in New Delhi is intricate and multi-layered, intertwining individuals and households based on factors such as caste, religion, regional origin, language, or ideology. This complexity is vividly illustrated by the diverse ways in which these communities engage in political strategies, aligning themselves with various political parties. This involvement emerges as a pivotal dimension in the larger quest for social mobility and empowerment in the city.
For instance, certain street shrines may become focal points for followers supporting different political parties, reflecting the dynamic nature of political affiliations within these communities. The cultural movements and societal struggles that unfold within these religious spaces seamlessly transition into political conflicts, with tangible manifestations in territorial disputes over physical space in New Delhi. For instance, recently in Jan 2021, an idol of Shirdi Sai Baba was demolished by a BJP supporter and a realtor because a Jat Hindu Guru had claimed Shirdi Sai Baba was born a Muslim, and the realtor did not want that to be placed in a Hindu neighbourhood.
In essence, the nuanced dynamics of Hindu street shrines not only mirror the cultural diversity within the communities but also serve as arenas where political ideologies and affiliations converge, shaping the broader narrative of social dynamics and empowerment in the dynamic context of New Delhi.
It is essential to have a clear understanding of the fact that political and religious imbrications are connected to rural-urban flows, transitions, and networks, as well as the caste and regional conflicts that are involved in these transitions and connections. Furthermore, it is important to note that these imbrications are not simply the result of government action or inaction on urban and spatial planning: caste and regional conflicts are also involved.
At the same time, publicly addressing the contentious issues that arise from these conflicts and struggles cannot be addressed purely through formal state or urban planning mechanisms, as these play out primarily through informal channels, in spatial patterns that are informal, and in public spaces that through long term practice and local sanction have been earmarked for informal uses. Because politics, religion, and culture are much more closely linked in the Asian context to issues of dominance, inequality, and hierarchy – all of which operate through informal mechanisms – it is not surprising that battles around these take place in informal spaces, and perhaps even achieve a greater degree of success than formal or institutionalised attempts to democratise Indian society.
The ethnographic observations about these shrines offer a glimpse into the ongoing negotiations between tradition and modernity, the sacred and the secular, thus contributing to the broader scholarly debate on the cultural and political dimensions of urban India. The enduring legacy of these shrines, amidst the dynamic changes of urbanization, reflects not only a rich cultural heritage but also a resilient adaptation to the evolving socio-political landscape.
In conclusion, this exploration into the realms of street shrines offers insights into their evolving cultural and political significance. The dynamic mosaic of street shrines in urban India serves as a vivid representation of the intricate interplay among diverse cultural dimensions. Amid conflicting perspectives on land utilization and decision-making authority, the delineation of sacred boundaries becomes increasingly intricate, particularly in a country like India where finite land resources pose challenges. This ethnographic journey seeks to unravel how these sacred spaces engage with the dynamic geography of the city, thereby reshaping the ancient Islamic architecture in Delhi’s urban landscape.
Dr. Smytta Yadav is an Anthropologist and currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. The above article is an output of her AHRC grant number AH/T000864/1 which she held at the Queen’s University of Belfast. The title of the grant was Ancient Vedic Gods in Early Urban and Pre-Mughal India.
References:
Kennerly, R. M. (2005). Roadside Shrine Cultural Performance: Poststructural Postmodern Ethnography. Agricultural and Mechanical College, LSU.
Mayaram, S., Pandian, M. S. S., & Skaria, A. (Eds.). (2005). Muslims, Dalits, and Historical Fabrications (Vol. 12). Oriental Blackswan.
Cite as: Yadav, Smytta 2024 “Shifting Landscapes: Urbanization, Religious Transformations, and Cultural Resilience in Delhi” Focaalblog 16 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/16/smytta-yadav-shifting-landscapes-urbanization-religious-transformations-and-cultural-resilience-in-delhi/
One of the casualties of Putin’s war on Ukraine will be European critical social science. While the war has instigated important discussions about ‘US-plaining’, ‘Westplaining’ and about Russian imperialism, we also see—so far in a clash of keyboards—a growing weaponization of scholarship. There are signs of growing censorship of those ideas that would not align neatly into friend-enemy dyads. In the fight against ‘misinformation’, diverging opinions are framed, often preventively, as problematic and even pejoratively as “pro-Kremlin.”
It is with this in mind that I revisit herein the campaign to amend the “EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine”, published initially on 26 February 2022 and amended on 15 March 2022. The case reveals how not only mainstream media and big tech are changing what is permissible, but how militarism, securitisation, and warmongering is creeping into anthropologists’ language and analyses, at times insidiously as they usurp anti-hegemonic and decolonial positions to enhance their credibility. Where it will take us is hard to predict, but it might be worth looking into the amendments of the EASA statement to cast light on possible futures in social anthropology’s debates and in order to make a case for anthropology as an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war discipline.
EASA’s statement on the Russian war and the protest campaign to rewrite it
On the 26th of February 2022, two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EASA executive committee (EASA EC) published a statement ‘EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine’. While in the context of atrocities its value is symbolic rather than practical, the EASA EC must be commended on the swiftness of their response and the clarity of their stance against the war and imperialism. The first two paragraphs of the statement are particularly strong:
The Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) condemns the Russian government’s illegal and unprovokedmilitary invasion of Ukraine: an imperialist war that is leading to immeasurable suffering and losses for the Ukrainian people, whose dignity, well-being, and independence we wholeheartedly support.
As the Ukraine war has worsened in all sorts of shocking ways, the Executive feels that our statement needs to be unequivocal in order to avoid ambiguity of any kind. A group of EASA members contacted us to say that there were some ambiguities in our initial statement and therefore we have amended it.
How did this change come about? On Friday, 11 March, almost two weeks after the statement had been published, a group of anthropologists from East Central Europe wrote an email to EASA EC demanding that what they saw as ‘controversial ideas’ in the statement be revoked. In the meantime, they also uploaded a petition to GoogleDocs and started gathering signatures. They explained in earlier versions of the petition that if EASA did not retract the wording by noon on Monday, 14th March, they would feel ‘morally obliged’ to go public with the petition. As EASA EC changed the wording, the petition was never widely circulated.
The style of the protest itself is quite stunning as it features moralistic-conservative language (‘controversial ideas’), forces the executive committee to decide over a weekend, and in many ways resembles wartime Realpolitik (the initiators speak of ‘kind appeals’ but set conditionalities and prepare to escalate further, justifying such their steps with reference to morality). But it is the content of the protest that interests me here. As the authors of the petition explain:
While we fully agree that the war against Ukraine has roots in Russian imperial ambitions, we reject the suggestion that Russia’s armed aggression is caused by NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory. Such a statement would imply that sovereign countries of Eastern Europe do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves, justifying Russia’s colonialist and imperialist claims over countries in Eastern Europe. As anthropologists, we understand Ukraine’s defensive actions as resistance against the reactionary empire and recognize the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances. The sentence [this refers to the final sentence in the EASA EC statement quoted above; M.F.] also contains a deeply troubling ambiguity—referring to Putin as “main aggressor” implies that there are more aggressors in this war than Putin and Russia, assigning the blame for the war against Ukraine (even asymmetrically) to another party.
Don’t mention the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation
The “ambiguity” raised by the last point can be debated. On the other hand, most EASA members are not native speakers of English and thus there may always be ambiguity in written English statements from the organization. But I believe, it is clear from the statement condemning “Russian government’s illegal and unprovoked military invasion” in the opening sentence who is the aggressor.
It is, however, the arguments made in the first three sentences which are particularly striking. I ask the readers to take a look at the first two paragraphs of the original EASA statement quoted above again. How could a mention NATO’s role in the longer history preceding the invasion imply that sovereign countries do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves? What logical somersault was performed here? Does the protesters’ problem with EASA EC’s statement lie in the word “roots”? Do the protesters read this as equivalent to “the cause”?
It is certainly not a marginal position to argue that Putin’s actions are framed in geopolitical terms (where the key agents are the US and China) and that the West has not really tried to “inscribe Russia in a more comprehensive security agreement and all of the bilateral and multilateral agreements”. It is also not a marginal position to point out that NATO policies have made Russia’s invasion more likely. Moreover, pronouncements about Ukrainian membership in NATO (or in the European Union) had been merely symbolic. Even countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had never truly supported Ukraine’s membership until now (geopolitics, in other words), leaving it in a particularly vulnerable position. In no way, however, does acknowledging “the geopolitical confrontation between the US-led liberal “empire”, and the Russian imperialist project in East Europe” mean that Ukrainians are mere puppets without desires, hopes and agency, who should not freely express their will on which international alliances their country should enter, without a fear of becoming targets of military invasion.
Of course, most Ukrainians have no time and patience for such debates now—their country has been brutally attacked and the fight against the Russian invaders is all that matters to them. In this sense, it is good that the EASA EC removed the final sentence of the statement to avoid a social media storm that would have followed with the publication of the petition and which would have detracted from the statement’s overall message.
But let’s be clear here: there was no ambiguity in the original statement. The ambiguity was created by the initiators of the protest. Unless, of course, for anthropologists it is inconceivable that one can support the independence and sovereignty of Ukrainian people while seeing Russian tsarism and NATO enlargement as shaping the context of the invasion. But there is a danger that knee-jerk ascriptions of culpability and contests over the moral high ground will weaken our capability to take a critical view of ourselves, and to understand how our activities contribute to fascism and militarism.
NATO in CEE
The choice presented by the protest initiators is straightforward: if the EASA EC statement mentioned NATO as an actor shaping geopolitical contexts, it would go against Ukraine’s right of self-determination. This, to me, is a whitewashing of NATO. It is striking that it comes from anthropologists who must know that the pro-NATO position was never unequivocally embraced by Ukrainians. This is why, Volodymyr Arthiuk explains, “a silent majority” elected Zelensky who “promised to end the war, to not press issues of identity and language.” And while for reasons of bare survival under occupation, support for NATO membership, or at least for a closer cooperation, increased among Ukrainians in comparison with the pre-war period, these views will continue to be in flux and are regionally specific. As regards Ukrainians’ political opinions, one must also wonder what it will be in the future, given how NATO has failed to come to their defence.
Equating NATO membership unproblematically with popular sovereignty, with “the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances”, is even more disingenuous coming from CEE scholars, as in most CEE countries there were no referendums about NATO membership—there was no popular decision. And while in Poland or the Baltic countries, the majorities would have probably been in favour, even Václav Havel was against the referendum in Czechia, since the opinion polls were far from conclusive. In Slovakia, another country that I know well, barely 50% supported membership in 2003 when the country joined the alliance. Continued ambivalence of these two countries to NATO can be seen, for instance, in demonstrations against the installation of tracking radar and kinetic missiles in Czechia. Although politicians argued these would protect from attacks by rogue states, such as Iran, the public overwhelmingly (68%) rejected them. In Slovakia, just prior to the invasion, more people blamed NATO than Russia for the escalation of the tensions along Ukraine’s borders.
The petition was initiated by eight anthropologists – seven Polish and one Slovak (see ‘Protest initiators’). The petition now claims to speak for an “international anthropological community”, whereas the EASA website speaks of an initiative by “EASA members” that stimulated the change. Since the petition with signatures was never publicised, I must suppose that the executive committee decided to change the wording of the statement following the email from the protest initiators. A predominantly CEE character of the initiative is further reflected in the online social life of the petition: most of the signatures come from Poland, Slovakia and Czechia. And while a public campaign was stopped short by the EASA EC changing its statement, any momentum for obtaining a critical mass for the protest would have emerged from within this region.
In this way, the narrative of the protest echoes important discussions about the position of Central and East European anthropologists within the discipline, in which many signatories of the protest letter have been taking part actively. However, consider the irony it leads to: a group of CEE anthropologists led by former members of EASA EC end up defending NATO against EASA, which they imply is a Western hegemonic institution misunderstanding the region (even if it is currently presided over by a Bulgarian). Such positioning undoubtedly added to the pressure on the EASA EC, since it suggested that EASA’s statement was denying sovereignty to Ukrainians and to peoples of other “sovereign countries of Eastern Europe”, legitimising Russia’s imperialist claims.
We must be wary of such east-Europeanising re-alignments in the context of the prevalent view of Ukraine in many CEE countries as a failed state between Central Europe and Russia; the racialisation of Ukrainians as cheap and thus exploitable, also sexual, labour, but ‘white’ (good migrants and even refugees!). Likewise, it is important to critically reflect on the grading of Europeanness in the CEE public sphere, where NATO and EU membership have been constructed as its unambivalent symbols.
It would also be misleading to say that all CEE anthropologists found EASA’s original statement to be “the dangerous distortion” that the protesters saw it to be. Many disagreed, or would have disagreed, if they had been aware of the protest, and if not with the content of the protest, then with its tone. Indeed, there was a lively discussion on the mailing list of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA), with voices pro and contra. In the end, only a few members signed the petition. Of course, some were probably waiting for EASA EC’s response, while others might have thought this whole thing ridiculous, since, as one member put it, and I paraphrase, “Ukrainians need guns, not statements.” In any case, it shows that the options presented by the protest initiators as clearcut were not wholeheartedly embraced by all.
The need for anti-militarism
Let’s be honest here. Rather than an argument about popular sovereignty, the initiators’ position is a pro-NATO one. It presents a false dichotomy: if one is against Putin, one cannot be against NATO. To be sure, I understand where this position comes from. The feeling among many people in CEE, including my parents, confirmed by the invasion, can be summarised in the following way: only NATO membership protects our countries from becoming prey to Russia’s tsarist ambitions; it is therefore only NATO that enables people in member states to be safe and, by extension, CEE anthropologists to pursue our careers.
Certainly, such an argument is counterfactual, as the world where CEE countries would not be NATO members would be a different world. Precisely because any line of argument about the absence of NATO membership must remain counterfactual it invokes both fears and desires, and in its operation must reproduce legitimising narratives. These are things anthropologists should be mindful of. The argument is also problematic as it separates NATO’s past interventions and invasions from its role as a defensive alliance through which smaller states can protect themselves against an imperialist next door. Violence elsewhere (e.g., Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and with Turkey as a NATO members conducting a war against the Kurdish population within its borders and in Syria) and often against a threat of “tribal” or racialised “savagery” (Pierre 2013: 548) are treated in isolation from peace and European values at home. This compartmentalization is understandable in the context of Russian imperialist warfare, but it leads to simplistic listing of pros (NATO as a national-level ally against Russian colonialism) and cons (continued militarisation internationally; ‘humanitarian interventions’), which is a sophisticated approach to neither the history of imperialism nor to a critical anthropology of military alliances. As anthropologists, we must resist such a compartmentalization. Our discipline must be anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war, even though it is always practised from a specific locale, such as CEE. We must reject simplistic Manichaeism, labour against provincialism, and reject seeing anthropologists as Putin’s apologists, just because they are critical of NATO and of their own countries’ role in it.
Furthermore, the above line of argument promises only war; it extends Russia as a threat into the past with only war and crisis on the horizon. One must wonder how such “truths” (constructed through the piling up of historical analogies, which are now in vogue) skew anthropological sensibility, especially in and about Central and Eastern Europe. Gregory Bateson (2000: 265), among others, showed how our truths, premises and habits of thought recursively reinforce our understanding of the world and of ourselves, which leads further to the petrification of these truths.Against the real threat of securitisation in European anthropology, I suggest we promote an anti-war anthropology, a part of a broader anti-war movement. To break the militarist habit of thought we should become apprehensive of how militarism and militarisation shape research topics and field sites (Gusterson 2007).
We should also proceed as if we knew that the forever war (as a problematic, not static ontology) was the ground on which we stand and from which we speak as anthropologists. This task is more urgent now when countries are increasing their military spending or when some argue for the need to destroy Russia in a long-term war, with the suffering borne by Ukrainians. We might find inspiration in abolitionist anthropology and rethink European anthropology as a speculative analysis that not only critiques the existing order, but in a move of counter-war imagination, reimagines and—through collective practical effort—reinvents the possible, “past the ruins of the world (and the discipline) as we know it” (Shange 2019: 10).
Two final comments
The fact that Putin clearly broke international law and the Russian army has been committing war crimes should not make us blind to the fact that the war has been going on in Ukraine for eight years preceding the invasion. As anthropologists we must recognise the complexity of that situation. This does not make us Putin’s apologists. In fact, the real problem from the point of view of the discipline is the way European anthropology chooses which ‘events’ it notices: while we have had discussions on Brexit and COVID (e.g., dossiers in Social Anthropology and two series of articles on FocaalBlog), the war in eastern Ukraine—with 14,000 casualties between 2014 and 2021—was never the focus of critical discussion (e.g., no dossier or EASA-sponsored roundtable, not even by the protest initiators).
Turning to the internal politics of EASA, it is important to note that many members would want the association to function as a learned society that abstains from activism and politics. For them, EASA’s past activities related to HAU, precarity, and possibly also the open letters published by the current EASA EC signify an unwelcome ideological move to the left. It is ultimately EASA members who will decide on this in the future elections. I, personally, am proud to be a part of an association that published such a strong anti-war statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Organising biannual conferences, publishing a journal or facilitating various topical networks is not enough.
Martin Fotta is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. His current research focuses on the Romani diaspora across the Lusophone South Atlantic region.
References
Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press.
Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon
as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s
accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments of radical process. They
form a dynamic in and of themselves. They express the chaos and transition of
the moment but they are also and at the same time forces in the transformation
and transmutations of capitalism and world history, perhaps, with the
complications of the COVID19 pandemic, virtually an axial moment, a switch or
turning-point of crisis, as
Don Kalb has argued on FocaalBlog early in the pandemic (Kalb 2020).
This involves a re-consideration of what is
fast becoming the master narrative concerning Trump, with ideological
implications of its own. Trump is presented as a spectre of a fascist past
rather than a foretaste, a mediation into, the potential of an authoritarian
totalitarian future involving major transmutations in capitalism. What follows
concerning the Trump phenomenon is written with all this very much in
mind.
Our guess (a risky gamble in these times
when almost anything seems possible) is that Trump will fade. There are
doubtless many other political figures similar or worse who could take his
place. With the going of Trump so may his “movement”. What crystallized around
him was more an assemblage, a loose-knit heterogeneous, motely collection of
diverse persons and groups ranging from the extreme far right to the more
moderate, whose organizational cohesion may be more illusory than real. Not yet
a political ‘Party Trump’ it is as likely to melt into air and go the way of
most populist movements as it might congeal into a longer-lasting force of
opposition headed by Trump.
This is not to gainsay the shock of the
storming of the Capitol on the otherwise ritualistic day of the confirmation of
Biden’s victory that concludes the liminal transitional period conventional in
the US-American democratic cycle. Such a liminal space (Turner, 1969) is a
relative retreat and suspension of the state political order as the presidency
is renewed or changed. This is often a festive time given to all kinds of
political excess when the people vent their potency in the selection of those
who are to rule them. Trump encouraged and intensified the potential chaos of liminality
at its peak when, ideally, it should subside and political order be fully
restored. He aimed to disrupt this critical moment and to maintain his
uncertain presence as the Lord of Misrule, if not necessarily to effect a coup.
Named as “God’s
chaos candidate” by some evangelicals who supported him, Trump promoted,
even if unwittingly, a moment of extreme chaos that was all the more intense
for the liminal moment of its occurrence when the participants themselves blew
out of control.
Night of the World, Pandemonium at the Capitol
In the nightmare of the event, newscasts presented
visions of a fascist future filled with Fascist and Nazi images and other
commonly associated symbols. There was a strong sense of dialectical collapse
along the lines of Hegel’s “Night of the World” of demonic appearances when
forces in opposition dissipate against each other and lose their meaning. The
representatives of the nation cowered under their desks fitting gas masks while
those who would challenge them in festive mood and drunk with brief power put
their feet up on desks aping their masters and carried off the mementos and
spoils of their invasion. Exuberant chants of “this is our house” echoed down
the corridors of power.
Shades of the past paraded in the present,
foremost among them that of the enduring trauma of the rise of Nazi
Germany. What Sinclair Lewis had warned
in It Can’t Happen Here – a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of
the democratic world – anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s
apotheosis, seemed to be actually materializing. This accounts for the
excitement on the steps of the Capitol – “this is America 2021 y’all!!” Arlie
Hochschild captured the millenarian Nuremberg feel of his campaign rallies when
researching Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American
Right (Hochschild 2016), her excellent ethnography of the white far right
and their sympathisers in Louisiana, America’s poorest state and a Donald Trump
heartland. Hochschild recounts at a lecture to the Rosa
Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin a scene, reminiscent of the opening frames
of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, when Trump’s plane,
“Trump Force One”, appears through the clouds and, as if from heaven it
descends “down, down, down” to the waiting crowd; electrified in expectation of
the saviour’s endlessly repeated sermon of redemption of the deep resentment that
they felt for having been pushed aside from the promise of the American
Dream.
But here is the point: The immediate
reaction to the storming of the Capitol gave further confirmation to the real
and present danger of Trump’s fascist threat fuelled in the rumblings of class
war which Trump has inflamed and exploited. It is a liberal fear, mainly of the
Democrats but including some Republicans, who are the chief targets of Trump’s
attacks. His demonisation of elite liberal value (marked by accusations of
moral perversities aimed at unmasking the claims to virtue) is at one with his
condemnation of the liberalism of Federal political and social economic
policies which he presents as contributing to the abjection of mainly white US-American
working class and poor; to be seen in the rapidly increasing power of global
corporations, policies of economic globalization, the privileging of
minorities, refugees, recent immigrants etc.
Image 1: When surprises were minimal and manifest destiny kept on giving. The Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C., Nov. 26, 2012 (Foto: US Forest Service/Keith Riggs, accessed 8 Feb 2021)
It might be remembered at this point that
the violence of the Capitol invasion–the marked involvement of military
veterans, the carrying of weapons, baseball bats, the reports of pipe bombs–that
shocked so many, reflects the fact that all modern states are founded on
violence. This is particularly the case in the US where the US
Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in defence of
democratic rights. In an important sense the violence of those invading the
Capitol refracts back at the middle class and especially the ruling elite the
very violence that underpins the structure of their rule. If liberal virtue was
shocked by the events on January 6 it was also confronted with the violent
paradox deep in its democratic heart (see Palmer 2021). Thus, this paradox
slips into paroxysm at this critical moment in American political history.
The transitional figure of Trump feeds on
the prejudices of his intended constituencies and exploits an already
ill-formed class awareness building on ready commitments and vulnerabilities – the
well-rehearsed fascist and populist technique – creating indeed a false
consciousness (there is no other way to say it) that is not only destructive
but in the hands of the likes of Trump integral to intensifying the feelings of
impotence and the miseries that give Trump his relative popularity. Slavoj
Zizek says as much in what he describes as “Trump’s
GREATEST TREASON”.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator,’
was quick to counter the white supremacist, macho, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper and Three
Percenter elements highly visible in media newscasts with a Conan the Barbarian
performance. This was his take on the dominant brand of Make America Great
Again. (Really, all those along the political spectrum participate in MAGA – Democrat
Party badges and hats from the recent election read “Dump Trump Make
America Great Again”). He focussed on his own immigration away from his native
Austria and its Nazi associations to the liberated American world of his
success. For Schwarzenegger, the Capitol invasion and its vandalism equated to Kristallnacht.
Noam Chomsky likens the storming with Hitler’s
Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 observing that it effected a greater penetration
to the heart of power than did Hitler’s failed attempt. But Chomsky, with
characteristic acuity, adds that the fascist danger lies in the anti-democratic
class forces (including electoral and political manipulations on all sides)
that provide the fertile ground for fascism; forces that have acutely and early
been pinpointed by anthropologists (Holmes 2000, 2020; Kalb and Halmai 2011;
Kalb, forthcoming).
But the point must be taken further. New
class formations are in the making right now and they are being driven in the
explosive nature of technological revolution (see Smith
2020). This is something Marx himself was very much aware of and why he
wrote more than one hundred pages on the machine and the human in Capital. This
is also the concern of Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (2002) and the
continued focus of today’s accelerationists such as the Nick Srnicek (2017) on platform
capitalism.
Creative Destruction, the Transmutation in Capital and Corporate State Formation
The rise and fall of Trump (not discounting the
possibility that Humpty Dumpty might come together again, which is the fear of
the master narrative) may be understood as expressing a transition between
two moments of capitalism during which one formation morphs into another. Trump
is the embodiment, instrument, and anguish of this transition, a tragic figure
in a theatre of the absurd. Grand Guignol almost, but in Gothic American Horror
Story style. The accession of Biden is the apotheosis of the new in the
hopes of most; he is a vehicle for healing the divisions in the U.S. that Trump
brought to a head and are still very much present. But Biden’s rise has ominous
oppressive indications of its own.
The Trump events have all the hallmarks of
the crisis and rupture of transformation or, better, transmutation. The
millenarian spirit that Hochschild captures in her account is one born in the
capitalist ideology of the American Dream; fortified in the religious
fundamentalism of Trump’s many followers that revitalizes their hopes in that
American Dream in the face of abject failure. The rallies and the impassioned
actions of those invading the Capitol are filled with revitalizing energy.
Such millenarian explosions, distinct in
their own historical contexts, occur at many other points in global history. It
was apparent at the dawn of capitalism in Europe, at later moments of crisis
and redirection in capitalism up to the present – indeed at the inception of
the Nazi horror, and at points of the disruptive expansion of capital in the
western imperial/colonial thrust as in the Cargo movements of the Pacific (Cohn
1970, Lanternari 1960, Worsley 1970 (1959); Neveling
2014 for a link between Cargo Cults and neoliberal capitalism).
The rupture of transmutation in capital,
the crisis that the Trumpian progress manifests, is an instance of what Marx
and others have understood to be the creative/destruction dynamic of capital;
whereby it reproduces, renews, revitalizes its potency against contradictions
and limitations to its profit motive that capital generates within itself as
well as those thrown up against it in the very process of its own expansion and
transformation.
The circumstances underpinning the current
transmutation in capital relate to the revolutions in science and technology those
associated particularly with the digital age and advances in biotechnology).
The rapid development of capital (and especially that of the still dominant, if
declining, US-American form) was driven by the innovations in knowledge and
technology (something that Marx and many others admired in US-America). What
became known as the nation state (the dominant political form that nurtured
capital) and the class orders that were generated in capitalism and necessary
to it (not to mention the over-population and ecological disasters that grew in
capital’s wake) also constituted barriers and limitations to capital’s
growth.
The new technological revolutions are a
response to the limitations on capital emergent within its own processes.
Technological innovations enabled revolutions in production and consumption, creating
new markets and increasing consumption, reducing the need for human labour and
the resistances it brings with it, overcoming problems, and opening up
novel lines, of distribution; forcing the distress of unemployment (especially
among the erstwhile working class), creating impoverishment and uncertainties
reaching into once affluent middle classes as captured in the neologism ‘the
precariat’; shifting class alignments; redefining the nature and value of work,
of the working day, the expansion of zero hours and, as an overarching
manifestation, a sense of the return of a bygone era.
The current technological revolution is a key
factor in the extraordinary growth in the monopolizing strength of corporations
such as Google, Amazon or even Tencent. The dot.com organizations (the
flagships and spearheads of capitalist transformation with huge social transmutational
effect) have wealth that dwarfs many states and they are functioning in areas
once controlled by the state (from what used to be public services to the
current race to colonize space). Indeed the corporate world has effectively
invaded and taken over the operation of nation-states (Kapferer
2010; Kapferer
and Gold 2018).
This is most noteworthy in those state
orders influenced by histories of liberal social democracy, in Europe and
Australia for example, which tended to draw a sharp demarcation between public
interest and private enterprise. The nation-state and its apparatuses of
government and institutions for public benefit have been corporatized so much
so that in many cases government bureaucracies have not only had their
activities outsourced to private companies but also have adopted managerial
styles and a ruthlessness along the lines of business models. The corporatization
of the state has aligned it much more closely with dominant economic interests
in the private (now also public) sectors than before and enables a bypassing of
state regulation, even that which once sustained capitalist interest, but which
became an impediment to capitalist expansion.
These changes have wrought socio-economic
and political disruption and distress globally and most especially in the
Western hemisphere. This is not merely collateral damage. The revolution in
science and technology has been a key instrument in effecting social and
political changes via destruction, for the regenerative expansion of capital.
It is central to the re-imagination of capital in the opening of the twenty-first
century.
This is particularly so in the United States
whose socio-political order is historically one of corporate state formation which
accounts for its long-term global political economic domination. Some renewal
in leftist thought (e.g. with Bernie Sanders) is an index of the depth of distress
that is being experienced although the ideological and counteractive potency of
the American Dream fuelled especially in fundamentalist Christianity suppresses
such potential and contributes to the intensity and passion of the Trump
phenomenon. The ideological distinction of the Trump event aside, its dynamic
of populism is reflected throughout the globe (Kalb 2021)
One common feature of this is the rejection
of the political systems associated with nation state orders and, to a marked
extent the largely bipartite party systems vital in the discourses of control
and policy in nation states. Trumpism and other populist movements (in Europe
notably) complain of the alienation of the state and its proponents from
interests of the mass. The expansion of corporatization and the further
hollowing out of the state, the corruption of its public responsibilities by
corporate interests, is effectively what Trump was furthering in his
presidency. It is a potent dimension of the Trump paradox and a major irony of
the Capitol invasion that, for all the apparent fascist tendencies, it was the
spirit of reclaiming democracy (admittedly of the freebooting kind) in an
already highly corporatized establishment (subject to great corporate capitalist
interest) that Trump’s actions were directed to. An important figure in this
respect is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The tech
billionaire, early investor in Facebook and founder of PayPal, was an early
Trump supporter and named a part of Trump’s transition team in 2016. His book, Zero
to One, based on his lecture courses at Stanford University, argues for a
corporate-technocratic governance beyond older systems of government. (Thiel
2014).
From Panopticon to Coronopticon
COVID-19 has highlighted the social
devastation of the destructive/creative dynamic of capitalism’s transmutation (see
also Kalb
2020). The class and associated ethnic inequities have everywhere been
shown up and probably intensified by a pandemic that is starting to equal, if
not surpass, the depressing and devastating effect of two world wars. Like them
it is clearing ground for capitalist exploitative expansion – something like
Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).
Under the shadow of the virus, labour
demands are being rationalized, the cutting back of employment and its benefits
legitimated, governments are pumping capital into the economies in a way that
protects consumption in an environment where there is declining occupational
opportunity and income. The idea of the universal basic income is seriously
discussed. Its implementation would offset some of the contradictions in a
transformation of capitalism that is reducing our dependence on labour and endangering
consumption through automation and digitalization. While the poor are getting
poorer the rich are getting richer; most notably those heading the
revolutionary technologies of the digital age and biotechnology, with the
competitive race to secure viable vaccines against the virus one example for
the latter sector’s power.
There is a strange synchronicity linking
the pandemic with the dynamic of capitalism’s transmutational corporatization
of the state. The virus reproduces and spreads in a not dissimilar dynamic.
Indeed, COVID 19 in some ecological understandings is the product of the
acceleration of globalization effected in those processes of capitalism’s
transmutation associated with corporate expansion and the corporatization of
the nation state. As a crossover from animal to human bodies the virus is one
manifestation of increased human population pressure on wild animal territory,
the closer intermeshing of animal and human terrain. The scale
of the pandemic is, of course, a direct consequence of the time space
contraction and intensity
of the networked interconnections of globalization.
State surveillance has intensified as a
by-product of combatting COVID which is also its legitimation, with digitalization
as the major surveillance instrument. The digital penetration into every nook
and cranny of social life (see Zuboff2019, and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma),
is interwoven with the commodification of the social and personal for profit – economizing
individuals calculating the costs and benefits of their social ‘interactions’
(the YouTube or Kuaishou ‘influencer,’ the hype TED talker as Foucault’s
entrepreneurial self, cut, pasted, uploaded and remixed).
The management of Covid-19, demanding
social isolation and the disruption of ordinary social life, has exponentially increased
the role of the digital as the primary mediator of the social and a commanding
force in its very constitution. Covid-19 has been revealed as a kind of social
particle accelerator. As such, and ever more exclusively so, the real of the
social, is being re-imagined, re-engineered and re-mastered as a digital-social,
a ‘Digisoc’ or ‘Minisoc,’ constrained and produced within algorithmically
preset parameters. Here is Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show,
radically updated. And, as with Truman, the space of freedom is also and at the
same time experienced as a space of unfreedom.
This manifests in the deep ambivalence many
feel about the new technologies they daily live with and through. The digitized
social is often presented as a new agora, a liberating ‘space’ in which new, progressive
ideas and directions are enabled, operationalized and indeed optimized. The
internet has become a site of multiple struggles in which class forces and new
potentials for social difference and proliferating identity-claims are continually
emerging. The freedom of the internet has provided exciting opportunities for
many. Such freedom also and at the same time contributes to conspiracy
imaginations on all sides. As has been made clear in the two elections
featuring Trump, the superpower of corporations like Google and Facebook
threatens to install a domain of hyper-control. Digital walls and electronic
fences are appearing everywhere in the age of the global ‘splinternet.’
The hegemonic and totalizing potential for
the ruling bodies of the corporatizing state who control the digital is as
never before. This is so not just in the global scale of the network reach but
in the heightened degree to which controlling bodies can form the ground of the
social, radically remodel, engineer and design reality in accordance with
dominant interests, and where motivated shut out that which threatens their
order. The awareness of this has driven the fury of censorship and
self-censorship on all sides – Trump’s threatened TikTok ban becomes Twitter’s
actual Trump ban.
Back in Some Form: From 1984 into a Brave New World
Trump and Trumpism are moments in the
transitional, transmutational process of capitalism outlined above and of the
formation of new social and political orders. Echoing the past, they express its
transmutation (and its agonies) rather than repeat it. Trump and Trumpism
manifest the contradictions of such processes, agents and agencies for the
transmutations in the social and political circumstances of life that are in
train, themselves forces in the bringing forth of a future that, in some
aspects, is already being lived.
Trump himself can be described as an
“in-betweener”, a bridge into the new realities, both a force in their
realization and a victim. His manner and style, the brutal no holds barred
amorality is familiar from the captains of industry and robber barons of an
earlier age, who built capitalist America and crushed working-class resistance
by all means, more foul than fair. Trump maintains the style but in reverse
redemptive mode. In his shape-shift he presents as supporter of the working
classes not their nemesis as did his forerunners.
However, his authoritarian business manner,
of The Apprentice’s“you’re
fired” fame, matches well the managerialism of the present. He is an
exemplar of contemporary venture capitalism and most especially of profit from
non-industrial production (often anti production) gained from real estate,
property transfer, asset stripping, and the expanding gaming and gambling
industries (their importance as symptoms of the crises of transformation in
capital) from which some of Trump’s key supporters come.
Trump’s reactive anti-immigrant nationalism
and “Make America Great Again” rhetoric not only appeals to the white right but
is an engagement of past rhetoric to support new political and economic
realities. Trump’s economic war with China stressed re-industrialization but it
was also concerned with counteracting China’s technological ascendancy,
especially in the realm of the digital, a major contradiction born of the
current globalizing transmutation in capitalism involving transfers of
innovatory knowledge.
Trump anticipated the risk to his
presidential re-election. It manifested the dilemmas of his in-betweenness. His
inaction with regard to the pandemic was consistent with the anti “Big
Government” policies of many Republicans and the US-American right who cherish QAnon
conspiracy theories as much as they want to reduce government interference and
modify regulation in capitalist process, a strong emphasis in current
transitions and transformations of the state and of capital.
Trump’s cry that the election was being
stolen was excited in the circumstances of the pandemic. His attack on postal votes
related to the fact that the pandemic gave the postal vote a hitherto
unprecedented role in the election’s outcome by by-passing and neutralising the
millenarian populist potency of his mass rallies already reduced in numbers by
fear. Trump sensed that the COVID-inspired move to ‘working from home’ and ‘voting
from home’ would challenge, fence in and fence out his base of support.
Trump has always taken advantage of the
digital age, his use of Twitter and Facebook the marked feature of his style of
rule. His practices looked forward to the politics of the future ever
increasingly bounded and conditioned in societies of the image. Following the
events at the Capitol, Trump’s own Custer’s Last Stand to allay his
fate, his cyberspace and internet accounts were switched off. He has been
cancelled by the new digitally authoritarian corporate powers (who arguably
benefitted the most from the Trump era and profited greatly under pandemic
conditions) who are behind the growing new society of the image, in which he
was a past-master and within which he had in the main established his identity.
(Kapferer
R, 2016)
The overriding image of the Capitol
invasion and carried across most networks is that of the occupation of the
heart of American democracy by those who would threaten its ideals. The media have
concentrated on what was the dominating presence of the extremist macho white US-American
far right violently parading symbols of a racist past combined with clear
references to the not-so-distant memories of fascism and Nazism. There
were others there more moderate in opinion and representative of other class
fractions, if still mostly white, whose presence does not reduce the fear
of fascism, possibly as in Nazi Germany when what seemed to be small groups of
extremists hijacked power (and the events of the Capitol evokes such memory) to
unleash the horrors to follow. Something similar could be said for what
happened in the Soviet Union leading to Stalinism. These were the worlds of
George Orwell’s 1984, in which some of the major ideals of the time flipped in
their tragic negation. Such events were very much emergent in realities of the
nation-state, its imperialist wars and the class forces of that particular
historical moment in the history of capitalism and the formations of its social
and political orders. There is no statement here that this could not happen
again.
What we are saying is this: a different
authoritarian and oppressive possibility may be taking shape – not of the
fascist past but of the future. This is a future that Trump was mediating but
which may be coming into realization, despite the great hope to the contrary,
in the accession of President Biden. Perhaps this prospect can be seen as more
akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World born in the current transmutations
of capital (and its agonies of class) and in the circumstances of the radical technological
revolutions of the digital era, involving the apotheosis of the corporatisation
of the state, the corporate state emerging out of the ruins of the nation
state.
Aldous Huxley depicted a world centred on production
and efficiency, a bio technologically conditioned global system of perfect
rational, optimised order. The class conflicts of the past are overcome here; everyone
accepts their predetermined place. It is a post-human reality in which the
foundation of human beings in their biology and passions is transcended. It is
a somatised, artificially intelligent world of the image and promiscuity. Indeed,
the American Dream. Those who do not fit or who resist are fenced out. Time and
space are being reconfigured, incurving around the individual and
‘personalised.’
Biden’s inauguration for all its upbeat ceremonial spirit had some
intimation of such a future, taking into full account the security constraints
of its moment: to protect against the murderous unchecked rampage of the virus
and the threat of the attack of right-wing militias. The stress on this, it may
be noted, had an ideological function to distance what was about to come into
being from, for example, the definitely more visceral world of Trump and
thoroughly evident in the invasion of the Capitol – what Biden in his inauguration speech called an “uncivil war.”
The scene of the perfectly scripted inauguration was
virtually devoid of people. Apart from the dignitaries and all-important
celebrities, the highly selected order of the society of the corporate-state. Where
the general populace would normally crowd, was an emptiness filled with flags
and protected by troops, more than currently are stationed in Afghanistan.
Those who might disrupt, Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘resistant
savages,’ were fenced out. It was a totalizing and constructed digital media
image presenting a reality of control, harmony, and absolute surveillance.
We claim that something like Trump and the
events surrounding him would have happened regardless of the specific phenomena
we have focussed on here. The events Trump are a moment, perhaps among the most
intense, in the transitional transmutation of the history of capitalism and the
socio-economic and political orders which build and change around it. The
apparent chaos indicates a major axial moment in world history – a chaos driven
in the emergence of a cybernetic techno-capitalist apparatus on a global scale.
What might be augured in the Biden accession is already taking vastly different
shape in China and elsewhere around the globe. New and diverse formations of
totalitarian authoritarianism are emerging. The Trump phenomenon is crucial for
an understanding of some of the potentials of a future that we are all very
much within and that an overconcentration on the parallels with the past may
too easily obscure.
Bruce Kapferer is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor Emeritus at Bergen University, Professorial Fellow UCL, Fellow Cairns Institute, and the Director of the ERC Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen.
Roland Kapferer is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Deakin University, a filmmaker and a musician. He does research on cybertechnologies.
Cite as: Kapferer, Bruce, and Roland Kapferer. 2021. “The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities.” FocaalBlog, 2 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/02/bruce-kapferer-roland-kapferer-the-trump-saga-and-americas-uncivil-war-new-totalitarian-authoritarian-possibilities/
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
As a result of welfare reform and continuing budget cuts, social service agencies in the UK have struggled to make ends meet and match the still-growing demand on their services. Local councils and the voluntary sector have both suffered cuts. The former are increasingly looking to the voluntary sector for help, while the latter used to rely heavily on grants from statutory bodies and suffers from increased funding restrictions. In the context of welfare reform, a model of active citizenship and participation has emerged. This model focuses on decreasing citizen dependence on welfare and social services while encouraging the ‘responsibilisation’ of citizens (Verhoeven & Tonkens, 2013). This policy agenda, supported by successive UK governments, has painted a picture of the ‘active citizen’ as a solution and improvement to the budget cuts in the voluntary sector. Citizens are encouraged to ‘take more responsibility’ instead of ‘depending on remote and impersonal bureaucracies’. As part of this responsibilisation, volunteers have taken center stage and their positive impact on communities is emphasized and celebrated (Schinkel & Van Houdt, 2010). Volunteers play an increasingly crucial role in welfare provision and the welfare system relies heavily on their work.
The extent of
this reliance became clear during my fieldwork in Manchester in 2018 – 2019. I
conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Manchester for 16 months, during which I
worked with several advice centers in Greater Manchester. In November 2018, I
attended a ‘Volunteer Day’ organized by the advice center I had been
volunteering at for the past year. This annual event celebrates volunteers and
gives paid staff and management a chance to thank volunteers for their work and
commitment. The day was opened by a speech from Jack Puller, member of the
charity Manchester Alliance for Community Care (MACC), who ‘supports and
encourages local people to be active citizens through volunteering and other
forms of participation’. His speech focused on impact and how to measure
it. In numbers, he states that more than 110,000 people in Manchester
volunteer, putting in a total of 278,000 hours of work each week, and having a
total worth of 252 million pounds. Puller also mentioned that impact cannot be
measured in numbers alone. Volunteers are vital to social services, arguing
that they reflect the spirit of Manchester and are crucial to the existence of
places like the advice center.
While this still presents a positive image of the impact of volunteering, the reality is that many advice centers can no longer survive without volunteers and there is a constant need for more volunteers to fill the gaps in advice services. Advice centers, along with other social services, have suffered from a ‘double squeeze’: a withdrawal of public services has led to an increase in demand, while they simultaneously have to work with shrinking budgets (Evans, 2017). As a result, many depend on the work of volunteers more than before and even then, many fail to meet the demand and have to send people looking for their help away on a daily basis, as I experienced during fieldwork. Voluntarism in British welfare provision is thus not as straightforward and romantic as Puller depicted it, and both volunteers and paid advisers often struggle to navigate their workload and the relationship between them. The double squeeze on advice centers has not only made them more dependent on volunteers but has also changed the role of volunteers, who have become central more in the advice centers. In this contribution, I further analyze how the dependence on volunteers has changed their role within advice centers, showing how this affects the relationships between paid advisers and volunteers and analyzing how narratives of active citizenship often translate into different realities. Specifically, I lay bare how a politics of austerity has resulted in a paradoxical relationship with volunteers, where they are perceived as both a blessing and a burden.
Many social services, including advice centers, have aimed to bridge the growing gap between demand and capacity by relying more heavily on the work of volunteers, with some advice centers I worked with even being completely volunteer-run. This gap is usually characterized as a gap in more professional work, where paid advisers can no longer cover all their tasks due to lack of time and resources. As a result, the growing reliance on volunteers in the provision of social services is also characterized by the increasingly professional nature of the work volunteers do. As Verhoeven and Bochove note, volunteers are now expected to do more than provide complimentary work to the work paid advisers do, they are increasingly expected to take over parts of the paid advisers’ responsibilities, referred to as the ‘volunteer responsibilisation’ (Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). However, my fieldwork showed that many volunteers are underprepared when they first start their work and are not able to carry out those responsibilities, which complicates the working dynamics at the center. At an advice center in the North of Manchester, where about two thirds of staff members are volunteers, all prospective volunteers must attend a training program to prepare them for volunteer responsibilities. I volunteered here as well and attended the 9-week training program, with one training day a week. The training aimed to prepare volunteers for both the practical and emotional labor ahead of them, but often proved insufficient once volunteers started their voluntary activities at the advice center. The large majority of volunteers felt underprepared for the complexities and intensities of advice work. For example, a former volunteer named Susan told me that she enjoyed helping clients with more straightforward form-filling, but struggled with more complex cases. For her, it resulted in high levels of anxiety and guilt, to the extent that she eventually stopped volunteering as an adviser. ‘It felt like I was just sitting there with my hands cut off, watching someone in front of me die’, she told me.
Figure 1: Volunteers during their weekly training on the welfare system and advice sector (photo: Janne Heederik, 2018)
Welfare advisers often have to deal with difficult and complex situations, with their clients struggling to make ends meet and often coming to the advice center feeling desperate and upset. It is the task of advisers to guide their clients through the welfare system, approach authorities on their behalf, and manage benefit outcomes to their best ability. However, the welfare system has grown increasingly complex, and advisers often have to engage in a ‘complex web of relations’ to assist their client (Forbess & James, 2014:80). For volunteers like Susan, the practical skills and emotional labor required to do good advice work, often feel like too big a responsibility to carry. Similarly, during my time as a volunteer at this advice center, I had to help clients who were about to be evicted, clients who had lost all their income, clients who had escaped abusive relationships, and clients who were depressed and sometimes even suicidal. While the training program provides basic information on how the welfare system operates and how advisers navigate it, these intricacies of advice-giving are too complex to teach in a course. Many volunteers, like Susan, are in need of more guidance, but more often than not volunteers are thrown into the deep-end and have to cover tasks previously done by professionals. Unlike their paid colleagues, however, they have to do without the financial or practical support: they do not receive monetary pay, nor do they receive the proper training to teach them how to deal with the complex client cases and the emotional labor that comes with it. In addition, the high demand and the lack of space, time, and resources, means that there is little time to process such events. Volunteers I spoke to often felt alone in dealing with some of the hardship they were faced with when seeing clients. One volunteer described how he often felt inadequate and how this resulted in him researching ongoing developments and policy changes at home:
I feel like I am always at the limits of my knowledge, and I already know a lot more than the average person. Volunteers like me have to put in a lot of time. You don’t just do your hours here. I often have to research stuff at home too.
Whilst active citizenship is thus envisioned as an enriching and fulfilling experience, for many volunteers this is only part of the story. The work they take on is more intense and demanding then initially anticipated and some volunteers struggle with the pressure they feel to respond to the demand adequately. These high expectations of volunteer work and the contradictory lack of training and preparation imply that volunteers can no longer be seen as amateurs supporting social services, but as professionals who deliver unpaid yet essential work (Coule & Bennett, 2018; Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). It is an attempt for voluntarism to strengthen the welfare system despite reform and budget cuts, but it falls short in its assumption that welfare advice can be done by anyone at any time.
Advice centers thus need volunteers to fill certain gaps in their work capacity, but at the same time struggle with the knowledge that volunteers often cannot fill these gaps with the same level of professionalism as paid advisers. Volunteers often turn to paid advisers for both practical and emotional support. Advisers might have to jump in or even take over appointments from volunteers who are unable to help their clients sufficiently. The manager of one of the advice centers expressed her concern regarding the center’s reliance on volunteers, stating it worried her that ‘this type of work is done by volunteers. Such overly complicated issues like almost all benefit cases rely on volunteers’. She worried for the clients, who might not get the right help if volunteers tried to solve client’s cases on their own, but was equally worried about volunteers and whether they were able to cope. Furthermore, often having to rely on assistance from paid advisers, the use of volunteers within advice centers often leads to an increase in workload for paid advisers. This leads to a paradoxical situation, where advisers must rely on volunteers for the survival of the advice center, but at the same time experience an increase in their workload as many volunteers need guidance and training.
This paradox is
further complicated by the fact that relying on volunteers always comes with
certain levels of insecurity as volunteers are not bound to contracts and
employment conditions like paid advisers are. The turnover of volunteers was
high at all the advice centers I visited, with volunteers staying anywhere
between weeks and months, but rarely longer than a year. Additionally, coming
from a wide variety of backgrounds, volunteers often had a wide range of skills
and abilities, meaning not every volunteer could handle the same tasks and paid
advisers spent a lot of time figuring out what volunteer would cover which
task.
For permanent
staff and management, relying on volunteers is thus necessary for the survival
of the advice center, but never easy. And it can at times be burdensome. Volunteers
cannot fulfill certain roles and end up sitting around and doing nothing, while
at the same time there is never enough staff to do everything that needs doing.
As a result, staff end up having to spend more time helping volunteers then
they might gain form their presence. This situation forces paid advisers to
engage in ‘volunteer management’ (Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). Volunteer management
involves the dividing of tasks among volunteers according to their skills and
abilities, keeping track of who will be present on what day and making sure
volunteers are spread out evenly across the week, checking in with volunteers
to make sure they can cope with the demand and emotional labor of their work,
and assisting volunteers in their work whenever necessary.
In addition, volunteer management also impacts the relationship between volunteers and advisers. Dividing tasks among volunteers often resulted in an unequal distribution of tasks, where more highly educated or experienced volunteers would be given many and more complex tasks, whereas other volunteers struggled to get any tasks at all. During a volunteer meeting at one of the advice centers, volunteers had the chance to raise any questions or issues they had. One volunteer mentioned an incident where she had been asked to see a client, but she did not feel comfortable taking on the tasks as she felt unqualified to deal with the complexity of the client’s case. Another volunteer had offered to step in, but the adviser assigning the task would not listen. ‘I was essentially told to just get on with it’, the volunteer said, adding that it had made her feel very uncomfortable and hesitant to ask the adviser for any tasks in the future. Volunteers who were given more complex tasks mentioned that they often felt they were not prepared for the difficulties of these cases, and struggled to deal with them emotionally and practically. On the other hand, volunteers who struggled to stay busy, mentioned that they were bored, could not develop their skills, and felt they could not help as much as they had wanted to. The paradox of volunteers being both a blessing and a burden resulted in difficulties for paid advisers and volunteers and affected their relationship. However, despite having tensions in the workplace, where advisers sometimes feel volunteers just add to their workload and volunteers feel left to their own devices, these tensions did not seem to translate into frustration with one another. Volunteers were always acutely aware of the workload that paid advisers had to carry and understood that they simply lacked time to train volunteers. Furthermore, whilst being aware that as volunteers they sometimes added to this workload, volunteers said they felt respected and accepted by their paid colleagues. Advisers were always grateful and positive about the volunteers, highly aware of the advice center’s dependence on their work: ‘We would be closing our doors without them’, one adviser said. Similarly, the manager of the advice center stated: ‘Volunteers have played more and more of a key role, they are at the front of our service’.
However, the paradox of the volunteer as a blessing and a burden remains, and many advisers felt frustrated with their working conditions. Rather than resulting in frustration towards volunteers, this frustration was predominantly aimed at the government, and there was a strong sentiment that the government had failed the voluntary sector while at the same time having offloaded its responsibility onto citizens under the banner of active citizenship. The key issue advisers pointed to was almost always funding. As one adviser stated:
If they want this [advice work] to be free, they need to provide the proper funding […] Look at us, advisers can’t help you properly because they are busy with five other cases, volunteers are taking on responsibilities they shouldn’t be, and we are all overworked. And it’s the government that is to blame.
These tensions between advisers and volunteers are therefore more than workplace quarrels; they are political. They reflect the everyday reality on the frontlines of a policy agenda of budget cuts and ‘citizen activation’. The responsibilisation of voluntary work is therefore problematic not just in the heaviness of the responsibilities that volunteers have to carry and its effect on their relationship with advisers, it also lays bare the problematic nature of a policy agenda that aims to offload government responsibilities onto the voluntary sector and citizens, without providing them with the necessary financial assistance and substantive support. The experiences of paid advisers and volunteers tell a clear story: advice services – among many other social services in the UK – are in crisis, but as important as volunteers are, it should not be their role to rescue these services. However, the outcry for change is still predominantly focused on those they are trying to help: they protest and advocate for the rights of welfare claimants, and in the process forget to advocate for their own rights. Individual voluntary commitment can be a blessing, but the overall use of voluntarism as a solution to budget cuts and welfare reform is a burden.
Janne Heederik is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University and a member of a ERC-funded research project on participatory urban governance. Based on ethnographic research in Manchester, UK, her research explores welfare, poverty, and brokerage in contemporary Britain.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coule, T., & Bennett, E. (2018). State-Voluntary
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Cite as: Heederik, Janne. 2020. “The Voluntarisation of Welfare in Manchester: A Blessing and a Burden.” FocaalBlog, 2 October. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/10/02/janne-heederik-the-voluntarisation-of-welfare-in-manchester-a-blessing-and-a-burden/
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
In the Netherlands from 2015 onwards, the ‘spectacle’ (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015) of people arriving into Europe seeking refuge was channeled by vast media attention and political debate. These events triggered a vast response of bottom-up initiatives in the Netherlands wanting to support refugee status holders. In this contribution, I focus on such newly emerged initiatives that seek to support refugee status holders in Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the Netherlands. It discusses the struggles that the initiators of these initiatives face, who more often than not have a refugee background themselves. It shows how these struggles originate from the ambiguous categorizations of group-making that experimental policies presuppose in the field of refugee reception and support in urban spaces today.
I focus on initiatives that are not established yet, but are still in the process of becoming. By studying initiatives that are still fine-tuning their focus, grappling for funds, searching for volunteers, seeking collaborations with others et cetera, I had an insight in the constitutive and generative elements of the infrastructure of refugee reception and support.
During a 12-month ethnographic fieldwork period in Rotterdam in which I studied such initiatives, I followed several aspiring initiatives in their efforts to establish partnerships with other organizations. When the community organizers of these initiatives would meet with people who know about funding circuits, discuss their project proposals with the municipality, pitch their plan in network sessions, organize events to acquire volunteers and so on, I joined them. In doing so, moments of breakdown (Larkin 2013) were particularly insightful; when my research participants hoped for or anticipated something that did not arrive, I learned about who may do what, where and how.
Rotterdam is an illuminating case to study grassroots initiatives in the field of refugee reception and support. It is considered ‘policy laboratory’ (cf. Van Houdt and Schinkel 2019) and is celebrated for its allegedly innovative urban and social policies, including in relation to migrant integration. Rotterdam cherishes its alleged hands-on mentality – a mentality captured by the popular slogan ‘actions speak louder than words’. Contrasting with Rotterdam’s self-image as experimental and bold, the city has the highest number of low-income households in the Netherlands. Another central force in the city is Livable Rotterdam [‘Leefbaar Rotterdam’], a rightwing party with populist traits and the highest share of votes in local elections. Their policies focus on so-called immigrant assimilation and are explicitly anti-immigration – which translates into policy frameworks that the resident initiatives I study here are affected by and provides context to the fierce anti-immigrant protests in the city in 2015.
Intersecting struggles
Between 2016 and 2020, the so-called Rotterdam Approach for Status Holders explicitly reached beyond the integration objectives articulated by the national government. For example, in Rotterdam, the City Council expects refugee status holders to pass the civic integration exams one year earlier than usually required. In addition, through the ‘Time Obligation’ measure [dagdeleneis], the City Council expects refugee status holders to be ‘active in society for at least four days a week or more with education, work, or voluntary work’. This measure is part of the so-called ‘Participation Act’, which applies to everybody in receipt of benefits. Although a policy evaluation pointed out that only 47 per cent of the status holders in Rotterdam was indeed ‘active’, the most recent (2019-2022) Rotterdam Approach to Status Holders largely continues the existing approach. As a consequence, the refugee status holders that I worked with struggle to live up to the demand to integrate fast, struggle to find their way in the incomprehensive field of initiatives, and fear to be unsuccessful in managing their new lives.
Resident initiatives that seek to support status holders struggle too – although on first sight, Rotterdam seems the place to be for resident initiatives. The Rotterdam Approach for Status Holders states that, in ‘coordinating additional activities’ for accepted asylum seekers, it ‘smartly uses […] private initiatives for refugees and volunteer work,’ thus explicitly opening up the floor for participatory initiatives to play a role. The document claims to ‘believe in the added value of civil society,’ to recognize ‘that creative and innovative initiatives from volunteer organizations give new energy and help integration,’ and that it ‘encourages such initiatives wholeheartedly.’ It thereby responds to recommendations from The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) to mobilize to ‘society’ and ‘volunteer projects’ in ‘speeding up integration’, as well as to the general appeal to ‘active citizenship’.
In practice, however, funds are drying up. In 2014, the city administration agreed to ‘stop irrelevant subsidies in the field of diversity and emancipation,’ for ‘tax payers’ money gets lost’ and ‘subsidizing activities is not a goal in itself’. This shift away from subsidized activities is explicitly mentioned in a recent policy document regarding support to refugee status holders: ‘only a small part of the budget remains available for subsidies for small-scale, innovative initiatives from society,’ the document points out. As such, the initiatives I worked with find themselves faced with competitive funding schemes; they fear being excluded from subsidies and collaborations, while trying their best to build an image of professional legitimacy.
Opaque group-making
The different forms of struggle identified thus far can also come to intersect, as illustrated in the case of Aida. Aida received a refugee status several years ago, is in receipt of social benefits, and is in the process of setting up an initiative to help Eritrean status holders with their paper work. However, she is afraid she will not be able to get support from the City Council. This is so because the abolishment of the so-called ‘target group policy’ in Rotterdam prescribes that policies should target the population of Rotterdam in general, and not have specific interventions that assume ethno-racial differences (such as people with an Eritrean nationality). Although the Netherlands has a strong tradition of implementing targeted policies, the shift from group-specific policies to generic policies has been a political priority since at least the 2000s (Scholten and Van Breugel 2018). As a result, there is evidence of a declining consciousness of migrant integration concerns, because generic policies often fail to incorporate immigrant integration priorities in the ‘mainstream’ (idem).
For Rotterdam, Dekker and Van Breugel have deconstructed the move from target group policies towards generic policies. They identify a ‘continuous act of balancing between generic and specific policies’ (Dekker and Van Breugel 2019, 128) that at one time implements targeted policies for migrants and at another time subsumes migrant interest under generic policies. These interchanging approaches to group-making in Rotterdam now seem to have reached an equilibrium in which generic policies are the norm. Regarding the support of civil society organizations that seek to assist refugee status holders, the municipality decided to no longer support ‘mono-ethnic and/or mono-religious activities’ to the extent that initiatives ‘will not be financed, unless there are substantive reasons to do otherwise’ because activities should be ‘focused on participation and integration.’ In another policy document, the city’s discouragement of such activities is explicitly linked with Rotterdam’s earlier-mentioned self-image as ‘innovative city’: in ‘giving room to new innovative organizations and ideas,’ the City Council explicitly breaks with ‘whatever is done in the past’.
Yet despite the fact that Rotterdam seem to have reached an equilibrium in which generic policies are the norm, the city publishes annual reports on the achievements of ‘people with a migration background’ that fly in the face of any ‘generic’ policy assumption. Moreover, to my research participants, the ‘group policies’ are elusive and subject to change. For example, Rotterdam’s ‘Somali-resolution’ in 2015 has resulted in the formal recognition of people of Somali descent as ‘group’ and led to the subsequent availability of subsidies to community organizers that sought to assist this ‘group’. And considering recent publications about ‘the Eritrean group’ – such as this and this and this one – my research participants now expect the same thing to happen to people from Eritrean descent as ‘group’.
Exactly because of this instability and opacity with regards to group-making, community organizers such as Aida are striking out blindly with regards to what ‘groups’ can be identified without risking eligibility to municipal funding.
What adds to Aida’s confusion, is that different municipal departments work through different logics. The department that is responsible for procurements in the field of refugee receptionand support (Work and Income) has different expectations from initiatives than the department that is responsible for subsidies (Social Support). The former department is now experimenting with so-called ‘customer profiles’. As an example of such profiles the policy advisor mentions ‘the single mother with three kids’ and adds that ‘customer profiles are a good way to offer tailor-made solutions without working with target groups.’ Customer profiles thus are meant to ‘objectively’ describe ‘groups’ of city dwellers without assuming ethno-racial differences, they make use of stereotypes such as ‘the single mother with three kids’ – a figure that appears as ‘the inversion of morality and family values par excellence’ (Koch 2015). To Aida, it is unclear to what extent these customer profiles are something that concern her and her endeavors; although she now applies for subsidies, she hopes for her activities to be included in the procurement structure some time. Again, she gropes along in the dark.
Eclectic initiatives
As a result of her insecurity about what constellations of people are accepted as a target group, Aida has started to organize dinner parties for long-term Rotterdammers with little money, alongside offering administrative support to Eritrean refugee status holders. She does so because she is scared that if the municipality found out that she only offers support to Eritreans – which she in fact does, with a few exceptions – she would be accused of catering only for one ‘target group’ and as such miss out on funding and collaborations.
These dinner parties however create awkward moments, because the long-term Rotterdammers – who are all white – usually sit on separate tables to black Eritrean people. It is not that Aida has intentionally designed the dinner-setting as such; it is rather that she does not know how to deal with the situation. Recently, the initiative of Aida was declined funding again. In the refusal letter said that ‘there are good reasons to assume that the subsidy would not (or not sufficiently) be spent on (or contribute to) the (policy) objective for which the subsidy is meant.’ In a subsequent meeting with a policy advisor at the town hall, it was specified that Aida’s initiative was considered ‘too broad’. Never mind that very reason the constellation of beneficiaries is indeed quite diverse is that Aida is scared to be accused of focusing on one group in the first place.
Image 1: Right-wing protest in Rotterdam (Banner on the right says: ‘Preserve Dutch Culture Traditions Norms and Values’; Photographer: Lieke van der Veer, 2018)
Reception brokers
Because it is so difficult for Aida and other initiatives to navigate the municipal frameworks, she has asked the help of Jozefien. Jozefien is a woman who has co-founded the platform called You Are Welcome. She once introduced herself as ‘from a little village in the Netherlands’ yet added that ‘I feel more like a Middle-Eastern person, I think.’ You Are Welcome was established to strengthen bottom-up initiatives that engage with refugee status holders, and to spread a positive message on integration. The platform was launched in 2015, explicitly in response to violent protests that broke out during an information meeting about the construction of the reception center.
What is problematic, however, is that some of the initiatives that Jozefien helps, dislike one another. In particular, Aida really dislikes Luciano, the founder of another aspiring initiative for Eritreans, who is born in Rotterdam in a family of refugee parents. Aida is upset because she fears that Luciano is trying to take clients from her. Aida is hurt, she says, because she feels that Luciano is a smooth-talker, that he smiles arrogantly at her on the street, and that, given that Luciano has more contact with city administrators, he forces Aida into the shadows.
For Jozefien, although she tries to equally promote both initiatives, it is difficult to deal with the tension between the two. It also has ramifications for her own relationships with Aida and Luciano. Especially for Aida, the competition she experiences with Luciano makes her deeply distrust Jozefien. One afternoon, Aida complained to me that ‘so often she [Jozefien] is at Luciano’s. But she doesn’t come to us! And she has taken him to the councilor [‘wethouder’]! She has arranged an appointment for Luciano with the councilor! I asked Luciano if I could join. But Luciano said: “no”.’ […] And she [Jozefien] has never even come to our Friday dinners! She only came once, to take a picture, and then she left again. From the very beginning, I didn’t feel welcome at You Are Welcome.’
Discussion: solidarity, humanitarianism and neoliberalisation
Recent ethnographic work contrasts solidarity with humanitarianism and juxtaposes emic accounts that frame solidarity as horizontal, anti-hierarchical, and as an emphasis on similarities between people with the viewpoints of professional humanitarian NGOs (see e.g. Cabot 2014). In Rotterdam, because grassroots initiatives generally turn to the municipality for funding and collaboration and feel pressured to professionalize, the distinction between solidarity and humanitarianism is remarkably fuzzy. The community organizers of refugee support initiatives ‘yearn for’ the state (Jansen 2015) to formally recognize their initiative through a tendering contract and compete to perform professionalism. They seek to use licensed software to prove impact, assimilate to municipal buzzwords, match funding calendars, formalize their organizational form, and forge lucrative partnerships.
These emerging forms of humanitarian volunteering (Youkhana and Sutter 2017; cf. Rozakou 2017) summon a complex assemblage of forms of humanitarian reason, forms of authority and technologies of government (Fassin 2007). Because grassroots initiatives seek to incorporate policy objectives (cf. Van Dam et al. 2014), are subject to mechanisms of raising funds that are part of the technologies of government (Fassin 2007, 151), and thereby gamble on which ‘target groups’ the municipality will acknowledge, they are shaped by these forms of authority and technologies of government. The case of Aida is an example of how refugee support has become intertwined with control mechanisms that are part of experimental municipal policies.
To Aida as well as to the brokers she turns to for advice, is unclear which ‘groups’ may be identified and which not. A lot of ‘information’ in this regard is distorted and comes from hear-say. Although the interchanging approaches to group-making in Rotterdam now seem to have reached an equilibrium in which generic policies are the norm, this equilibrium is unstable, as reports about specific ethnic groups have proven to result in the recognition of these groups and the subsequent availability of subsidies. Moreover, different municipal departments – that deal with subsidies and competitive tendering contracts respectively – work in accordance with different logics, yet is it unclear where one logic begins and the other one ends.
This opacity of group-making policies and related funding schemes gives rise to fierce competition and distrust between initiatives, which has fueled divisions within the refugee solidarity movement. In the grappling race for funds between (aspiring) initiatives which give in to the criteria for competitive success, neoliberal market logics and humanitarianization become further entwined. Community organizers seek to act as successful entrepreneurs – by reaching targets, increasing numbers, seizing volunteers, and laying hold of the target group. In doing so, they may present their core issues as side affairs and vice versa.
This contribution shows that not only beneficiaries suffer from the contemporary mechanisms that mix care and control; some of the aspiring community organizers with a refugee background find themselves in a precarious position as well. Underneath the seemingly universalizing pretense of generic policies, ambivalent practices of institutional selectiveness exclude vulnerable community organizers and the initiatives they are trying to launch. The inequalities that these exclusions are premised on are produced as well as obscured by the mantra of generic policies.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).
Lieke van der Veer(Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology in an ERC-funded research project on participatory urban governance. She has a background in Philosophy. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Rotterdam in 2018, she studies aspiring grassroots initiatives that provide support to people with a refugee background.
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Cite as: van der Veer, Lieke. 2020. “Group-making and distrust within the infrastructure of refugee support.” FocaalBlog, 3 August. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/08/03/lieke-van-der-veer-group-making-and-distrust-within-the-infrastructure-of-refugee-support/
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
On April 4, 2019, Pedro cycled for over an hour to get to our meeting with Mexico City’s Security Minister. He made it just on time for Alicia, a leading activist, to write his name on the list of the 14 people who would take part in the meeting. Once we were all in the meeting room, and after waiting around half an hour for the minister to show up, the meeting finally started. An activist offered the services of networked cyclists as ‘eyes’ on the streets: “We are hundreds, and can send reports about things we see”, said Octavio, who had become known in the cycling community through his personal cycling news channel on social media. Oscar, an activist who arrived in a suit, had offered to donate up to 100 new bicycles to a group of policewomen who had been recently appointed to keep cycleways clear of motorcyclists and other obstructions. “We would donate them under the condition that there is clarity about their use, and security about them not being stolen,” he said. Several activists in the room had years of experience behind them, and were well known to Mexico City authorities.
For Pedro, it was a different story. It was his first time attending a high-level meeting with government officials. When he spoke, one could sense how nervous he was in his voice tone. He sat in a corner of the large table, and only spoke as the meeting was coming to an end. “For us in the outskirts of the city, it is particularly risky when cars go by at high speeds, so we really need for police officers to do their job. I’ve seen them do nothing as drivers break the law in front of them,” he said. Before him, the tone of complaints had been in part reproach but in part indicating his willingness to collaborate with the authorities.
One of the main complaints among activists attending the meeting was that security personnel in patrol cars were the first to flout regulations, like running through red lights or parking where they’re not supposed to. “How are you going to enforce the laws that your own agents break?,” Oldemar asked the minister. The meeting had been convened among cyclo-activists who had perceived an increase in hostile behaviour from motorists. In their view, motorists felt free to flout regulations because of the promise of the then newly arrived government (which took office in December 2018) to stop charging speeding fines because of a lack of transparency from the private firm who managed the city’s speed cameras. Instead, the government announced ‘civic fines,’ which would entail a points-based system that would grant 10 points to all drivers and deduct one point per traffic offence, or 5 points if the speed was 40 per cent higher than the established limit. The first two points lost would come with a warning. For recurrent offenders, so-called incremental ‘civic penalties’ that would include online courses, face-to-face classes, and community service. In order to comply with the ‘verification’ (technical assessment of emissions) that is mandatory for all motorized vehicles in Mexico City, drivers need to have at least 8 points or to honour all ‘civic penalties’ incurred. It was the opinion of most activists attending the meeting that the new administration had not succeeded in getting their message across about the nuances of the change, and had rather misleadingly created the impression among motorists that there would simply no longer be sanctions for speeding. When activists explained this, it took the Security Minster by surprise. It seemed he and his team had not thought of that possibility.
Over the past two decades, cycloactivists have achieved much more than they originally thought would be possible. From initial demands for safer cycling, various groups have developed expert knowledge regarding infrastructure, urbanism, and transport policymaking. The city government has also taken many of their demands on board and has situated ‘mobility’ as an important issue on the public policy agenda. Such success, has gone hand-in-hand with an increased presence of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on the issue (especially regarding public transport and urban design), and of foreign financial institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank, which provides credits to carry out some of the changes activists demanded. This combination has brought about the professionalization of cycloactivism in a manner that privileges a technocratic data-driven form of urbanism with its own jargon. This transformation has involved cycloactivists themselves, among whom I have often heard a mantra: ‘what is not counted, does not count.’ Whereas cycling is a popular cause because it addresses urban dwellers’ need for cheap and easy access to the city across social classes and other boundaries, the resulting professionalization of the activist field has brought with it a new set of inequalities that Pedro’s situation illustrates.
In their campaigns and public discourses, cycloactivists frequently used arguments of social justice and inclusion to promote cycling among urban dwellers, and demand improved infrastructures and policies for its practice from government officials. In Mexico City, social disparities are clearly noticeable during commuting times. Some workers spend up to five hours per day commuting. Again, those who live farthest from the city centre tend to be worse off. Recent studies have shown that suburban households earn 30% less than urban households, have 40% longer commutes, and spend twice as much per transit trip (Guerra 2017). For the poorest fifth of households, this expenditure can be a fourth of their total daily income. A recent government survey (INEGI 2018) also showed that while 52 per cent of urban dwellers use public transport on a daily basis, most government expenditure on mobility is dedicated to car infrastructure. In order to address these disparities and promote a more just distribution of resources from the local public administration, some cycloactivists have gone through a steep learning curve that has included professional training. Some of them have studied graduate courses on related issues (urbanism, transport engineering), others joined NGO technical teams to learn about policymaking, a few joined the government, and a couple started their own consultancy firms to promote mobility projects among small local governments around the country.
Cycloactivists have thus taken advantage of the growing relevance of mobility in policy circles. Our global times are built on the possibility of people, things, and ideas rapidly reaching faraway destinations. Mobility “has come to define the contemporary human condition as never before, involving long-range and frequent movement that impinges on or even defines the everyday life of people from all backgrounds and social strata” (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012, 460). Scholars refer to a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006) or ‘turn’ (Faist 2013) that highlights the role of movement as key to our social connections. Mobilities links the materiality of infrastructures with the movement and flows of interactions. Due to environmental concerns and continuous urban growth, mobility has also earned a place in global policymaking equivalent to that of social housing in the 1970s. For some scholars and activists, there is a need to include ‘mobility’ as one more human right (Logan, et al. 2018). This follows from the drastic inequalities that differentiated access and practices entail. In joining the mobility turn from a vantage point of grassroots activism, those involved have earned enough political capital to be able to use it in order to build a career in an issue they feel strongly about. But in doing so, they have also privileged a technocratic data-driven form of politics regarding mobility, which excludes from debates all those who lack the cultural capital to access the language and knowledge needed to take part in debates.
On top of such situation, the issue of mobility has also been dominated by a type of technomorality. In their analyses of relations between NGOs, social movements and the state in India, Bornstein and Sharma defined the way these different groupings negotiate the political relations through ‘technomoral means.’ By this they meant “the complex, strategic integration of technical and moral vocabularies as political tactics” (Bornstein and Sharma 2016, 77). It is basically a translation of moral projects into technical ‘implementable terms’, such as through laws or policies. In the case of mobility, this means that decisions about what is deemed ‘good’ for the city are first taken and then the statistics are provided to show that the government is doing what it can to achieve it. This can similarly be said to be the case for cycleways and pedestrian areas. In both cases, however, some critical activists point out that despite the increase in construction of cycleways and pedestrian areas, more need to be built to address structural inequalities in Mexico City. Furthermore, much of the investment that has taken place on such infrastructures has been concentrated in what is called the ‘bubble’: an area renowned for its restaurants, and cafes, where the city’s young professionals with a high disposable income hang out, and where foreign students or highly skilled workers seem to be more comfortable. The prominence of bicycles in such areas adds to their gentrification, and even helps market new housing developments as more environmentally aware and convenient.
Image 1: Monument going through maintenance after being vandalised by feminist activists in Mexico City (Photo: Raul Acosta, 10 November 2019)
For Pedro and thousands of other cyclists from the outskirts of Mexico City, the challenges of reaching their work places or any other locality in the city centre are, by contrast, enormous. There is no cycling infrastructure in Pedro’s neighbourhood, despite the fact that thousands of people use a bicycle not because they necessarily want to, but because it is the cheapest means of transportation they can afford. Pedro became an activist after organizing a few night rides among his neighbours, and noticing that other groups in the city that had done something similar had achieved changes in their barrios. Once he started gathering groups to cycle around his area, local politicians began to take notice. He started being invited to ceremonies and interviews. And he started getting involved with other better off and well-educated activists from the centre of the city.
I first met him at an event organized by Mexico City’s Assembly (Cámara de Diputados), where experts and activists were invited to talk about their views on any necessary changes to improve mobility laws and regulations. Pedro chose to frame his becoming an activist through a narrative of his personal struggles with depression. “Cycling helped me, and I noticed it could also help others,” he said, as he showed photos of the collective bike rides he’d organized with his neighbours. When he finished talking, he got a big round of applause and the event went on. I kept on meeting him in different events, like the meeting at the Security Ministry I mentioned above. While he enjoyed the attention and appreciated being heard, he generally appeared shy and remained silent when main points of contention were being debated. When I visited him in his neighbourhood, he told me about his caution in dealing with other more established activists: “I get the sense they are so well connected with authorities, you know, that I have little possibility to contribute [to their debates]. That is why I prefer to focus on demands in our local area, without interfering on larger debates about the whole city.”
I refer to Pedro as a ‘peripheral’ activist because of his location at the physical margins of both the city and the political activist arena. Most of the groups that have been carrying out successful campaigns over the last two decades are made up of educated middle-class individuals who tend to have markers that distinguish them from most other urban dwellers. “Some criticize me for being white and talking about justice,” Alicia told me, who represents the oldest and most influential activist group called Bicitekas. In her case, as in others, the clear markers of privilege helped her get her message across to decision-makers in very concrete terms: in the form of invitations to dialogues with government officials, interview requests from major newspapers and magazines, invitations by international NGOs and foundations for specific campaigns and projects, and even awards of prizes for her activism. She is outspoken, well-informed about the latest debates in environmental and urban matters, and creative in thinking about new projects and seeking out the people who she needs to liaise with in order to carry them out. In comparison, Pedro is somewhat shy, although he clearly wants to be more active. Ironically, even though compared to Alicia he is worse off both in terms of economic and cultural capital, in his community he is also above the average. For a start, he has free time to dedicate to activism; and he is able to attend meetings in the city centre when many others need to work. Yet, he is peripheral compared to activists like Alicia.
After talking a few times with Pedro, I sense both his optimism about being able to improve the lives of his neighbours through his activism, as well as his scepticism about the language that he is expected to master in order to successfully address policymakers or NGOs in meetings. When I ask him about the difficulties he may face, he smiles and tells me that “it’s all a part of the journey, like riding a bicycle in this city: it is a risk and a joy.” The journey Pedro refers to, he tells me frequently, is one of endurance. I wonder, however, how much he realises that the movement he forms part of reproduces the dominant structure he and others denounce. With their activism, they demand new infrastructures and policies to correct injustices especially affecting those worse off in the city. But there does not seem to be an effort within that activist milieu to steer their own internal workings into a more equitable arrangement where he and others would not be perpetually cast in the peripheral role.
Raúl Acosta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He currently carries out research on urban activism in Mexico City in a sub-project of the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded Urban Ethics Research Group. His monograph “Civil Becomings: Performative Politics in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mediterranean” examines activist and advocacy networks.
References
Bornstein, Erica, and Aradhana Sharma. 2016. “The righteous and the rightful: the technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India.” American Ethnologist 43 (1): 76-90.
Dalakoglou, Dimitris, and Penny Harvey. 2012. “Roads and anthropology: ethnographic perspectives on space, time and (im)mobility.” Mobilities 7 (4): 459-465.
Faist, Thomas. 2013. “The mobility turn: a new paradigm for the social sciences?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (11): 1637-1646.
Guerra, Erick. 2017. “Does where you live affect how much you spend on transit? The link between urban form and household transit expenditures in Mexico City.” The Journal of Transport and Land Use 10 (1): 855-878.
INEGI. 2018. Encuesta origen-destino en hogares de la zona metropolitana del Valle de México 2017. Mexico City: CDMX, INEGI.
Logan, Samuel W., Kathleen R. Bogart, Samantha M. Ross, and Erica Woekel. 2018. “Mobility is a fundamental human right: factors predicting attitudes toward self-directed mobility.” Disability and Health Journal 11 (4): 562-567.
Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The new mobilities paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207-226.
Cite as: Acosta, Raúl. 2020. “Navigating promises and good intentions: technomorality and scepticism among peripheral cycloactivists in Mexico City.” FocaalBlog, 7 July. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/07/raul-acosta-navigating-promises-and-good-intentions-technomorality-and-scepticism-among-peripheral-cycloactivists-in-mexico-city/
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
The global trend away from rural living and towards urbanization continues unabated. This is so despite high levels of inequality, poverty and forms of exclusion that are part and parcel of city life for the many. Indeed, across the globe, growing numbers of urban dwellers struggle to meet even the most basic needs for housing, security, and income. In response to these challenges, governments have attempted to present solutions that are too often palliative, addressing merely the symptoms of inequalities rather than their causes. In a similar vein, highly mobile policies are frequently implemented under the banner of terms like “good governance,” “participation” or “crisis management” that reinforce the social exclusion of the most marginalized, often contrary to their stated intentions (Peck and Theodore 2015). Cases of such exclusion include mass evictions, the rise of gated communities, the securitization of urban spaces, shifts towards austerity measures, punitive policies of migrant populations, and the regulation of the informal sector.
As such, cities are places of multiscale struggle (Mollona 2014) where a variety of different actors, from (inter)national and local government bodies to charities, corporations, grassroots movements and citizens make competing claims of legitimacy and express visions for future living (Harvey 2003, Susser and Tonnelat 2013, Lazar 2017). Indeed, cities have become focal points for various class struggles.
Based on a panel held at the IUAES conference in Poznań, Poland, in August 2019, this collection of papers addresses both the various forms of resistance to, and the reproduction of, exclusionary urban policies. Our main ambition is to expand important conversations in anthropology on urban mobilizations emerging from Henry Lefebvre’s “right to the city” and the “production of space” via a focus on the character and persistence of urban struggles (Lefebvre 1991, Banerjee-Guha 2010, Kalb and Mollona 2018, Koster and Kolling 2019). In this post and the contributions to this feature blog, we understand the study of urban struggles as a collection of productive tensions where governance, resistance and solidarity play out in plural and often unexpected ways within global frameworks of highly unequal regimes of accumulation (Susser 2014).
Urban governance: facing challenges and reproducing inequality
Cities grow by layers of time. This is related to both population growth and changes to the built environment. The number of urban dwellers grows not merely through the reproduction of those already living in urban spaces, but through constant immigration that originates in the countryside from surrounding areas and often from much further afield (Davis 2006). Many migrants who are attracted to urban life consider the city to be full of opportunities that cannot be found elsewhere, even as they find upon arrival that their status and rights to the city are often less recognized and sometimes actively suppressed compared to those of more established populations. The steady growth of cities across the planet has created, in turn, new pressures on local government bodies to keep up with the provision of infrastructure, public goods and employment opportunities needed to meet even the most basic demands for living (Caglar and Schiller 2018).
To respond to the challenges faced by urban dwellers and the risk of social turmoil these entail, governments have come to implement a range of policies aimed at improving the urban lived environment. Governments thus tend to see larger cities both as centers where political legitimacy is built and where their ideologies and visions of the future take shape. Because of this combination, cities have also become sites of experimentation for states, where policies are tested before being rolled out more broadly. Often sold under the banner of buzzwords like “civilizing cities”, promoting “active participation”, “community building” or embarking on “crisis management”, these policies promise to improve the quality of life and built environment of the most vulnerable (Nuijten 2013, Schinkel 2010, Masco 2017). To do so, many come to rely on new forms of technocratic governance that uses the matrix of statistics and quantitative science in implementing various political and legal projects, ranging from social housing provisions to environmental policies to regeneration projects (Koch 2018).
While these various initiatives may have ostensibly democratic goals, their implementation all too often reproduces the structural conditions of exclusion that they are meant to address (Alexander, Bruun and Koch 2018). The objective or neutral language of urban initiatives disguises the complex ways in which these policies are embedded in, and further promote, capitalism’s circuits of value and accumulation. Decisions by government policy makers usually favor the segments of the population who already hold most capital in the city. Meanwhile, urban infrastructure projects and regeneration initiatives attract real estate developers and to gentrify neighborhoods (Evans 2016). Both processes are aggravated when budget cuts and austerity measures fuel the outsourcing of urban governance to third-party actors – private companies and non-governmental organizations alike – that are often unwilling and sometimes unable to adequately provide public goods.
Urban struggles as resistance and solidarity
Cities, as sites where different actors compete for legitimacy, are the locus of productive urban struggles. We use the term urban struggle to refer to the complex and varied sets of negotiations through which city dwellers, grassroots movements, activist groups and political and development brokers critically engage with the claims to legitimacy and visions for the future that are promoted by official channels. As these groups face a wide variety of problems from insufficient housing (Cohen 2014) and infrastructure to environmental hazards, they develop an equally vast repertoire of resistance strategies, tactics and responses. These include, as the contributions to this feature show, amongst others, squatting initiatives, land occupations, grassroots art exhibitions, and the expansion of informal ties that are often viewed with suspicion by the state. There is thus a constant push and pull between dispossession and resistance, austerity and solidarity, exclusion, and inclusion unfolding in urban spaces.
Image 1: Street graffiti in Recife, Brazil (Photo: Martijn Koster, 18 August 2015)
Yet, creative engagements seemingly opposed to neoliberal urban policies do not produce unequivocal forms of resistance, less even a singular anti-capitalist stance against structures of oppression (Kalb and Mollona 2018). On the contrary, ambiguities and contradictions prevail as citizens move within the same unequal processes of accumulation that frame official policies (James and Koch 2020). One example of this concerns the case of slum dwellers who aspire, above all, to become landlords and rent out rooms to even poorer slum dwellers under extractive conditions. Hence, the practices of the poor are not necessarily expressions of unequivocal solidarity and care (Palomera 2014). Likewise, social movements and grassroots initiatives, while often deploying a universal language of humanitarianism, may only benefit particular groups of urban dwellers, thus generating resentment and jealousy amongst those excluded (Wilde 2020). Urban struggles do not necessarily produce a better city, even as their spokespersons claim to speak on behalf of the most vulnerable and excluded (Gutierrez-Garza 2020).
Acknowledging the contradictions that are at the heart of urban struggles opens the space for a particular analytical lens: one that conceptualizes cities as assemblages of productive tensions where a variety of actors, groups, movements and policy makers define, and continuously compete over, the meanings of urban citizenship, “rights to the city”, and democratizing access to infrastructures and public goods. This, in turn, can help us see how social responses, including those of social movements, grassroots initiatives, and local care networks, should not be romanticized as simple expressions of political resistance. Neither, however, does such a lens lend itself to a dystopian view in which capitalism erases all alternatives. Instead, cities emerge as places of ongoing, open-ended power struggles. Ethnography, with its focus on the lived experiences of urban dwellers, is particularly well placed to capture both the moments of solidarity that continue to exist and the wider forces disabling them. The papers in this feature seek to do precisely this.
Ethnographies of urban struggles
Our blog contributions highlight urban struggles and their complicated politics in a range of settings, taking the reader from Latin American’s mega-cities to European urban centers to recent urban developments in Asia. In Mexico City, Raúl Acosta analyses how cycling activists, intent on improving the infrastructure of the city, engage in a project that uses technical expertise to put forward a moral project of improving life in the city. However, the capacity to claim such moral projects is not evenly distributed, as activists on the “periphery” – both in the spatial and the social sense of the word – find that they lack the economic and cultural capital to be heard by power holders. In Brazil, questions of resistance and power are also at the center of the urban activism practiced by the poor. Sven da Silva explores how occupancy urbanism of the poor is negotiated in the context of development projects in the fast-growing Recife, in Brazil. Here, community leaders engage in political activities to resist real state pressure and in favor of what they view as community interests. Adam Moore’s contribution presents the hopes and dreams of victims of development in Medellín, Colombia. Looking at practices of autoconstruction, he explores the ‘human cost’ of ‘urban renovations’ and challenges the hegemonic narrative about urban transformation in Medellín, which heralds the local government as exemplary in its commitment to equitable and pro-poor urban development interventions.
In Europe, struggles over governing urban populations and spaces similarly abound, bringing together a complex network of third sector organizations, private actors, Universities and state bodies. In the “policy laboratory city” of Rotterdam, frequently celebrated for its allegedly inclusive and innovative social policies, conflicting views over how to govern migrant populations have opened the space for new technologies of control. Here, Lieke van de Veer shows that the effort on the part of local groups claiming a role on the reception infrastructure of migrants often become riddled with internal tensions over funding and resources as different groups are unequally positioned to access these competitive funds. Meanwhile, in the UK, two of our blog contributions focus in more closely on questions of inequality in the city. Sarah Winkler-Reid’s work on Newcastle-Upon-Tyrne focuses on the university’s role in the network of actors influencing urban development proclaiming to create the “good city”. Here, the rapid growth of privately owned, mostly purpose-built student accommodation, create new forms of inequality in the city’s historical centre. In her contribution on the voluntarization of welfare advice in Manchester, Janne Heederik demonstrates how a withdrawal of state funding and a shift of tasks and responsibilities from government officials to citizens have transformed the landscape of welfare provision. If solidarity is the basis of the relationships between claimants and non-state advisers, they are also marked by tensions that are the result of the structural shifts austerity has imposed on the welfare system.
In all of the contributions considered thus far, concessions and gains experienced by one urban group can simultaneously constitute a loss or betrayal for another. Indeed, this insight is also key to Anne-Christine Trémon’s ethnography of the city of Shenzhen in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where the authorities’ attempts to gain the status of a “national civilized city” – a status bestowed by the PRC government in recognition of “quality of life and a higher degree of urban civilization” – have introduced new forms of inequality for migrant populations vis a vis the typically much wealthier natives. Trémon makes use of the concept of “variegated governance” to make sense of how cohabiting residents in the same territorial unit receive differential treatment depending on their respective economic valorization and the political acknowledgement of their social worth. Finally, in Ezgi Guler’s contribution on urban Turkey, we move closer to questions about the possibility of collective resistance to oppressive urban structures and policies. Yet, once more, while the transgender sex workers with whom she carried out fieldwork rely on dense networks of mutual support and care, these rarely translate into collective political action as material pressures, including financial stress, inequality, competition and stigma also make workers deeply suspicious of one another.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).
Raúl Acosta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He currently carries out research on urban activism in Mexico City in a sub-project of the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded Urban Ethics Research Group. His monograph “Civil Becomings: Performative Politics in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mediterranean” examines activist and advocacy networks.
Flávio Eiró is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and Dvelopment Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He has conducted ethnographic research on electoral politics and conditional cash transfers in Northeast Brazil, and currently works in the ERC funded project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”.
Insa Koch is Associate Professor in Law and Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her recently published monograph “Personalizing the State: an Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain” offers an ethnographic study of the crisis of democracy and urban citizenship in Britain.
Martijn Koster is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Currently, he leads the ERC funded project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”.
References
Alexander, C; M Hojer Bruun; I Koch. 2018. Political economy comes home: on the moral economies of housing. Critique of Anthropology 38(2): 121–139
Banerjee-Guha, S. (Ed.). 2010. Accumulation by dispossession: Transformative cities in the new global order. SAGE Publications India.
Caglar, A. S. and N. G. Schiller. 2018. Migrants & city-making: dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Durham, Duke University Press.
Cohen, Yves. 2014. “Crowds without a master: A transnational approach between past and present,” FocaalBlog, November 10, www.focaalblog.com/2014/11/10/yves-cohen-crowds-without-a-master-a-transnational-approach-between-past-and-present.
Davis, M. 2006. Planet of slums. London, New York, Verso.
Evans, G. 2018. London’s Olympic Legacy: The Inside Track. London, Palgrave MacMillan.
Gutierrez Garza, Ana. 2020. “Te lo tienes que currar”: enacting an ethics of care in times of austerity. Ethnos, Published online.
Harvey, D. 2003. The right to the city. International journal of urban and regional research, 27(4), 939–941.
Kalb, D. and M. Mollona. 2018. Worldwide mobilizations: class struggles and urban commoning. New York, Oxford, Berghahn Books.
Koch, I. 2018. Personalizing the state. An anthropology of law, politics, and welfare in austerity Britain. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Koch, I. and D. James. 2020. The state of the welfare state: advice, governance and care in settings of austerity. Ethnos, Published online.
Koster, M. & M. Kolling (eds). 2019. Betrayal in the city: Urban development across the globe [Special Issue]. City & Society 31(3).
Lazar, S. 2017. The social life of politics: Ethics, kinship, and union activism in Argentina. Redwood City, Stanford University Press.
Lefebvre, H. 1991. The production of space. Oxford, Basil Blackwell.
Masco, J. 2017. The crisis in crisis. Current Anthropology, 58(S15), S65-S76.
Nuijten, M. 2013. The perversity of the “Citizenship Game”: Slum-upgrading in the urban periphery of Recife, Brazil. Critique of Anthropology, 33(1), 8–25.
Palomera, J. 2014. Reciprocity, commodification, and poverty in the era of financialization. Current Anthropology 55(S9): S105-S115.
Peck, J., & Theodore, N. 2015. Fast policy: Experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Susser, I., & Tonnelat, S. 2013. Transformative cities: the three urban commons. Focaal, 2013(66), 105–121.
On May 28th the liberal Romanian government published the last data on the employment situation. This is therefore a good time to review the fate of Romanian labor in and after the lockdowns. I argue that we see a deepening of the export oriented neoliberal paradigm that demonizes the “social” and represses social reproduction in favor of subsidies to capital. Moreover, some of those subsidies now go towards increased militarization and the further beefing up of policing. What the liberal government calls “economic recovery” policies, turn out to be nothing more than a return to the “normality” of state supported international capital accumulation that has characterized much of post-socialist Europe after 1989.
Reviewing labor contract data from the end of March to the end of May, one notices a steady increase in the number of both suspended and terminated contracts. By the end of April, this trend changes: suspensions decline while terminations increase. By the end of May, the total number of suspensions and terminations reaches alarming proportions: over 1 million. More than four hundred thousand workers (especially in manufacturing, retail, and construction) had their labor contracts fully terminated. These workers receive paltry unemployment benefits of 25% of the minimum wage, amounting to about 330 lei/68 euro per month. If they are lucky and can claim technical unemployment, they receive 75% of their salaries. This probably means that some 600,000 former manufacturing and retail workers will now receive a monthly benefit of about 1,000 lei/208 euro (75% of the minimum wage). By the end of May, then, about 1,100,000 workers have less than some 200 euro per month while the value of the minimum consumption basket is even in the official calculation more than double that amount (at the end of 2019, the minimum consumption basket was over 2650 lei/525 euro per month).
Image 1: “Poverty kills”, Romanian protesters in Cluj (Photo: Enikő Vincze, 2020)
The labor crisis is exacerbated by the return of Romanians who used to work abroad: 1,270,000 of them at the end of April, of which at least 350,000 are actively looking for a job and receiving unemployment benefits. Of a total Romanian population of 17/18 million, some 1,5 million people, then, live on an income that just allows for bare survival. However, one should point out that this is not new for them: they were pretty bad or very bad off even before the pandemic, when they had fully paid jobs. Now, they hardly differ from the more than 4,632,000 persons who, according to Eurostat 2019 data, lived below the official poverty line, meaning on less than 900 lei/191 euro per month. In sum, 30 years after the revolution and 12 years after EU accession, Romania, a belated but by now dedicated student of neoliberal transition economics, may well have some 6 million people just above or under the poverty line, about half the working population. Against the policy rhetoric, these people have no “normality” to return to after the pandemic (keep in mind that In the “old good times”, over 30% of Romania’s employees (or 42% of formal employment contracts) earned only half the value of the minimum consumption basket per month). But the current government does not even talk about inequalities, poverty, or the public responsibilities of the state for the dispossessions brought by capitalism. Instead, it dreams of returning to a fictitious normal that for many never existed. As in the past, the crisis of capitalism induced by the Covid pandemic is solved through the “normality” of state supported capital accumulation: further enrichment of the rich, facilitation of transnational capital, and even deeper impoverishment of the many.
The current government’s “economic recovery plan” is leading to the further pauperization of labor (for more details see here). The plan is based on state aid schemes used throughout EU in the context of the pandemic: guaranteeing commercial loans for firms, but also capital and investment loans for both small and medium-sized enterprises, and large companies; subsidizing the interest rates of bank loans; offering aid to newly established companies. Moreover, there are several other facilities granted to large property owners: reducing the price of electricity for large consumers, refunding VAT, halting seizure on their debts. The government also foresees some measures to support employers who keep employees in their jobs or plan on hiring new staff. However, it does not provide anything that would directly support labor, like raising wages or improving labor conditions. In short, it is imagined as an economic recovery but not for ordinary people.
These ordinary people are told the EU funnels billions of euro to aid Romania’s recovery. At the same time, the government refuses any talk of wage rises, social protection, or public housing investment. Such talk is branded “toxic populism” or “economic ignorance” of the critical role that investment rather than consumption plays in growth. Romanian labor is no longer interesting, not even as a consumer. This supply-side policy in support of capital is based on the expectation that labor must remain cheap (regardless of the problems that further decreases in demand would create for many local small enterprises), so that international capital may come along to exploit it. But will an export-led model work in a global economy interrupted by a global recession, with shrinking returns to capital? True, for Romania it did work in 2010. But will it again?
After the pandemic has shown so clearly that labor is the very carrier of production, the current Liberal government chooses to further disregard workers. Instead, it’s doing everything possible to grant state aid to multinational companies operating in Romania. For that goal this government is also ready to borrow on the international market or from international financial institutions, which will push debt over the 50% of GDP threshold that rules as “normality” in CEE, in which case international pressure will force it to cut public sector spending such as on public wages, social assistance, and social protection. Saving capital goes therefore hand in hand with austerity measures (as prescribed in the Convergence Program 2020 of Romania, see Vincze 2015). Once again we see the tasteless spectacle of arrogant private entrepreneurs being saved by the visible hand of the state, grinning with satisfaction at public sector cuts while claiming the right to be supported at all costs, looting the public sector on behalf of their apparently deserved private profits.
In contrast to the 2008 crisis, however, this time Romania bets that the military industry will save the economy. “Among the government’s priorities are greenfield and offset investments in industries such as the military,” says the prime-minister. This option crowns former initiatives such as the acquisition of the $ 3.9 billion American Patriot missile system, promoted by the country’s president since his first mandate. The 2020 budget allocations provide for an 18% rise of military budget as compared to 2019, while the Ministry of Internal Affairs can do with an extra 13% on top of the increased budget for the Romanian Intelligence Services.
In this increasingly troubled world with various contradictory scenarios for the future, there is a risk that the current crisis of capitalism will be resolved not only by the militarization of the economy but also by rising political and social fascism. There is consistency there. Promoting racialized hatred (Stoica 2020), provoking interethnic conflicts and tensions between social classes is part of the justification for investments in a police state with military muscle. As other branches of industry are struggling hard to recover from the recession, capital needs war industry investments to save itself. Perversely, Romania’s leaders also offer the domestic reserve army of labor the opportunity to make a career out of warfare. President Iohannis recently stated that Romania’s armed forces can be made available for participation in missions and operations outside the Romanian state, claiming “important resources for equipping the Romanian Army make it possible to achieve national defense capabilities within the collective defense system of NATO and, at the same time, coherent multiannual programs can offer the Romanian industry the chance to relaunch. especially through institutional cooperation with the companies of our allies.”
We may not be surprised by these developments, but we can and must revolt against them. We could begin by imagining different economic recovery scenarios. What if the state took over the companies that can no longer function according to the rules of the “free market”? What if state aid came with the demand for decent wages for the employees? What if the state taxed large fortunes in real estate and banking accumulated over the past decades? What if the state decided to implement measures in support of people rather than profit: banning forced evictions, municipalization of public utilities, controlling private rents, achieving a significant stock of social housing through various methods? What if the state acted for the benefit of labor? For peace and disarmament? What if we did all of this now, to mark 75 years since the defeat of fascism and the promise of a better era for humanity? Why long for the “normality” of capital accumulation when we can long for other possible worlds?
This is the English version of an article published in Romanian on the platform Baricada, June 4th, 2020. The Romanian version contains additional graphs and references. Accessible here: https://ro.baricada.org/relansarea-economica-a-romaniei/
Enikő Vincze is Professor of Sociology at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, and a political activist for housing justice with the group Căși sociale ACUM/ Social Housing NOW!
States’ claims that they are relieving human suffering have become a central element of their ongoing liberal legitimation amid their production of deepening inequalities. The British government’s modern slavery agenda in relation to “county lines” provides a case in point. County lines is the name given by the police to “Class A” drugs networks spreading from larger cities that rely on young runners to move the drugs. These runners – predominantly working class and ethnic minority young men who used to be criminalised for their involvement in the illicit economy – are now being discovered as modern slaves in need of saving. Yet, professionals also separate those worthy of saving from others who are the object of rightful punishment. The fraught politics of victimhood at the heart of the modern slavery agenda foregrounds the role of legal-moral control in governing disenfranchised populations in austerity Britain and elsewhere. It illuminates how states try to shore up popular consent beyond a politics of ‘law and order’ where decades of neo-liberal policy have brought their democratic mandates under attack.
Modern Slavery Policies: domesticating a humanitarian agenda
“More than 200 years ago the British House of Commons passed historic legislation to make the slave trade illegal. But sadly, the grim reality today is that slavery still exists in towns, cities and the countryside across the world. And be in no doubt, slavery is taking place here in the UK”. These were the words of Home Secretary and later Prime Minister, Theresa May, in 2014 when introducing her flagship policy, the modern slavery agenda. The agenda was spearheaded by the Modern Slavery Act 2015, a piece of legislation that introduces both a prosecution and a defense tool for cases of human trafficking, slavery and servitude. It has also seen the creation of anti-slavery partnerships at local authority levels, the appointment of an anti-slavery commissioner, and the expansion of the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the government’s official identification mechanism for modern slaves.
Concerns over human trafficking and modern slavery have been on the international humanitarian agenda for some time (Davidson 2015). There, the slave victim has tended to be identified with the figure of the ‘exotic other’ – typically the black or brown woman from the global south – trafficked for purposes of sexual and domestic exploitation (Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008; Woods 2013). However, increasingly, the language of relieving human suffering has also become prominent in governing disenfranchised domestic populations in the global north (Fassin 2011; Feldman and Ticktin 2010). Miriam Ticktin has argued with respect to human trafficking discourses that the key to the appeal of this agenda lies in its unquestioned universality: ‘the underlying assumption is that we recognise suffering whenever we see it, because there is a common denominator to being human, located in our bodies, particularly in our bodies in pain’ (2011: 11).
The discovery of modern slavery as a matter of domestic policy constitutes an exercise in technocratic legal-moral governance. A wide range of actors – from NGOs, social movements to state actors – come to create, transgress and navigate ‘political relations […] through techno-moral means’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016; Kosmatopoulos 2014; Steur 2018). According to Bornstein and Sharma, in ‘mixing the language of law and policy with moral pronouncement, state and non-state actors posture themselves as defenders of rights and keepers of the public interest as they push their agendas and stake out distinct positions’ (2016: 77). But legal-moral governance also tends to reframe questions of inequality in purely technical or scientific terms (Feldman and Ticktin 2010). It typically replaces a struggle between ‘right’ and left’ with a moral struggle between ‘right and wrong’, thus further reinforcing what Steur (2018) recognizes as the displacement of the political into the legal realm.
County lines: the making of modern slaves
The depoliticising effects of legal-moral governance are illustrated in the case of “county lines”, a key area where the domestication of humanitarian agendas has taken off. County lines is the name given by the police to the expanding economy of “class A” drugs of heroin and crack cocaine spreading from cities to market, coastal and smaller towns, operating through designated mobile phone lines, the so-called ‘county lines’. Over 2000 county lines are said to be in operation, with thousands of young people being exploited. Horror stories have been circulating, with common images including those of teenagers and occasionally children as young as seven (Dearden 2019) being recruited by drug lords higher up the chain to ‘plug’ the drugs inside their bodies (Adams 2018), being taken to unknown location and kept in ‘trap houses’ (Mohdin 2019) and going missing for weeks on end (Marsh 2019).
Since 2018, I have been carrying out ethnographic fieldwork on the discovery of modern slavery in county line cases. This research, prompted by developments I stumbled across in my long-term field-site – a large post-industrial council estate in England (Koch 2018) – has led me to spend months talking to working class families, the police, local authority figures, defence and prosecution barristers and to cross between Britain’s disenfranchised urban housing estates to the country’s central criminal courts. Through this research, I have watched new logics of care and control being rolled out as frontline officials traditionally trained in enforcing a ‘war on drugs’ against young, black and minority ethnic males, are learning to recognise some of these same demographics as victims in need of support. Being identified as a modern slave engenders potential forms of redress, including limited welfare and housing support and relief from prosecution for drugs and other offences.
Image 1: Modern slaves’ and their exploiters often come from Britain’s post-industrial social housing estates (Photo by Insa Koch, 2017)
And yet, the recognition of abject suffering also engenders new forms of legibility and control. My research shows that the suffering of a county line victim hinges upon the figure of the groomer. Groomers are typically presented as residing in the same community as their victims. The alleged proximity between victims and perpetrators further enables the authorities to reframe intimate relations through a lens of exploitation as quasi-legal categories are applied to everyday relations in working class communities – terms like ‘remote mothering’, ‘cuckooing’ and ‘mate crime’. Those who are found to be behind exploitation are subject to harsh punishment. This is illustrated in the case of KWA (Marsh 2019b), one of the first successful prosecutions brought against alleged slave traffickers – three young black men from inner-London housing estates – under modern slavery law.
From punitive control to legal-moral governance
Much has been made of the ‘punitive turn’ (Koch 2018), as governments across the global south (Comaroff and Comaroff 2017) and the global north (Wacquant 2009) have responded to the insecurities generated by neoliberal rule by going tough on ‘law and order’. On the face of it, the discovery of ‘modern slaves’ in the case of county lines challenges these developments as some of the most disenfranchised demographics are no longer being criminalised but rather recognised as slaves in need of state compassion and care. And yet, the picture is not so simple. As my research shows, at the heart of the British government’s modern slavery agenda lies a murky politics of victimhood, one which not only conjures images of the internal traitor in disenfranchised working class communities but which also activates a host of technical and legal mechanisms of control in the name of saving the vulnerable.
Rather than seeing the discovery of modern slavery as an aberration from the punitive conjuncture, it then constitutes a deepening of its logics through legal-moral means. In Britain today, growing inequality, topped by a decade of austerity, have generated widespread discontent with government, as evident in widespread levels of voter withdrawal alongside the more recent ‘Brexit’ vote in the referendum on leaving the EU (Koch 2017). Against this backdrop, the discovery of abject suffering in the figure of the domestic slave becomes a means of conjuring moral legitimacy on the part of the state, one which takes the language of hierarchy between the deserving and the undeserving common to neo-populist discourses to the realm of law (Kalb and Mollona 2018: 5). As Brace has argued modern slavery presents an ‘intractable, moral problem, an evil that lurks within our hearts, a beat in the shadows’ (Brace 2018: 220). At a time when decades of neoliberal rule have brought democratic mandates under attack, it is precisely this ‘lurking in or hearts’ that is galvanised by liberal government to shore up popular consent.
And yet, the veneer of legitimacy always runs thin. Take the case of Kieron, a fifteen-year-old male from a large urban housing estate. In 2018, he was designated a ‘modern slave’, having been arrested with Class A drugs. Initially, this resulted in Kieron’s family being offered an organised housing transfer to the countryside. But support has also come at a cost. Various professionals have been closely monitoring his life and his daily social relations. Meanwhile, his parents are struggling to find adequate employment in the area they were moved to. When Kieron was arrested in 2019 with drugs on him again, the tables turned. ‘Now the police are saying that he can be prosecuted because he did not accept their help’, his mother told me. The situation has come full circle: the authorities went from seeing Kieron as a petty criminal to a slave to a criminal, once more.
Insa Koch is Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and the author of ‘Personalizing the State: An Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain’.
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Cite as: Koch, Insa. “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain.” FocaalBlog, 12 June. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/12/insa-koch-the-making-of-modern-slavery-in-austerity-britain/.
Sharryn Kasmir,HofstraUniversity & University of Bergen
Several weeks into the global pandemic, the gravity of the COVID-19-triggered economic crisis in the United States is coming into focus. As of this writing, some 22 million people were put out of work, one in four small businesses face permanent closure, and a third of renters were unable to pay rent in the month of April.
