One day last October, I
happened to spot an acquaintance’s post on Wechat. It was a simple message
thanking all ‘Ant-izens’ (people who work in Ant Financial of Alibaba) for
their hard work, followed by a short video advertising Ant’s upcoming IPO. It
came from a data scientist who had given up his high-paid job in the US,
returned to China, and joined Ant Financial three years earlier. Ant shares
were then expected to start trading in Hong Kong and Shanghai on 5 November.
Jack Ma, the founder of Ant
and affiliate Alibaba Group Holding, had declared it a “miracle” that such a
large listing would take place outside New York. It was poised to raise up to
$34.4 billion in the world’s largest stock market debut and would create a vast
group of new billionaires. The data scientist’s post, like many posts on social
media, was a showoff: it was a subtle public announcement that he was going to
become extremely rich in two weeks’ time. The post contributed to a rather
complicated, self-consciously suppressed feeling among many professional
Chinese Americans: once again they were tasting the bitter feeling of being
stuck in the US middle-class, left behind by those who had managed to jump on
the fast-track train of China’s economic growth, grabbing opportunity in the
mainland and realizing their ‘Chinese Dreams’ by finally becoming ‘financially
independent’ (meaning rich enough that you and your offspring would never need
to worry about money again).
Then, on 3 November, two
days before the feast, the IPO was suddenly called off by the Chinese
government. Immediately thereafter, China ordered Ant Group to rectify its
businesses and comply with regulatory requirements amid increased scrutiny of
monopoly practices in the country’s internet sector. Such a blow! The data scientist
kept a dignified silence; my professional friends kept a polite silence. And
Jack Ma, the real protagonist of the drama, kept a cautious silence. He has
since disappeared from public view (only reappearing on 19 January 2021 with a
video emphasizing his social work). Where is he? What is he doing now? What
would happen to him? Why would all this happen? What does the state’s
intervention mean to Ant and Alibaba, to the whole ecommerce industry, and to
the whole private sector? What does it say about the logic of the state
apparatus in this enigmatic yet so important country? Where will it go? And how
would this affect the rest of the world, especially the West? So many questions
and so much drama.
Unsurprisingly, the Western liberal media have maintained their usual cold-war tone, by interpreting the drama as a typical attack initiated by a post-socialist authoritarian state towards this too powerful private entrepreneur out of fear or simply for the vanity and narcissism of Your Highness Xi. The Financial Times, for example, compared it immediately with the Khodorkovsky case in Russia (Lewis 2021, paywall). The implication was clear: you can never trust those former socialist authoritarian countries. They would never respect private property, follow the rules of the liberal world, and become “us”. Equally unsurprisingly, some Western Leftists have maintained their idealist tone towards a China that may perhaps be capitalist but is at least not Western capitalist. For them, the crack-down on Ant signifies a determined fight by the state and the population against greedy capital and capitalists.
Most people in China indeed
seem to have welcomed the crackdown and support the state’s actions. There are
various reasons for such support. One economist
I talked to supported it for financial security considerations and for the
state’s antitrust efforts. She mentioned the extremely high and hence hazardous
financial leverage that Ant Financial is playing with, as well as the antitrust
efforts against Facebook and Google in the USA. One private entrepreneur also
supported the action for financial security considerations, but based on
different reasoning. According to him, since there are many different kinds of
capital (including foreign capital) behind Alibaba and Ant, Ant’s IPO would further
open the door for foreign finance capital to enter the Chinese market. Some
intellectuals talked about the vulgar and disgusting advertisements made by Ant
Financial aiming to encourage irrational consumption, as well as the
irresponsible private loans it has given out, and how all these behaviors have
disrupted social order and degraded social morals.
All these reasons were evident in the government’s statements for halting Ant: to regulate the financial market, enforce antitrust legislation, and create a healthier consumption environment (Yu 2020). This all seems valid except that the role Ant is playing is largely as a platform––a middleman between state banks and individual small-loan borrowers. Much of the capital given out as small loans by Ant actually comes from the state banks. The state banks were not allowed to engage in these high profit businesses. They also do not have access to the necessary consumer data and data science. They normally deal with state owned enterprises. So, Ant stepped in to help state banks exploit a previously untouched financial market: grassroots personal loans. They then divided the profit. As some observers rightly pointed , Ant has always aimed at creating partnerships with big banks, not disrupting or supplanting them. More importantly, quite a few important government-owned funds and institutions are Ant shareholders and were expected to profit handsomely from the public offering (Zhong & Li 2020). Thus, the claim that Ant squeezed out the state banks is spurious. They were basically in the same boat. That is why the state never really regulated Ant before. Meanwhile, we should not forget that the informal financial market has long existed in Chinese grassroots society due to the inaccessibility of bank loans for most non-state economic entities and common people. Ant actually formalized (to a certain degree) this informal market. Yes, Ant did play the financial game of ‘asset-backed securities’ to enhance its financial leverage, but hardly to the extent that Wall Street is used to doing. Finally, what about the irrational consumption encouraged by easily accessible loans (especially for youths)? Maybe. But most such loans still come from other smaller and less responsible lending agencies following in Ant’s steps, which try to grasp crumbs from the huge cake but do not have the technology and data required to avoid excessive risk. It is these smaller and less technologically capable actors that are in fact creating chaos in credit supply. In short: even if we all agree that financial capital has always been highly speculative, and that Ant is no exception, some of the official statements justifying the intervention into Ant’s IPO still sound fishy.
Meanwhile, the poor in
China still seem the most determined supporters of the state’s crackdown on
Ant. They supported it out of their hatred toward big capital. On the internet,
they lambasted the bloodsucking behavior of Ant, and called it “Leech Financial”
instead of Ant Financial (Leech is pronounced in Chinese as “Ma Huang” and ant
is pronounced as “Ma Yi”). There is also a popular cartoon being circulated on
the internet that depicts Jack Ma as a beggar in his old age—homeless, fragile,
and sad. One blue-collar worker told me that any big capitalist whose main objective is to extract money from the poor
should be dragged down.
Tellingly, the state has intentionally toned down popular indignation. The relationship between state and capital in this country has always been much more complicated than the mere antagonism imagined by liberal commentators. The state can’t afford a strong group of capitalists with too much power and resources; but neither can it afford losing them and scaring capital away. It has always been an art of balancing. As we have seen, Jack Ma has reappeared recently with a more solemn appearance. His Ant is now required to deploy necessary ‘rectifications’ under the tighter rein of state regulation (CBNEditor 2021). It is, nevertheless, the right thing for the state to do, no matter the underlying aims. Ma, of course, should always keep in mind that there has never been an Era of Jack Ma; it has always been the Chinese Era that created him, as one Chinese official newspaper publicly warned him as early as 2019.
As for those professional
Chinese Americans who believe that they have missed the recent gold-digging
opportunities in China and have started to doubt their earlier decision to go
abroad, the crackdown on Ant—or more specifically, the broken dream of becoming
a billionaire data scientist—has taught them a rather comforting lesson:
miracles, whether for a country, a company, or an individual, are slippery. A
boring yet relatively predictable middle-class suburban life in the West should
at least be bearable, perhaps even enviable.
Juzimu is an ethnographic researcher of Chinese capitalist transitions and writes here under pseudonym.
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.
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/
Leith Mullings’ death is a terrible blow to anthropology –
and a heartbreaking loss to those of us who were lucky enough to have worked and
collaborated with her. For many of us,
Leith’s death, which happened on December 13, 2020, is still almost too much to
bear. It would have been hard to accept
under normal circumstances, but to have it happen so unexpectedly – and in the
context of the Trump insurrection and the extended COVID emergency, when so
many of us are already feeling so much vulnerability, grief, fear, isolation,
and uncertainty – makes it feel terrible in a way that, at the very least,
reveals the deep inadequacies of standard academic grieving rituals. And yet, here I go.
Leith was a leading figure of the Black Left who established
a pathbreaking form of anthropological praxis that was deeply aligned with the
struggle for the worldwide emancipation of Black people. Her praxis was rooted in Black feminism, in
the centering of African American working class women’s lives in broader
theorizing about political economy, kinship, representation, and resistance, and
in emphasizing the importance of social movements involving people of the
African diaspora in struggles for justice and equality. The influence of her work is especially remarkable
given the reactionary status quo in anthropology of the last three decades,
which, let’s face it, has a very poor track record of providing institutional
and intellectual space to Black women scholars.
Fortunately, Leith, her allies, and her students worked over many
decades to legitimate Black feminist materialist approaches in a discipline
that to this day remains reluctant to give them the attention they deserve.
A remarkable aspect of Leith’s anthropology is the specific
and subtle ways that she imparted antiracist political sensibilities into it. For Leith, as for many other scholars, racism,
sexism, and capitalism were co-constitutive of overlapping systems of
oppression, exploitation, violence, subordination, and discrimination. What made Leith’s work unique was her
insistence on the power of antiracist activism and organizing to interrupt,
unsettle, and contest the system’s hierarchies and inequalities. In her long-term ethnographic study of
African American women’s health in Harlem, for example, she and her co-author
Alaka Wali consider race, class and gender not as attributes of low-income
women of color who suffer from ill health.
Rather, they see race, class and gender more dynamically, as a set of interconnected
relationalities that shape health outcomes in complex ways. In her famous elaboration of Sojourner
Syndrome, the survival strategy of resilience adopted by African American women
to support their families and communities, Leith emphasizes not just the resilience
that living under the yoke of multiplicative oppressions requires of them and
how this stresses them out, but also the importance of Black community struggles
for autonomy, power and control. Along
similar lines, in her work on racisms in the Americas, and on Black Lives
Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, Leith showed how new movements build
on Black freedom struggles from the past to contest the co-production of racism
and capitalism. In a Left intellectual context in which identity politics is
frequently disparaged and class universalism reigns, Leith’s was an essential
and powerful voice whose work demonstrated the significance of transnational
antiracist activism and organizing: what she called “racialization from below.”
Across more than 40 years of intellectual work, she provided irrefutable
evidence that intersectional struggles have connected targets and effects. Let us hope that others who are committed to
justice and equality pay attention to this important lesson.
Decades after prominent scholars called for decolonizing anthropology, US anthropology still attracts too few Black, Indigenous and Latinx students. In the wake of the Black insurgent activism of last year, abolitionist theories and methods are slowly gaining traction but are not nearly as widespread as they should be. The task of emancipating critical historical ethnographic scholarship from anthropology’s imperial and white supremacist present remains an enormous challenge. A new generation of US-based Black anthropologists are influenced by Afropessimist arguments about antiblack world building and the exclusion of Black people from the category of the human. They are looking for ways to incorporate class into their analyses. This effort is not helped along by a Left anthropology that only gives lip service to race and gender in its anticapitalist critique. Fortunately, there is Leith’s work. Her illumination of Black women’s experience of work, kinship, and community life, her attention to overlapping systems of oppression, exploitation and discrimination, and her pioneering approach to the study of social movements serve as inspiration to all scholars who are searching for a way to move past the tired old race vs. class. vs. gender argument, who wish to take capitalism, racism and sexism seriously, and who seek to reconcile these differences in a unified emancipatory framework.
For Leith Mullings
Don Robotham, City University of New York
I first met Leith Mullings as a doctoral student in the
anthropology department of the University of Chicago in 1967. Based on our
common background and interests, we quickly became friends—part of a group of
progressive students on the eve of the Martin Luther King assassination and the
1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Those were tumultuous years,
formative for both of us. Later, she joined me for fieldwork in Ghana and
remained close friends thereafter.
Leith was a remarkable person who was able somehow to manage
the feat of successfully raising two wonderful children, political activism,
developing her large body of scholarship, rising to the top of her profession
while being a major interlocutor for her partner’s intellectual work and those
of her colleagues and friends. She was deeply committed to the Black struggle
first and foremost and always put this in a larger context of the struggle
against racism and all forms of oppression of all peoples worldwide.
Her experience of 1968 and after made her a political
economist and she never wavered from that position or methodology. The
principal focus of her work was racial oppression as it interacted with class
oppression, gender and health, with the emphasis decidedly on the first. From
her earliest work on mental health issues in Accra, Ghana, through her book on
reproductive health in Harlem to her most recent project on racial oppression
of indigenous and African-descended peoples in Latin America, it was the issue
of the material basis of racial oppression on which her work was focused. This
broad experience and sweep led Leith to the view that racial oppression was by
no means a local or national phenomenon of the United States of America but one
with deep historical global roots. Thus, over time she was led naturally
towards the intersectionality concept as a fundamental tool for understanding
oppression and, what was critical for her, laying the basis for a politics of
transformation.
We had many debates on the many challenges which this
approach raised, principally around how much weight to give to class, as
distinct from race and gender, and indeed, whether it was possible or fruitful
to make such distinctions. She would generally hold to the race end and I to
the class end with gender falling in-between in terms of analytical priority.
Leith well understood that adopting the intersectionality concept did not quite
resolve the issue but sharpened it: how and why these forces ‘intersected’ and
which, if any, was analytically or politically prior remained to be answered,
theoretically and empirically via fieldwork. Thus, our debates raged before and
through our current political crisis prior to the 2020 US Presidential
election.
Leith gave as good as she got, indeed usually one came out
on the losing end. She was deeply grounded in both the classics of political
economy and a wide range of anthropological research. It was impossible to
impress her with theoretical acrobatics. Her combination of academic knowledge
and practical political experience made her a formidable interlocutor and scholar.
Her devotion to her students and her conscientiousness in the exercise of her
doctoral supervision duties was something to behold. Few could compete with her
in the quality of the voluminous comments and stylistic guidance provided.
While always sympathetic, she insisted that high standards of scholarship be
maintained especially when a thesis was addressing radical experiences, as many
were. Her scholarly integrity was impeccable and unchallenged, and she enjoyed
the wide respect of many who strongly disagreed with her theoretical and
political positions.
Leith Mullings was very much a product of the 1960s and
1970s. Like many of us, she was deeply influenced by the Civil Rights Movement,
the Cuban Revolution, the Anti-Vietnam War struggle and especially 1968. She
has added to that tradition of intellectual and political struggle in a lasting
way, always insisting that oppression had a material foundation, the analysis
and transformation of which should be the focus of our work and life. We have
lost a wonderful, kind, human being, scholar and activist, when we can least
afford to.
The editorial boards of Focaal and FocaalBlog join our colleagues and friends in remembering the life and work of Leith Mullings; a scholar and activist who has shaped our scholarship and politics.
International media coverage of the February 1st military coup in Myanmar has been rather consistent. The focus, overwhelmingly, has been on the detention of State Counsellor and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, with speculations about the political machinations of Myanmar’s commander-and-chief, Min Aung Hlaing. In this way, the developing story has orbited around the theme of liberal democracy in peril, for which Suu Kyi in detention serves as synecdoche. What such a focus misses, however, is the very real threat the coup poses to millions of ordinary workers and their families across the country.
Already by late January 2021, Min Aung Hlaing had hinted of a possible coup. But still, the events of February 1st came as a shock to many inside the country and abroad. Claiming widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 elections, which delivered Aung San Suu Kyi’s ruling National League for Democracy a resounding victory, the military deployed troops to urban centres, detained Suu Kyi and other senior government officials, and declared a nationwide state of emergency this past Monday.
Online commentary has been rife with speculation. Was the coup motivated by Min Aung Hlaing’s presidential ambitions? Or was is it simply a matter of plain stupidity? The latter assertion claims plausibility on the grounds that the military itself drafted the 2008 constitution, which enshrined its role in government even before the coup by way of apportioned parliamentary seats and reserved ministerial positions. And it was a lucrative arrangement. With sprawling business interests under two expansive holding companies and other nepotistic business arrangements, the generals were collecting vast profits, much of it from mining and other extractive industries in the country’s north and northeast. Whatever the motivations behind the coup, little is certain at present. What is clear, however, is that the state of emergency has raised anxieties among the millions of workers and their families who were already struggling to get by in the industrial zones around Yangon (where I have done research since 2016) and elsewhere in the country.
Working class struggles
The working-class population in Yangon’s industrial zones comprises mostly former villagers pushed out of rural areas due to unmanageable debt, the infrastructural devastation of 2008’s Cyclone Nargis, and outright theft of their land by military and private business interests. As real estate speculation and elitist urban development over the past ten years drove up the cost of housing, hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in the city were priced out of formal accommodation and turned instead to cheaper squatter housing on the city’s outskirts. Many of these new urban residents sought employment in food and other processing factories producing for the domestic market, or at garment factories producing for export. By 2018, over a million workers—mostly young women, including many squatters—were employed in garment, textile, footwear, and accessories factories in Myanmar—mostly around Yangon. In this context, workers at factories and workplaces across Yangon’s industrial zones have over the past decade organised collectively, formed unions, and gone on strike in impressive struggles against employer intransigence and outright violence. Such struggles pre-date the country’s so-called democratic transition that began in 2011, which was also the year new labour legalisation granted workers a legal right to form unions. So, while the new labour law cannot be credited with empowering workers, it did grant them greater legal space in which to organise.
Covid-19
Then Covid-19 happened. A shortage of supplies from the People’s Republic of China in February 2020 led to factory closures and an initial loss of 10,000 to 15,000 jobs, and by September, 223 factories had filed for closure, temporary closure, or redundancy following a government-mandated lockdown. Meanwhile, factory employers used the pretext of Covid-19 disruption to fire unionised workers in mass, while police intervened to break up strikes and arrest organisers. With no effective social safety net in the country, dismissed factory workers have been struggling under the pandemic—taking on further debt, reducing food consumption, and in some cases turning to sex work to support their families. And all of this was before the military coup. Indeed, the day before the military seized power, I was editing a funding report for activist friends in Yangon who had formed a sewing cooperative to support factory workers fired during Covid-19 for their union organising activities.
Another state of emergency
Under these
already grim conditions, the declared state of emergency portends even more
dire circumstances for workers and their families. A Myanmar labour activist
group, Alokthema Awlan [The Workers’ Megaphone], shared online the
results of impromptu interviews conducted on the day of the coup with
factory workers in the Hlaingtharyar industrial zone, outside Yangon. Respondents
spoke of fears of food shortages and temporary store closures, which led to
panic buying and drove up prices of basic foodstuffs.
It remains unclear what the status of Myanmar labour law will be under the state of emergency, but there is little to suggest that space for worker organising will do anything but contract. Some workers have already expressed concern that existing labour law will be abrogated or simply disregarded. To get their views on the matter (and since I am in Singapore), a Burmese labour activist friend of mine interviewed, a couple days after the coup, several women employed at garment factories in the Hlaingtharyar industrial zone. One woman, who has been active in her local workplace union, stated:
“Now that the military has taken power, I’m worried the situation will go back to the way it was before [under military rule] and that the workers won’t have any rights anymore. Also, we were told that the [legal minimum] wage was going to be increased in the coming months. The young workers were hoping for that. But now we don’t expect that there’ll be an increase. It’ll be as though we’ve lost our rights. And with the military taking power, it’ll be like it was before, and employers will oppress the workers and reduce their wages. That’s what I expect.”
Trade unions in Myanmar’s global factories
As a precedent, over the two decades of direct military rule from 1988 to 2011, trade unions were prohibited, and police violently repressed workers’ attempts to organise and bargain collectively. Even under Myanmar’s so-called democratic transition (from 2011 to the present), police regularly intervened on the side of employers to repress workers’ struggles. Factories producing for the domestic market have routinely paid below the legal minimum wage, forced employees to work overtime, employed child labour, and violated manifold workplace health and safety laws. Even garment factories producing for export have been in widespread violation of legal labour standards, notwithstanding their greater likelihood of paying the minimum wage and avoiding child labour. Under such conditions, many workers who took their grievances to the government’s industrial relations offices encountered reluctance, evasiveness, and outright collusion with employers by government appointed mediators. Said one such factory worker whom I interviewed in 2019:
“The official at the Township Conciliation Body would say just a little on the side of the workers and would say a lot on the side of the employer. I don’t think that he was trying to achieve justice… I think that the employer and the official were working together.”
“Good” liberal government versus an illiberal military?
Such egregious conditions even before the coup—for industrial workers, but also for impoverished rural dwellers and ethnic minority civilians displaced by ongoing armed conflict elsewhere in the country—raise important caveats for emerging lines of analysis that would frame recent developments in Myanmar as a struggle between a “good” liberal government ousted by an illiberal military. Such was the dominant trope in Burma analysis during the 1990s and early 2000s. It allowed NLD politicians, foreign media, and Western governments to narrowly construe popular opposition to military rule in Myanmar as a singular desire for liberal capitalism and bourgeoise democracy. Military sympathisers could then argue (not without some truth) that such elitist politics disregarded the more immediate health and livelihood concerns of ordinary people in the country—urging, instead, an approach that would ostensibly go “beyond politics to societal imperatives.”
Fighting back
To be sure, workers, unions, and labour activist have already expressed their opposition to recent events. Shortly after the coup, trade unions and labour organisations released statements condemning the military’s actions. Activists disseminated proclamations online of a country-wide campaign of civil disobedience against the reassertion of direct military rule. And by Tuesday night, a day after the coup, the banging of pots was echoing throughout urban centres as an expression of popular dissent. (Friends in the border town of Myawaddy sent me photos of their much-battered kitchenware.) More confrontational tactics are apparently in the works, including strikes by hospital workers, trade unions, and students. And crucially, industrial workers around Yangon are eager to take part in such actions. According to another garment factory worker in Hlaingtharyar whom my friend interviewed:
“Since the 1st [of February] the workers here have wanted to go out and protest. They want to go downtown and join protests. It’s like that. We feel like we can’t accept [the situation]. We all want to do that. We already voted, and then the military seized power. So, we feel that we don’t want to accept what happened. Now, everyone is sharing news on their phones and writing comments about what has happened. If our union federation decided to take some action [against the coup], then all of us workers would want to take part.”
Better lines of analysis and action
There is a sense in which these actions, coming after Suu Kyi’s call for supporters to protest the military’s seizure of power, point to a mere restoration of Myanmar’s brief experiment in bourgeois democracy, which even before the coup had been an elitist project that provided cover for the military’s rapacious resource theft, militarisation of ethnic minority areas, and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya. However, given the frustrations that many workers previously expressed about the repressive working conditions they encountered under NLD rule, current working-class dissent also reveals, I suggest, the enduring material concerns of workers and the unemployed who are struggling to get by in Yangon’s industrial zones.
Such working-class opposition cannot be contained in a liberal narrative that would read proletarian dissent as a mere statement of support for bourgeois democracy under the 2008 constitution. Greater attention to the everyday struggles of ordinary people—under the state of emergency, of course, but also under the NLD’s own elitist rule over the preceding years—would do much to avert the sort of simplistic liberal narratives that dominated international reporting on Myanmar prior to the country’s return to quasi-civilian rule a decade ago.
Stephen Campbell is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, and Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He is the author of Border Capitalism, Disrupted: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone (2018), as well as numerous articles on labour issues in Myanmar and Thailand.
Cite as: Campbell, Stephen. 2021. “What can workers expect in post-coup Myanmar?” FocaalBlog, 3 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/03/stephen-campbell:-what-can-workers-expect-in-post-coup-myanmar?/
As Covid-19 has washed over Latin America
like a tsunami and the pillars of shaky economies have shuddered under
lockdowns, the priority of profits over public welfare stands out in starker
relief, restating the need for effective public policies and demanding
government intervention more than ever. Such an unprecedented moment poses
strong challenges for the left and Latin America’s social movements. Remobilizing
in the wake of Covid and building lasting, independent social movement power
are key tasks ahead.
During the lockdowns of spring 2020, short videos became a popular means of reflecting on new experiences of quarantine and social distancing. Passed around on social media platforms, downloaded in microseconds, and stored on smartphones where they became nested amidst other videos and photos, Corona videos brought about smiles amidst anxious circumstances and reflected meaningful forms of expert and folk knowledges about the pandemic. In this blogpost, the genre of the Corona video is approached from the perspective of anthropological filmmaking. Can anthropologists create their own cinematographic interventions into the pandemic, by joining these visual conversations while commenting on them at the same time?
On May 31, 2020, the US exploded in protest to address the super-exploitation of racism, which has uniquely scarred its history. This was followed by international demonstrations, including massive demonstrations in Paris against police brutality, a common theme of the Gilets Jaunes, a protest starting in November 2018 that I was studying. However, this time the Paris protests included the Gilets Jaunes but focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. In these important new developments, we have seen an international mobilization which may now be breaking down, or breaking through, some of the fragmentations of the working class between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship and other forms of historical subordinations.
Here I consider long-term research among street protests in France in relation to the post-Covid outrage against police brutality. Austerity policies should be seen not simply as a consequence of the Great Recession in the wake of the financial crisis but rather as the latest most destructive stage of a neoliberal assault that began worldwide in the 1970s. My ongoing research in France suggests that the mass demonstrations which began with the French Occupy movement Nuit Debout (see Susser 2016, 2017) in 2016 and continued through a variety of strikes among students, transportation workers and others until the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations of fall 2018, and finally the massive pension demonstrations of 2019/2020, represent an effort to rebalance the pendulum in the struggles against the ever more virulent neoliberal assault. These are, in the end, international processes. I suggest that the kinds of demonstrations which were emerging powerfully in France before Covid-19, are now beginning to take place in the US and elsewhere. The disastrous inequalities that were massively exposed in the unequal fatalities and economic distress caused by the pandemic (see Focaalblog: Kalb 2020, Nonini 2020) have precipitated protests that can be seen as part of an ongoing formative process.
Long-term neoliberal assault, international dimensions
Long-term neoliberal assault has precipitated the widespread destruction of a particular kind of state (Smith 2011) as well as the restructuring of global power and networks (Nonini and Susser 2020). The industrial state underwrote the corporate world by subsidizing the education, health and stability of a large proportion of workers. Twentieth century workers’ struggles established the particular forms of social reproduction originally reified in the welfare state. The idea, for example, of ‘a fair day’s wage’ encompassed the costs of the patriarchal, heterosexual family for the reproduction of men with their wives and children. However, the stable working class emerged alongside and in interaction with lower and precarious standards of reproduction for minorities, migrants and other historically subordinate groups and women, as well as the uneven development of (post) colonialism. In other words, industrial capitalism included a super-exploited working class, marked by race and gender, citizenship rights and in many cases, indigeneity (Carrier and Kalb 2015; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Fraser and Jaeggi 2019, Steur 2015). These groups were the subjects of distinctive historically-defined processes of inequality and they were generally excluded, especially in the United States, from the benefits of the welfare state and the class compromise.
The massive assaults of neoliberalism of the past 50 years destroyed the lives of displaced industrial workers and further devastated minority, immigrant and native communities. Under Covid-19, both in France and more drastically the US, these losses, long manifested in differential mortality rates, among others, have become immediate life and death issues.
A new working poor of displaced industrial workers compounding the super-exploitation of historically subordinated groups has been recognized in the United States and Europe since the 1990s (Susser 1996). In the shifting global power configurations, contemporary nation-states no longer protect the stability of the traditional working class. The emergence of different forms of social movements can be seen as an attempt to redress the assault on customary living conditions, life cycle security and aspirations. I would suggest that this is also an attempt to redefine workers to include the previously neglected minorities as well as new family and identity configurations. New forms of worker protection will have to consider new forms of relationships within families and new kinds of work/leisure routines to address issues that some categorize as identity politics (such as feminism and LBGT rights).
From Nuit Debout to Gilets Jaunes
After Nuit
Debout, 2016-17 in France, which was largely a big city, youth led, leftist
Occupy movement, the next major mobilization was that of the Gilets Jaunes (2018-2019). The Gilets Jaunes were recognized as a
new phenomenon as they came from the urban peripheries of Paris and throughout
the provinces. Not regarded as cosmopolitan they included many teachers,
nurses, social workers as well as truck drivers, chefs, construction workers
and service workers in general. Many Gilets Jaunes were middle aged and
some were thought to be right wing.
Although perhaps not representative, it
should be noted that the woman who sent out the first call to protest the new
fuel tax implemented by President Emmanuel Macron was an educator of color from
the urban periphery of Paris. In addition, contrary to stereotype and the
government portrayal of the demonstrations, Gilets Jaunes insisted that they
did not object to environmental concerns. They objected to a measure that targeted
for extra tax the fuel that poor people in the urban peripheries were dependent
on for their daily commutes. Protests were organized in collaboration with
climate activists to demonstrate their common concerns and the support of the
Gilets Jaunes for the environment. A frequent chant and sign stated; we care
about “the end of the month and the end of the world”.
The first email call to protest the fuel tax was put out in September 2018 but by November, when the Gilets Jaunes began to block the highways and roundabouts and gather in thousands in the streets of Paris, they were objecting to much more than the fuel tax. They were concerned with the degradations of public services, the privatization of health care and their own daily challenges as well as what they saw as the decay of democracy. These protestersfrom the urban periphery frequently described the lack of investment in public transportation outside Paris and the declining support for provincial services as illustrating the “stealing of the state.” (Susser 2020). People regarded public services as a right and saw the services as belonging to the state as paid for by their tax money and therefore belonging to them. When the state privatized a service, it was seen as ‘stealing the public money.’ The destruction of the state is manifest not only in the privatization and dismantlement of public services, but also in the crisis of daily life, the family, education, health care, the aged, the handicapped (highly visible at protests on crutches and in wheelchairs) and the students, who feel they are “losing their futures,” as one protester said to me.
Continued Gilets Jaunes resistance
Until the pension strike, which began in
September 2019, the Gilets Jaunes were the most powerful, and most
supported of a variety of movements that had emerged in France since the
austerity policies imposed in the wake of the financial crisis. They linked
many of the uprisings and strikes from different sectors (such as railroads,
teachers and health workers) and the smaller uprisings among hospital aides or
the sans-papiers as well as the climate change activists and left-wing
organizations. Not concentrated in the workplace although participating in many
disparate strikes, the Gilets Jaunes invented new methods, such as the
occupation of the ronds-points, the
building of cabanas and the freeing of toll booths. In these ways, the Gilets
Jaunes were attempting to forge a new set of resistances and generating the
support of the public from the banlieues to the provinces. The movement
was both enraged and resilient: Enraged at the loss of community and public and
social services over time, and resilient in the commoning efforts to create a
new community (Susser 2020). The Gilets Jaunes, made up of working-class
people on the urban periphery, including many pensioners and families who could
not make ends meet, were crafting an emerging oppositional bloc.
The pension protests began in September
2019, when strikers closed down the metro and the buses for a day. A few months
later, different sectors from health care workers, legal professions, social
services, educators and others, organized massive strikes and demonstrations in
the streets that continued until they were shut down by the Covid 19 epidemic
in March 2020.
Gilets Jaunes among the grassroots union members, in many ways, had forced the unions to take up more militant positions against the pension changes. As health workers, lawyers and transportation workers marched in massive protests through Paris, Gilets Jaunes could be seen populating the street protests of every profession in their distinctive yellow jackets, personal statements written in black marker on their backs. The signature song of all the pension protests was that of the Gilets Jaunes, as were many of the chants and banners. Until Paris was closed down for Covid-19 in March 2020, the Gilets Jaunes and the massive pension marches combined in different, often conflicted, ways across France, in some cities with more cooperation in time and place than others.
In France, Nuit Debout, the Gilets Jaunes, the pension strikers and many other movements represent transformative spaces where people in the current era of financialization and globalization are struggling to work out new strategies. Activists envision horizontalist movements as an effort to develop innovative forms of protest to counteract the increasing inequality, authoritarian tendencies and hardened boundaries of the new global regime. Such progressive representation strives for inclusivity and the breakdown and recognition of established hierarchies of gender, race, immigration and class, among others. Each of these groups has to be understood in the context of their own history and social movements. The participants in Nuit Debout were not the same as the Gilets Jaunes. However, in France and elsewhere, multiple subaltern groups may be beginning to recognize themselves as part of a larger political bloc in opposition to the destruction of the welfare state and degradation of democratic representation (Kalb and Mollona 2018). Such movements are contingent and contested, reflective of the same rage against the destruction of living standards and aspirations for a generation but offering hope for more inclusive solutions.
Before the Gilets Jaunes, in 2016/7 activists from Nuit Debout had protested the police violence often focused on young men of color in the streets. The Gilets Jaunes protested the violence of the police against their own street demonstrations for over a year. It is a crucial development that in June 2020 the Gilets Jaunes joined ranks with the protests against police brutality and racism that were rocking the world. At this conjuncture, after the shocking Covid-19 shutdown and the disproportionate deaths of people of color in France as elsewhere, the displaced workers of the urban periphery joined directly with the superexploited immigrants, refugees and previously colonized people of color from the banlieues in several unprecedented massive demonstrations.
As Polanyi knew, rage against the disastrous failures of (neo)liberalism could be expressed in brutal and fascist ways (see also Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2020, Kalb and Halmai 2011). However, the protests that we see today are a hopeful sign in their inclusive progressive moments bringing together many groups who are all at risk in different ways and at different levels or aspects of exploitation. They are demanding a rebalancing of the destructive neoliberal assault of the past 50 years. They are constructing an inclusive but uneven critical community which may serve as an antidote against the growing fury which is fueling nationalism and exclusivism (see also Kalb and Mollona 2018).
Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.
References
Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi. 2018. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Medford, MA: Polity
Carrier, James and Don Kalb
(eds.) 2015. Anthropologies of Class:
Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kalb, Don and G Halmai (eds.) 2011.
Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class:
Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe.
Vol. 15. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Kalb, Don and Massimilliano
Mollona (eds.) 2018. Worldwide
Mobilizations. New York: Berghahn Books.
Kasmir, Sharryn and August
Carbonella (eds.) 2014. Blood and Fire.
New York: Berghahn Books
Kalb, Don 2020. Covid, Crisis and the Coming Contestations. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/
Maskovsky, Jeff and S. Bjork-James (eds.) 2020.
Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism. Morgantown,
WV: West Virginia University Press
Nonini, Don 2020 Black Enslavement and the Coming Agro-Industrial Capital. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/03/don-nonini-black-enslavement-and-agro-industrial-capital/
Nonini, D. and I. Susser (2020).
The Tumultuous Politics of Scale. New
York: Routledge.
Steur, Luisa (2015). Class
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and Kalb D (eds) Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality.
Cambridge: CUP, pp.118-130.
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“The Construction of Poverty and Homelessness in US Cities.”Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1):
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Susser,
Ida (2017). Introduction: For or Against the Commons?, Focaal 79:1-5.
Susser, Ida (2017). Commoning
in New York City, Barcelona and Paris: Notes and observations from the field. Focaal 79: 6-22.
Susser, Ida (2020, forthcoming). “They are stealing the state”: Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In: Urban Ethics Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). New York: Routledge.
Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2020. “Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?” FocaalBlog, 3 December. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser:-covid,-police-brutality-and-race:-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries?/
The purpose of
this work is to examine and elaborate on the relationship between the people of
Native North America and the material and ideological content of
developmentalism as examined within the fields of anthropology and Native American
or Indigenous studies. I observe that Indigenous North American peoples are
frequently excluded from discussions of economic development within
anthropology. I try to reconcile this situation and reinsert native peoples
into the anthropology of development by demonstrating the historical and political
continuities between United States Indian Policy with the exported ‘development
apparatus’. In doing so, I follow Neveling (2017) and others in pushing back
against postdevelopment’s dematerialization of development and its emphasis on
development as discourse. Instead, I argue that a historical materialist or
political economic approach (Rose 2015, 2017, 2018) that conceptualizes
development in the terms of Neveling’s (2017) “political economy machinery”
better explains the situation of Indigenous North American peoples and the
processes that make and unmake their lives.
The
overall point here is that in order to properly understand the political
economic basis and ideological dimensions to the Post-War developmentalism
project it is necessary to understand and examine the history of those
political economic models and the history of those ideological dimensions.
While there likely were developmentalist antecedents in the policies of the
European empires, a major distinctive feature of post-war developmentalism is
that it was rooted in the political economy and hegemonic position of the
United States. As such, it is crucial to understand the local antecedents for
American developmentalist policies, which necessarily brings us to Indigenous peoples
as they were the early laboratories of these policies and political economic
models.
Contextual Disconnect
On
the global level, the sub-discipline of the anthropology of development has
flourished in the last half century, along with the interdisciplinary field of
development studies. In that time, prominent anthropological works have been
produced within the sub-discipline that have had a broad impact within
anthropology and influence beyond their own regional and disciplinary scope.
Some of these classics include the works of Arturo Escobar (1995), James
Ferguson (1990), Akhil Gupta (1998), David Mosse (2005), and Tania Murray Li
(2007). These works describe the transformative effects of ‘development’,
especially on the role of state policies, on the regions formerly grouped
together as the “Third World” (i.e. Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin
America), which are now more conventionally referred to as the global South. The
field of the anthropology of development, along with the interdisciplinary
field of development studies, has remained almost exclusively “Third World”
focused. Chibber (2013) observes that this isolation in the form of the lack of
thorough comparative engagement between capitalist development in Western
Europe and capitalist development in the Third World has led to an inaccurate
and romanticized portrayal of each in postcolonial studies of Third World
development. While I generally agree with Chibber’s critique, I wish to move
into a different context. The anthropological literature on development in the
global South is also disconnected from the anthropological literature on what
would otherwise be called ‘development’ in what was at one time called the “Fourth
World” (i.e. stateless nations), especially in regard to Indigenous peoples in
North America. This disconnect actually goes both ways. Jessica Cattelino’s
(2008) book is likely the most popular anthropological work on Indigenous
economic development in Native North America in the last several decades. Even
though her ethnography on (capitalist) economic development within the Seminole
Nation of Florida was published after the texts of those aforementioned
prominent anthropology of development authors, and deals with many similar
issues around development such as the intricacies and problematics of
sovereignty, governmentality, and possible alternative modernities, she does
not utilize them or the other work from this subfield. Furthermore, Tania Murray
Li’s (2010) comparative discussion of the relationship between capitalism and
dispossession in different regions does not include Native North America despite
the lengthy and ongoing history of dispossession of Indigenous peoples in North
America in relation to both colonial policies of the past as well as
contemporary processes of neoliberal capitalism and state (re)formation in the
United States and Canada. Instead of including Native North America as another
case study alongside Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, she mentions Indigenous
people in the Anglo settler states (i.e. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United
States) or CANZUS countries (Cornell 2015) only once and in passing, and does
so with the effect of driving a further wedge between them by saying that the
processes of class differentiation were different among Indigenous peoples in
those locations. Similarly, David Mosse’s (2013) summary article on the state
of the subfield is telling of its geographic orientation as there is no mention
of Indigenous North America at all and only a passing mention of development in
Europe. The point is that these works are not drawing from and are not in
dialogue with each other. There is a disconnect between anthropological studies
of development in the global South with those on the economics and development
of Indigenous people in the Anglo settler states even though (as I will argue) they
share certain commonalities and histories.
Developmentalism and Native North America
The
general scholarly consensus is that the modern ‘development apparatus’ and the pseudo-utopian
vision that is the modernist-developmentalist paradigm began with the Truman
administration after the Second World War, the emergence of the United States
as a superpower, and actions taken within the context of the Cold War in
needing to make capitalism more appealing for the (newly) former colonies in
comparison to the political economic model of the Soviet Union and then later
China (Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995; Cowen and Shenton 1996; Rist 2008; Kiely
2007). As Escobar (1995: 3-4) states:
The Truman doctrine
initiated a new era in the understanding and management of world affairs,
particularly those concerning the less economically accomplished countries of
the world. The intent was quite ambitious: to bring about the conditions
necessary to replicating the world over the features that characterized the
“advanced” societies of the time—high levels of industrialization and
urbanization, technicalization of agriculture, rapid growth of material
production and living standards, and the widespread adoption of modern
education and cultural values.
The
disconnect between the subfields is especially problematic here because while the
Truman administration does mark a shift in global development policy, scholars
of Native North America would observe that the Truman administration also
constituted a dramatic (and infamous) shift in United States Indian Policy. These
two phenomena are not disconnected. When the Truman administration began
exporting this pseudo-utopian vision of the glories of capitalism, technology,
and Western modernity to the world, United States Indian Policy shifted away
from similar policies of bureaucratization, technicalization, and
industrialization for tribal governments. These policies were based around the
creation and support of local/Indigenous bureaucratic institutions that would
in essence aid internally in the development of Native American societies
toward a form of collectively managed capitalism, which was intended to bring
them as societies into the modern world. Although it had antecedents in United
States Indian Policy in the nineteenth century (Miner 1989) stretching back
even to the Jefferson administration’s ‘civilization’ program, this type of
internal developmentalism began in a comprehensive manner with the
administration of Franklin Roosevelt in the early 1930s and crystallized around
the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (Jorgensen 1978). The Act, as the
product of the political economy of the United States of the period, was
therefore in accordance with the interests of the American bourgeoisie
(Littlefield 1991), and brought about the transformation of Native American
societies by formally institutionalizing capitalism within bureaucratic tribal
governments. In many locations, it had the effect of solidifying political
power over Indigenous communities by the emergent Indigenous bourgeoisie (Schröder 2003; Nagata 1987; Ruffing 1979;
Rose 2014).
The Truman administration marked the shift in Indian Policy away from Reorganization and towards Termination (Duthu 2008; Fixico 1986). The Termination period involved a series of policies that sought to formally complete the integration or incorporation of Indigenous peoples into the American mainstream political economy by means of subjecting them to the authority of the States, physically relocating them off reservations and to urban areas, and ending—or terminating—the political and legal standing of Indigenous governments in the eyes of the United States (Duthu 2008). In short, the Termination era represents a shift in the orientation of developmentalism for native peoples: from one where their own local bureaucratic institutions were fostered as the means to bring native people into capitalist modernity, to one where these same institutions were viewed as the impediments to their achievement of modernity. It represents a shift from the policies of internal developmentalism to an external developmentalism.
The
internal developmentalist policies of Indian Reorganization bear a resemblance
to the modernist-developmentalism that the United States exported to the world
during the Truman administration. It is my contention that the development
apparatus and the modernist-developmentalist paradigm are direct successors to
the long history of United States Indian Policy and these efforts. The Truman
administration’s shift to a policy of global scope meant that they were to
export what is in essence the same civilizing project except they did so in the
language of development and modernity. However, by the 1970s, Indian Policy
would shift back toward internal developmentalism in the periphery except this
time under the label of self-determination (Duthu 2008). This represents an
oscillation of developmentalism in the center and in the periphery
corresponding to periods of expansion and contraction of American political
economy (Friedman 1994). For native peoples, internal developmentalism marks a
period of peripheralization as the center contracts, while termination and
assimilation mark a period of external developmentalism and reincorporation
into the center as it expands.
Similarly,
the geographic contexts must be comparatively examined to draw out these
historical parallels to better understand the historical and contemporary
dimensions of capitalist development. For example, at around the same time that
James Ferguson (1990) was famously discussing the “anti-politics machine” and
how development (even ‘failed’ development) is linked not simply to an
expansion of capitalism but to the expansion of state power, Marxist
anthropologist Alice Littlefield (1991: 219) was writing that
Studies and critiques of these major policy shifts [in US Indian Policy] have frequently noted that the assimilation policies often failed to assimilate, and that self-determination policies often failed to provide for meaningful self-determination. Looking beyond the discourse of the reformers who claimed credit for these policy shifts, it can be observed that material interests of various sectors of American capital were often well-served by the workings of particular policies.
While
I recognize and agree with Neveling’s (2017) critiques of the theoretical and
empirical dimensions of Ferguson’s work in his overemphasis on discourse to the
exclusion of political economic context, the crucial point here for me is to
understand that the underlying processes being described are not dissimilar.
These two works are describing a singular process or a singular political
economic machinery, except that it is occurring at different times and in
different places. Ferguson is describing “development” in Lesotho in the middle
to late twentieth century, while Littlefield is describing “civilization”,
“assimilation”, and “self-determination” in the United States as applied to
Native Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Further Research
We do not have the space here to delve into a detailed examination of each of the finer points. Rather, my purpose with this piece was to try to begin to connect these disparate areas and fields of study and put them into dialogue with each other. Further comparative study would better elucidate the parallels and lines of divergence in the operation of capitalist development and the experiences of peoples within this machinery. This would lead to a greater understanding and greater insights into the history and operation of capitalist development as a global project and singular machinery.
Samuel W. Rose is an independent scholar based in Schenectady, NY. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2017. His dissertation was entitled Mohawk Histories and Futures: Traditionalism, Community Development, and Heritage in the Mohawk Valley. His research has focused on the indigenous populations of eastern North America, community and economic development, political economy, and issues of race, identity, and the politics of history. His work has appeared in journals such as Anthropological Theory, Dialectical Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology, and the Journal of Historical Sociology.
References
Cattelino,
Jessica. (2008). High Stakes: Florida
Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chibber, Vivek.
(2013). Postcolonial Theory and the
Specter of Capital. New York: Verso.
Cornell, Stephen.
(2015). Processes of Native Nationhood: The Indigenous Politics of
Self-Government. The International
Indigenous Policy Journal 6(4), Article 4.
Cowen, M.P. and
R.W. Shenton. (1996). Doctrines of
Development. New York: Routledge.
Duthu, N. Bruce.
(2008). American Indians and the Law.
New York: Penguin.
Escobar, Arturo.
(1995). Encountering Development: The
Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Ferguson, James.
(1990). The Anti-Politics Machine:
“Development”, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Fixico, Donald.
(1986). Termination and Relocation:
Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Friedman,
Jonathan. (1994). Cultural Identity and
Global Process. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Gupta, Akhil.
(1998). Postcolonial Developments:
Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Jorgensen, Joseph
G. (1978). A Century of Political Economic Effects on American Indian Society,
1880-1980. Journal of Ethnic Studies
6(3): 1-82.
Kiely, Ray. (2007).
The New Political Economy of Development:
Globalization, Imperialism, Hegemony. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Li, Tania Murray.
(2007). The Will to Improve:
Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Li, Tania Murray.
(2010). Indigeneity, Capitalism, and the Management of Dispossession. Current Anthropology 51(3): 385-414.
Littlefield,
Alice. (1991). Native American Labor and Public Policy in the United States. In
Alice Littlefield and Hill Gates (eds.), Marxist
Approaches in Economic Anthropology (p. 219-232). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Miner, H. Craig.
(1989). The Corporation and the Indian:
Tribal Sovereignty in Indian Territory, 1865-1907. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Mosse, David.
(2005). Cultivating Development: An
Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. New York: Pluto Press.
Mosse, David.
(2013). The Anthropology of International Development. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 227-246.
Nagata, Shuichi.
(1987). From Ethnic Bourgeoisie to Organic Intellectuals: Speculations on North
American Native Leadership. Anthropologica
29(1): 61-75.
Neveling, Patrick.
(2017). The Political Economy Machinery: Toward a Critical Anthropology of
Development as a Contested Capitalist Practice. Dialectical Anthropology 41(2): 163:183.
Rist, Gilbert.
(2008). The History of Development: From
Western Origins to Global Faith, 3rd Edition. New York: Zed
Books.
Rose, Samuel W.
(2014). Comparative Models of American Indian Economic Development: Capitalist
versus Cooperative in the United States and Canada. Critique of Anthropology 34(4): 377-396.
Rose, Samuel W.
(2015). Two Thematic Manifestations of Neotribal Capitalism in the United
States. Anthropological Theory 15(2):
218-238.
Rose, Samuel W.
(2017). Marxism, Indigenism, and the Anthropology of Native North America:
Divergence and a Possible Future. Dialectical
Anthropology 41(1): 13-31.
Rose, Samuel W.
(2018). The Historical Political Ecological and Political Economic Context of
Mohawk Efforts at Land Reclamation in the Mohawk Valley. Journal of Historical Sociology 31(3): 253-264.
Ruffing, Lorraine
Turner. (1979). The Navajo Nation: A History of Dependence and
Underdevelopment. Review of Radical
Political Economics 11(2): 25-43.
Schröder, Ingo W. (2003). The Political Economy of Tribalism in North America: Neotribal Capitalism?. Anthropological Theory 3(4): 435-456.
Cite as: Rose, Samuel W. 2020. “Disconnected Development Studies: Indigenous North America and the Anthropology of Development.” FocaalBlog, 17 November. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/11/17/samuel-w-rose-disconnected-development-studies-indigenous-north-america-and-the-anthropology-of-development/
Tiny bodies, the remains of little children entombed without name or mercy, are uncovered in Tuam, a small Irish town in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland, at the site of a former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in 2017. The excavation, part of a Mother’s and Baby’s Home commission of inquiry (set up in 2015), precipitated by the tireless research of a local historian Catherine Corless, uncovered an eerie underground structure demarcated into 20 chambers (possibly a sewage tank) containing the children’s remains. The commission stated that ‘multiple remains’ were found, but some estimates run as high as in the region of 800. The home was run by the Catholic Bon Secours order of nuns from 1925 to 1961, one of many on the island of Ireland at that time. Now in Oct 2020, even before the Commission of inquiry publishes their long-delayed report (original deadline Feb 2018 due now Oct 30th, 2020), the Irish State has stated it intends on sealing the Mother and Baby records for 30 years.
The first two cases of COVID-19 in
Indonesia were announced on 2 March 2020, quite late compared to other
countries. The first patient was a 31-year-old woman who came into contact with
a Japanese citizen – who later tested positive – at a dance event in South
Jakarta. She then passed it on to her mother. Both women were hospitalized in
North Jakarta, which later became one of the referral hospitals for COVID-19
cases in the city. By early May, the number of confirmed cases nationwide had
reached 9800, including 800 deaths. While elsewhere around the world
governments are easing lockdown restrictions, in Indonesia there is still
minimal testing being undertaken and the COVID-19 pandemic is showing little
sign of decline.
As in many other nations, Indonesian
politicians have been accused of not recognizing the seriousness of the
situation early enough, and some eventually admitted to misinforming the public. Sophia
Hornbacher (2020) only recently highlighted the populist rhetoric and
neo-liberal policy of the Indonesian government, which once more illustrates
the country’s problems of social injustice and welfare. In a statement made in
early March, the health minister Terawan Agus Putranto said he was surprised by
the commotion arising from the spread of COVID-19, as in his perspective “flu is more dangerous than the corona
virus”.
In mid-April, 46 health workers at a
hospital in Semarang were infected after patients had not revealed their travel
history from areas with a high number of infections, or coronavirus red zones.
Six weeks after the first case of COVID-19 was announced and in the face of
what looked like becoming an uncontrollable pandemic in Indonesia, Lindsey and
Mann summed up what many Indonesia watchers around
the world and indeed Indonesians were feeling – that the government had been in
denial of the health threat for too long and a clearly structured approach on
how to handle infections and sources of these infections was still missing.
Crisis
in healthcare
For some time there has been rising
criticism of Indonesia’s public healthcare, including the closeness of
pharmaceutical industries to medical practitioners and related “unhealthy
practices” of corporate theft with government backing. Now,
the existing structural and personnel shortage in the public health system has
become glaringly stark due to the pandemic. The latest World Health
Organisation (WHO) data shows that Indonesia’s ratio of doctors per 10,000
people is 3.8, and it has 24 nurses and midwives per 10,000
people. This is well below Malaysia’s 15 doctors per 10,000 people and Thailand
and Vietnam’s eight. Besides this, questions about pharmaceutical monopolies and
cartel practices in the medical sector, and cases of malpractice and fraud at
the expense of patients, are mounting. Underlying this mood is a latent mistrust not only of the pharmaceutical
industries, the medical profession, and the medical structures of hospitals,
but of the national elites in general and the civil servants of health-related
authorities in particular (Weydmann 2019: 60).
Recent history offers some good reasons
for why medical professionals, patients and those watching Indonesia’s health
sector are wary. In 2006, during the H5N1 pandemic crisis, or bird flu as it
was commonly known, Indonesia claimed “viral sovereignty” and refused to
cooperate with the WHO, going against a 2005 international health regulation on
responsibilities and rights of national governments when dealing with a public
health emergency. The contentious issue was around samples of H5N1, which were
collected within Indonesia’s borders. In their analysis
of this debate, Relman, Choffnes and Mack observed that the government declared
“it would not share them until the WHO and high-income countries established an
equitable means of sharing the benefits (particularly, the vaccine) of the
sample collection” (Mack, Choffnes & Relman 2010: 27).
Against this background many have reservations about the level of cooperation
that can be reached between the WHO and Indonesia’s government in handling the
current pandemic.
Many parties in the weeks and months to
come have already criticized the emergency strategy of the government and the
national health care system. We want to shed light on another issue raised by
the COVID-19 pandemic, that of medical pluralism in Indonesia and different
approaches to illness and health, as the medical context is critical for
understanding the government’s response..
Jamu
will do?
During the initial phase of the
pandemic, some Indonesian policy makers claimed publicly that COVID-19
infections could heal without intervention, as long as a person’s body had a
strong resistance to disease. For this reason, they reminded the public to
maintain or boost levels of body immunity. President Joko Widodo supported this
assessment and recommended that citizens drink traditional herbal jamu remedies to prevent infections.
In order to understand the political
play on the role of jamu during the pandemic, it is important to know
that the consumption of herbal plants as medicine has been part of Indonesian
culture for thousands of years (Beers 2001), mainly based on oral traditions
and without systematic canonization. Jamu isoften produced by
households of jamu gendong sellers, who carry bottled remedies in baskets
or via bicycles or motorbikes to customers.
Today, however, jamu is no
longer the medicine of the poor but an economic sector with large international
companies such as Air Mancur, Djamu Djago or Nyonya Meneer producing a variety of
jamu remedies sold as instant powders, tablets or capsules. Street
vendors compete with big drugstores over jamu sales and the Indonesian
government campaign for jamu as a remedy against Covid-19 supported an
important “economic pillar for the nation” (Prabawani 2017: 81) that generated IDR
21.5 trillion (US$1.38 billion) in 2019; up 13.1 percent from Rp 19 trillion in
2018.
As early as mid-March, the
Singapore-based newspaper The Straits Times reported that the President posted a statement on a government website
saying that he started drinking a mixture of red ginger, lemongrass and
turmeric three times a day since the spread of the virus and was sharing it
with his family and colleagues. He claimed he was convinced “that a
herb concoction can ward against being infected with the coronavirus”. His
statements on the use of jamu medicine contributed to a rapid
price increase so that prices of red ginger, turmeric and curcuma
multiplied.
Like Jokowi, other politicians have pointed to the benefits of traditional medicine
in the current crisis. The district health office of Situbondo in East Java invited members of his community to a public
event to drink jamu medicine. He also
involved hundreds of school students to further promote the benefits of the
traditional medicine for strengthening the immune system. The minister for
health also handed over jamu remedies
to the first three recovered COVID-19 patients.
The WHO has issued a list of
recommendations for handling the current pandemic, including
handwashing, following general hygiene and maintaining social distancing. The
early suggestions of Indonesian politicians to use herbal Jamu remedies as well
as their general assessment of COVID-19 as a harmless virus, has been in clear
contrast to the WHO assessment.
However, “healthcare” is not a singular
process but consists of a complexity of different medical traditions, external
influences and dynamics. As such, the ongoing COVID-19 challenge may call on
different medical approaches, which are not exclusive from one another. So,
whilst the WHO uses a biomedical understanding as the basis for assessing the
current pandemic, Indonesia’s politicians and many citizens are turning to
traditional Javanese medical paradigms. Rather than dismissing outright the
calls from Jokowi and others to use traditional medicine during the pandemic,
it is necessary to contextualize their calls within Indonesia’s corporate
health care market as much as within the nation’s medical pluralism and the
concept of traditional Javanese jamu medicine in particular.
Traditional Javanese medicine and the
pandemic
The
public provision of healthcare in Indonesia is almost exclusively based on
biomedical treatment approaches and corresponding
ways of defining health and disease. Each sub-district in Indonesia is expected
to facilitate one community health center (“Pusat Kesehatan Masyarakat”, acronym: puskesmas) in order to focus on preventing diseases and
promoting health. In the present COVID-19 outbreak, this has meant that puskesmas are key institutions for
public health treatment and also surveillance. It is expected that each center
will trace and monitor infections locally. However, puskesmas are mostly small medical units with perhaps only one
medical doctor on staff. In the current crisis, these small local centers are now required to split their limited teams in order to
provide public education about the pandemic, contact tracing of infected
persons, and treatment of COVID-19 patients in isolation from patients with
other diseases.
Indonesia,
like any other nation in the world, consists of an ethnically diverse society
and this social diversity is reflected in a pluralistic medical system. Large
parts of Indonesian society rely on traditional medical approaches. The use
of “traditional” medicine or a combination of biomedical treatment and
“traditional” medicine, is a common phenomenon all over Indonesia (Ferzacca 2001; Woodward 2011, among others). Relatively recently, more educated
urban households have also been found likely to use “traditional” rather than
biomedical healthcare. This vivid diversity of medical traditions is
represented not only in the supermarket shelves stacked with the jamu-style
soft drinks promoted by the government, but also in a large informal medical
market, though not in the national primary health care system.
Despite the dominance of biomedical
approaches in primary health care and the accompanying skepticism towards other
health etiologies, over the past 30 years the market for traditional and
complementary medicine in Indonesia has experienced a veritable boom. The use
of a whole range of over-the-counter (that is, non-prescription) medications,
pharmaceuticals, tonics and new forms of herbal or other mixtures has sprung up, with a wide spectrum of herbal
products and stamina remedies (Lyon 2005: 14).
As the COVID-19 crisis deepened, a new
market emerged offering “Corona Jamu” that
contains turmeric, ginger and other ingredients, in order to strengthen the
body’s immune system against viruses. An existing traditional remedy, Wedang
Uwuh – a herbal specialty in the region of Yogyakarta – is also being
promoted, as it is used to prevent colds, warm the body and boost immunity. The
remedy is composed of secang wood, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg
leaves, lemon grass roots and cardamom. The
Jakarta Post summarized several reports from
marketing and consumer research agencies, e.g. McKinsey, and emphasized that
a number of jamu producers have seen an increase in
revenue of up to 50 per cent and predicted that the habit of drinking jamu will be “a new normal”, claiming jamu as “the new espresso”. (However, no data on current
market shares of small-traders and corporations in the sector is available.)
Yet, from a medical anthropology
perspective, jamu consumption and
prescriptions are based on the principles of humoral medicine, which has a long
and sophisticated tradition. It identifies bodies as having four important fluids which are characterized as hot/cold and
wet/dry, and is based on the belief that a balance of these bodily fluids is
fundamental to good health. According to this understanding, a balanced unity
of body, mind and spirit are essential to withstand outside influences such as
viruses, evil spirits or social discrepancies (Weydmann 2019: 213ff.).
It is a long way to go for
anyone to provide academic evidence that jamu medicine helps against
Covid-19. And yet, some scientists now claim that the more-established
traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), both traditional and modern remedies,
strengthens the body’s immune system in ways that reduce viral pathogenic
factors (Zhou et al., 2020). As has been demonstrated by Hartanti et al. (2020),
jamu remedies promoted as Covid-19 prevention in Indonesia are adaptations
of the TCM formula which has been officiated in the Chinese National Clinical
Guideline as a means to prevent Covid-19 or treatment during severe and
recovery stages.
While such trials and debates continue,
one thing is certain. The current crisis of Covid-19 seems to be a big chance
for the jamu industries. Recently, the head of the Indonesian National
Agency of Drug and Food Control BPOM
(Badan Pengawas Obat dan Makanan) declared that from January to July 2020 new permits
have been distributed for 178 traditional medical remedies, 3 phytopharmaca,
and 149 local health supplements with properties to help strengthen the immune
system. BPOM also supports research on eight herbal products to combat symptoms
of Covid-19. And, as the Jakarta Post recently wrote that there will be
“a bright, post-pandemic future for Indonesian ‘jamu’” (Susanty 2020), it comes
as no surprise that the Indonesian herbal products manufacturer Sido Muncul is
expanding into the Saudi Arabian market as “an
opportunity amid the COVID-19 pandemic”.
However,
besides the economic opportunities, we also need to consider that the pandemic negatively
impacts the poorest sectors of the population. Even though the Indonesian
Supreme Court on the one hand annulled the increase of premiums for the
National Health Insurance System (BPJS Kesehatan), Indonesian politicians are now
asking the poor to spend money for jamu medications or ingredients in
order to cope with Covid-19.
Against this background, the current pandemic and emerging practices of healthcare are an economic question. In short, the Covid-19 crisis “turned out to be a capitalist thing” in Indonesia as much as elsewhere (see earlier blog contribution by Don Kalb). Herbal medicine offers economic opportunities in times of crisis and even though we may dream of a system that enables health seekers to freely decide on their healthcare – independent of their economical background – we realize the many obstacles that need to be overcome before such a system can become reality for everyone.
Nicole Weydmann
is postdoctoral researcher at the chair of Comparative Development and Cultural
Studies with a focus on Southeast Asia at the University of Passau, Germany and
works on the use of traditional and alternative medicine in Southeast Asia and
Europe.
Kristina Großmann is professor at the anthropology of southeast Asia at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Maribeth Erb is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology at
the National University of Singapore (NUS). Originally from the US, she has
worked and lived in Singapore since 1989.
Novia Tirta Rahayu Tijajacompleted her MA degree in Southeast Asian Studies at the
University of Passau and currently lives in her hometown, Jakarta.
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Cite as: Weydmann, Nicole, Kristina Großmann, Maribeth Erb, Novia Tirta Rahayu Tijaja. 2020. “Healing in context: Traditional medicine has an important role to play in Indonesia’s fight against the coronavirus.” FocaalBlog, 8 September. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/09/08/nicole-weydmann-kristina-grosmann-maribeth-erb-novia-tirta-rahayu-tijaja-healing-in-context-traditional-medicine-has-an-important-role-to-play-in-indonesias-fight-against-the-coronaviru/