Tag Archives: Capitalism

Blog

Jaime A Alves: F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology

‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility. The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In the case of Brazil, a global reference in police terror, the narrative of police victimization helped president Jair Bolsonaro to galvanize popular support around the fictional image of patriotic officers (or soldiers like himself), ready to put their lives on the line to protect citizens and save the country.

Certainly, police officers are killed in Brazil at a rate that supersedes any other country in the hemisphere. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, 343 officers were killed in 2018 alone, 75% of them off-duty (FBS 2019). Although the numbers are extremely high when compared with the United States, for instance, where 181 law enforcement agents were killed in 2019 (NLEOMF 2020), this is a profession that, contrary to popular belief, has very low lethality rates worldwide. Yet, even in Brazil, with astonishing levels of officers killed on and off-duty, homicide is not the leading cause of police death. In what seems to be a trend in Brazil and the US, the leading cause of officers’ death is suicide (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Exame 2019; see also Miranda and Guimarães 2016).

While assault and killings of law enforcement officers do occur, this real risk is part and parcel of the work they perform. In fact, it is common-sensical that their work grants them special protection not enjoyed by any other civilian occupation. To raise a hand against a police officer is not only a serious felony offense, but is also quite often a lethal one. In Brazil, when an officer is killed, dozens of poor and predominantly black youths are killed in revenge raids such as the infamous 2006 massacre, when at least 600 youth were killed within the span of one week in response to gangs’ lethal attacks against police stations (Mães de Maio 2018). Police even deploy assassinations in order to pressure politicians to grant them better labor conditions.

Indeed, spreading terror has been an ‘efficient’ police strategy to gain political leverage. For instance, in February 2020, days before carnival, the Military Police of Ceará went on strike. Although the direct involvement of striking officers in the slaughter is the object of an ongoing investigation, there were several denunciations of police-linked death squads and hooded men in police patrols terrorizing the population. Coincidently or not, and repeating a pattern seen in other Brazilian contexts (see De Souza, 2016), at least two hundred individuals were killed within the span of one week (Jucá 2020; Adorno 2020). To no avail, the leftist governor Camilo Santana denounced these uses of terror as a tactic to bring the government to its knees. Widespread denunciations of human rights violations, from torture to assassinations, are consistently met with impunity in a country where at least 6,200 individuals were killed by the police in 2018 (17 deaths each day!), of which 99% were young male, favela residents and 75% were blacks (FBSP 2019).

Police officer with a club forcibly restraining a Black man who lies face down on the pavement while two other officers observe.
Image 1: While the US is the leading country in incarceration rates, Brazil leads the way in the killing of Black individuals by law enforcement policies. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, within six years (2015-2020) 29, 952 civilians were killed by the Brazilian police force. Black youth account for 8 in 10 individuals killed by the police. Click here for geo-reference on the lethality of policing in Brazil.

In this following, I focus not so much on the paradigmatic victims of police terror in societies of the African Diaspora such as Brazil and the United States, but rather on the critical role urban ethnographers can play in demystifying the ‘war on police’ and in advancing an insurgent movement pushing toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has, within the last few decades, seen a proliferation of socio-anthropological studies on police violence and police culture. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of its techniques – in their attempts to provide ‘privileged’ accounts of police praxis (e.g., França 2019; Muniz and Silva 2010; Storani 2008).

This article should be understood neither as a literature review of the burgeoning field of police studies in Brazil (for an overview see, Muniz et., all, 2018) nor an overview of global anthropology of policing. Instead, I call attention to new directions in the study of policing as a colonial regime of control that exists in urban contexts in Brazil and the USA, but is hardly unique to those societies. Crucially, as a global project, the practice of anthropology – and police fieldwork in particular (Steinberg 2020) – cannot be dissociated from the geopolitics of empire and global antiblackness. Enduring global colonialism is configured and continuously reinforced by Europe/US-led regimes of security and knowledge production. And yet, racial apartheid enforced by police terror –homeland security? — blurs geo-ontological boundaries between global north and global south and reasserts the afterlife of colonialism (Susser 2020; Nonini 2020; Beaman, 2020).  

How should anthropologists objectively treat police innocence and victimhood narratives without participating in this ongoing coloniality? If, as Anna Souhami forcefully argues, ‘the dynamics of police culture [ethnographers] so powerfully criticis[e] are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic process’ (2019: 207), how should we ethically write about police victimization without (even if involuntarily) endorsing the trope of cops’ fragility? What does the narrative of victimization engender? Finally, what should be the place of anthropology of policing in the urgent call of black activists and black studies to defend the dead? While studying the police (and any mainstream institution) does not necessarily lead to uncritical alignment to power, the antiblack animus of policing makes it extraordinarily challenging and politically compromising for anthropologists to work with the police in the name of ethnographic complexity and simultaneously engage with social movement’s critique of policing-as-antiblackness (Hale, personal communication). That is to say, the anthropology of policing, even when highly critical of policing structure, seems to underscore a liberal reform paradigm that goes against what the paradigmatic victims of police terror demand: defunding, dismantling and abolishing the police state.

The Myth of Police Fragility

There is a scene in Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s 2019 movie, Queen and Slim, that is worth recuperating here. The young couple is going on their first date when a white cop pulls them over. The minor traffic violation ends with Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) taking the cop’s gun and shooting him dead in self-defense when the officer fires his gun against Queen (Jodie Tuner). Slim wants to turn himself in, but Queen (who is a lawyer) reminds him that their blackness has already sealed their destiny. The ‘cop-killers’ go on the run through the deep South, hoping to reach Cuba. As the video of the killing goes viral, Queen and Slim’s story mobilizes other African Americans and images of Black Lives Matter protests are merged with their fugitive endeavor. The scene that strikes me features Junior, a black boy in the foreground leading a demonstration. With fists in the air he shouts, ‘Let them go!’ When an officer tries to stop him, he pulls the officer’s gun and shoots the officer dead.

One may speculate: What led him to such an expected act of violence? Perhaps the painful consciousness of his blackness? Perhaps the limited options available, within the context of ‘fugitive justice,” to stop the “grinding machine of human flesh” policing represents?  The film and the scene in particular aroused heated debate on the nature and scope of Black resistance against police violence in the Black Lives Matter era. Lena Waithe has called the movie ‘a meditation on black life in America’ (King 2019). However, where the filmmakers gave cinematic representation to an all too familiar “state of captivity” (Wilderson 2018:58), some received the movie as a ‘war on cops’ while others blamed it for ‘going too far left in its implications in that black people condone, protect and are inspired by reciprocating violence against police as a result of their experiences with law enforcement’ (Vaughn 2019).

The “war-on-cops” rhetoric and its attending practices in the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement in the United States and its parallel (albeit diffuse) pro-cops movement in Brazil can be read as what legal scholar Frank Rudy Cooper calls “the myth of cop fragility”. Hecontends that such mythology draws a false equivalence between ‘blue lives’ and ‘black lives’ by ‘reposition[ing] police officers, and whites in general, as the new victims’ of racism (Cooper 2020:  654). In that sense, ‘white backlash better explains Blue Lives Matter’s self-defense perspective than does the vulnerability of police officers to attack’ (2020: 655).

 By hijacking the meanings of the black struggle for life, the police also cannibalize the terms of the debate. This, in turn, seems to resonate in the academia’s ambivalence (unwillingness?) in dealing with the cruelty of police power. Whereas radical social movements and scholars lay bare the impossibility of freeing justice from its coloniality (e.g., Best and Hartman 2005; Segato 2007; McDowell and Fernandez 2018; Flauzina and Pires 2020), we see a proliferation of works on police reform, or, in the case of anthropology, an investment in cops as a new subject of inquiry whose violent work must be understood in relation to broad social norms and power dynamics. I have nothing against the election of cops as ethnographic subjects and indeed, such an election has been crucial to illuminate social processes that otherwise would continue to remain obscure. Though in a fragmented form, I take this very path in my own ethnographic work on police brutality in São Paulo, Brazil and Cali, Colombia.

Likewise, recent groundbreaking ethnographies of policing (I am consciously grouping scholars from distinct disciplines whose work employs ethnography as its main methodology) have shed light on the ways in which officers justify their work as habitus – ‘just doing their job’ – which reflects a socially shared belief in torture and killings as a form of ordering the chaotic social world. In racialized geographies such as the Paris’ ‘banlieues,’ Los Angeles’ ‘ghettos’ or Brazil’s ‘favelas,’ these critical ethnographies show that officers enforce sociospatial imaginaries of belonging, entitlement and justice (Fassin 2013; Denyer-Willis 2015; Roussell 2015). Officers also perform a peculiar form of order-making in contested regimes of urban governance by competing local authorities such as drug-traffickers, paramilitarism, power-brokers and so on (e.g., Salem and Bertelsen 2020; Larkins 2013; Penglase 2012; Arias 2006). Other interventions have accounted for the ways in which police negotiate their everyday encounters with institutional violence and public discredit. Officers are forcefully portrayed as political actors whose practices, emotions and subjectivities echo broader systems of morals (Pauschinger 2020; see also Jauregui 2014). Police and policing produce a mode of “sociability,” an ethos, and a political rationale of governance (Karpiak 2010; Sclofsky 2016; Muniz and Albernaz 2017). Finally, there is the call for ‘publicity, practicality and epistemic solidarity’ among anthropologists, law enforcement agencies and larger publics to respond to the disciplinary invitation for political engagement with pressing problems of corruption and violence (Mutsaers et al. 2015: 788). 

These and many other works (too many to be listed in a commentary note) reflect an important anthropological contribution to demystifying this troubling institution and the subjectivity of its agents. In the last decade or so, it has become a consensus in the field – regardless of one’s theoretical perspective – that policing is much more than uniformed personnel patrolling the streets.  By making ethnographically visible what policing does and produces, ethnographers have provided insightful understandings of mundane forms of order-making, statecrafts and rationales of government (see Karpiak and Garriott 2018, Martin 2018, Steinberg 2020 for an overview).

My intervention does not go against these contributions that I loosely locate within the field of ethnographies of police. My concern here is with what anthropology does and what anthropology produces when giving cops more voice and space in these critical times when cities are on fire. In their edited volume, The Anthropology of Police, editors Kevin Karpiack and Willian Garriott ask the important questions: ‘What are the ethical and political stakes of trying to humanize the police? Are there any grounds on which one could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humanization over and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying police-perpetuated harms?’ (2018: 6-7). The authors answer this crucial question by calling for the study of police as a way to challenge the discipline’s trend to “study up” and as an attempt to understand contemporary notions of humanness embedded in policing and security practices. To them, one cannot understand the world and what it means to be human without understanding the work of police (2018: 8).

In this sense, it is argued, the risk pays-off: when attentive to one’s own positionality, critical ethnographies of policing can shed light on important issues such as the culture of militarism, the corrosion of democracy and the normalization of gendered violence (Kraska 1996; Denyer-Willis 2016). I can relate to that. My fragmented ethnographic encounters with police officers (usually themselves from the lowest social stratum of the society they supposedly serve and protect) gave me a first-hand understanding of how officers negotiate apparently contradictory approaches of defending the killings of ‘criminals,’ enthusiastically supporting a ‘new’ human rights-oriented community police, energetically detaching themselves from the “bad cops,” and embracing a hyper-militaristic crusade to ‘save’ family and Christian values (Alves 2018). 

While doing ethnography with/of police does not necessarily stand in contradiction to the ethics and promises of anthropology in solving human problems, something I have no doubt my colleagues genuinely embrace as a political project, and while we should suspend assumptions that all anthropologists must adhere to the militant/activist theoretical-methodological orientation (Harrison 1992; Hale 2008, Hale personal communication), studying the police requires one to face tough ethical questions on the troubling position of witnessing the perpetration of violence, the unintended normalization of police culture (see Souhami 2019), and the dangerous humanization of police work. 

My analysis (and that of many of my colleagues), was politically aligned with activists and empathic with individuals embracing outlawed forms of resistance against police terror. Still, I was constantly asked which side I was on. For instance, a black young man, who by the time of my research in the favelas of São Paulo was making a living in what he refers as ‘the world of crime,’ unapologetically told me I was an asshole for being ‘too straight, too naïve, too afraid to die.’ In Cali, Colombia, although I was considered “not kidnappable” — as the member of a local gang laughed and joked around, perhaps demarking the difference between my physical appearance and those of other foreign researchers usually from the global north — I was awkwardly enough associated with the mestizo middle class and its regime of morality that called for state violence against black youth seen as the scapegoat of the city’s astonishing levels of violence.

Thus, my contention here is not so much to stop studying police, but rather, to disengage from a seductive analysis of power that, while compelling in scholarly terms and in-depth ethnographic description, may involuntarily give voice to unethical power structures personified by the police. Following Frank Wilderson’s assertion that police terror ‘is an ongoing tactic of human renewal…a tactic to secure humanity’s place’ (2018:48), one should ask what such an anthropological project of humanization entails.  If we do not want our work to end up fueling and corroborating the skepticism over a discipline with an ugly history of complicity with oppressive power, then it is about time for an unapologetic ‘f*ck the police!’ in studies of policing.

Maroon Anthropology

In Progressive dystopia, abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco, anthropologist Savannah Shange urges anthropologists to apply ‘the tools of our trade to the pursuit of liberation, and [to enact] the practice of willful defiance in the afterlife of slavery’ (Shange 2019: 159). Abolitionist anthropology responds to scholars law-abiding investment in policing – what she calls carceral progressivism – by refusing the promises of the liberal state and liberal academia (39-42). The imperative ‘F*ck the Police!’ could be another way of engaging with Shange’s invitation to make space for freedom in our writing and our practices. The urgency of the moment asks anthropologists to work against the police, not with the police. If nothing else, the recent urban ‘riots’ in response to the lynching of black individuals in the United States and in Brazil support my call. Individuals strangulated with knee-to-neck asphyxia, skulls broken by police boots, wounded bodies calculatedly left agonizing in the streets or tied to the police patrol and dragged through the streets, rapes, disappearances and continued extortion are some of the mundane practices of police terror that should make us pause and reflect.  

A Black woman speaks into a microphone in front of a crowd gathered outside at night. A sticker on her shirt and pamphlet in her hand read "Marielle."
Image 2: On March 14, Marielle Franco, a black feminist, human rights defender and city councilperson from the socialist party, was murdered. She was also leading the Human Rights Commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by then president Michel Temer and she was vocal against paramilitary groups that control Rio’s political system. Two years after her death, the question remains: “Who ordered the killing of Marielle?” (Source: Workers Party. https://pt.org.br/caso-marielle-franco-um-ano-sem-solucao/)

Let’s be honest, as a discipline, we have failed to side significantly with the victims of police terrorism beyond sit-in moments at conferences, open letters, creatively designed syllabi or academic journal articles such as this very one. Anthropologists seem to be too invested in the economy of respectability that grants us access to institutional power ‘to engage anthropology as a practice of abolition’ (Shange 2019: 10). Nothing can be more illustrative of such an abysmal dissonance with this call than the political lexicon we use to describe police terrorism itself – it is telling that the word terror is barely articulated in the field of anthropology of police – and people’s call to ‘burn it down’ and ‘end the f*cking world’. With one fist in the air and a rocket in the other hand, demonstrators have denounced again and again that ‘Brazil is a graveyard,’ ‘the US is a plantation,’ ‘police are the new slave-catcher.’ Cities turned into a smoking battleground, police stations stormed, patrols set on fire. What has anthropology got to offer beyond well-crafted texts, sanitized analyses of the moment and good intentions to decolonize the discipline? We lack rage!

Like police, and unlike workers in general, tenured scholars (including anthropologists) have very low risk in performing their work. Police perform what Micol Siegel forcefully calls ‘violence work’ (Siegel 2018). They are professionals that essentially deliver violence represented as a public good. Anthropologists, I would argue, are ‘violence workers’ not only in performing the enduring colonial project of othering, but also when taking a ‘reformist’, ‘neutral’ or distant stance on social movements that demand radical changes. Even worse, in giving voice to police based on a pretentious technicality of ‘just’ collecting data, anthropology ends up helping to quell that struggle (see Bedecarré 2018 for groundbreaking work on the role of white scholars in promoting vigilante justice against Black anger). That is to say, the nature of the violence performed by ethnographers of policing may differ in degree and scope from police terror but, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, “we might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (Spillers 1987: 68).

If the subfield of anthropology of police wants to be coherent to the discipline’s (incomplete) decolonizing turn, it should have no ambiguity in regarding police ‘violence’ as terror, have no doubts as to which lives are in peril in these terroristic policing practices and refuse the false promises of reforming this colonial institution. For ethnographers, refusing to performing ‘violence work’ may require disloyalty to the state – including rejecting the self-policing required by corporate academia – and instead unapologetically embrace the position of an insurgent subject whose ‘coherence [is] shaped by political literacy emanating from communities confronting crisis and conflict’ (see James and Gordon 208:371).

I am not completely sure how an insurgent anthropology of police would look (Ralph, 2020 is a powerful example of how anthropologists can use the discipline’s tools to mobilize larger audiences against police terror). A departure point for discussion, however, would be the intellectual humbleness to learn from the wretched of the earth’s refusal to legitimize, ‘humanize’ and promote the reforming of the police, not to mention the temptation to equate cop’s (real) vulnerability to violence with the (mundane) killing of civilians. Ultimately, those of us doing ethnography in collaboration with men and women in uniform ought to ask ourselves how to express empathy with and mourn blue lives – since as ethnographers we develop emotional bonds to our interlocutors even if critical of their behaviors– and still remain critical of the regime of law that necessitates and legitimizes the evisceration of black lives. How do we attend to the ethical demand for all (blue) lives’ grievability while also attentive to the ways, as some anthropologists have shown (Kurtz 2006; and Vianna et al., 2011), the state is anthropomorphized and performed by political agents? Are not cops’ lives, insofar as their identity are attached to the (state) terrorism they perform, an expression of state livingness? That is to say, blue lives are not the same as black lives because blue lives are state lives (albeit not the only ones, a peculiar performance of state sovereignty). There is no space for a theorization on the multiple ways the state comes into being as a mundane practice of domination. It is enough to say that at least in the USA and Brazil, statecraft is antiblackcraft. Indeed, the military labor performed by the police in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil and the United States is only made possible by the ‘politics of enmity’ (Mbembe 2003) that informs contemporary regimes of urban security. It is in the terrain of sovereignty, thus, that one has to situate the work of policing.  As Siegel and others have shown, one of the most important realizations of state violence is the mystification of police work as civilian as opposed to military labor. The police, the myth goes, works under the register of citizenship to protect and serve civil society. Still, both police and the military are one and same. The field in which police operates is a military one, which works effectively and precisely to deploy terror in a sanitized and legitimate way (Wooten 2020; Siegel 2018; see also Kraska 2007).

This is not a peripheral point. One has only to consider the ways black people encounter officers in the streets as soldier and experience policing as terror (again, asphyxiated with the knee on the neck, dragged in the streets, dismembered and disappeared) in opposition to the contingent violence experienced by white victims of cops’ aggression (Wilderson 2018; Alves and Vargas 2017) or by cops’ vulnerability inherent to their profession. And yet, if the logic of enmity is what sustains the enduring antiblack regime of terror enforced by policing, from the point of view of its paradigmatic enemy reforming the police is absurd and praising blue lives is insane.

How might anthropologists challenge the asymmetric positionality of terrified police lives and always already terrifying black beings?  When one officer dies, it is a labor accident. When an officer kills, it is part of his or her labor in performing the state. The degrees, causality and likelihood matter here. Even in societies such as Brazil, where the number of officers killed is extremely high, police lives are not as in peril as conservative pundits want us to believe. The lives of those cops eventually killed ‘in service’ are weaponized forms of life that predict the death of black enemies. Thus, police and their victims belong to two different registers, and if there is an ethical issue in relativizing any death—an approach I firmly refuse –, there is equal or even greater risk in lumping together state delinquency and retaliatory violence by its victims.

There is no equivalence between blue lives and black lives, and even if the call for equivalence is the order of the day in the liberal sensibility that ‘all lives matter,’ this is not the job of anthropology to reconcile these two positions. It is in the spirit of anthropology’s moral and political commitment to the oppressed – a commitment that while empathic with the powerless is also highly critical of the uses of violence as liberatory tool — that we should insurge against this false equivalency.

Based on her work with activists in the South African liberation movement, Nancy Scheper-Hughes asks, “what makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from the human responsibility to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (1995:411). The author deals with this question by highlighting the complexity of not relativizing violence of the oppressed or taking a neutral distance from the cruelty of the oppressor and yet, positioning one’s fieldwork as a site of struggle. She opposes the anthropologist as a “fearless spectator” (a neutral and objective eye) and the witness (the anthropologist as a “companheira”). The later is positioned “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally committed being” and “accountable for what they see and what they fail to see, how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations” (1995: 419).

If we consider current waves of demonstrations against police terror as a historical moment that scholars committed to human liberation cannot refuse to attend, how do we respond to this call without been misunderstood as inciters of violenceagainst the police?  Although an insurgent anthropology should learn from different historical and ethnographic contexts where retaliatory violence has been deployed as one legitimate tool to counteract the brutality of power (Abufarha 2009; Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013), my critique here is obviously not an argument for embracing violence against cops as the way out of the current crisis of policing. I am also not turning a blind eye to a range of political possibilities militant and activist anthropologists already embrace in favor of empowering victims of state-sanctioned violence as “negative-workers”, public intellectuals, or member of advocacy groups (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995; Mullings 2015). Rather, informed by a black radical tradition, I am inviting anthropologists to rebel and change the terms of engagement with the police by questioning our (and our discipline’s) loyalty to the carceral state.

Thus, f*ck the police! is not a rhetorical device, but rather an ethical imperative and moral obligations to the eviscerating lives lost by state delinquency. It is indeed an invitation to seriously engage with the desperate call from the streets for making Black Lives Matter. Attending to their call, on their terms, would require a deep scrutiny on how anthropology participate in antiblackness as a socially shared practice. It also requires us to consider how antiblackness renders legal claims for redressing police terror quite often of little account, and what resisting police terror means to those whose pained bodies resist legibility as victims. What does the anthropological project of humanizing the police mean to those ontologically placed outside Humanity? For those whose marked bodies make Queen and Slim’s subject position – as new runaway slaves – very familiar and intimate, the answer is quite straightforward. Fuck the police!

Acknowledgments: This paper has benefited from generous comments from Charlie Hale, Micol Siegel, Graham Denyer-Willis, João Vargas and Tathagatan Ravindran, as well as from engaging audiences at the University of Colorado/ IBS Speaker Series, University of London / Race Policing and the City Seminar, and the University of Massachusetts/Anthropology Colloquium. I also thank Terrance Wooten and Amanda Pinheiro for a joint-conversation on police terror during the Cities Under Fire forum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don Kalb, Patrick Neveling and Lillie Gordon provided invaluable editorial assistance. Errors and omissions are of course mine.

Jaime A Alves teaches Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic interest includes urban coloniality and black spatial insurgency in Brazil and Colombia.  He is the author of “The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minesotta Press, 2018). His publications can be found at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com

References

Abufarha, Nasser. 2009. The making of a human bomb: An ethnography of Palestinian resistance. DUhan: Duke University Press.

Adorno, Luis. 2020. Durante motim, 312 pessoas assassinadas no Ceará” [During riot, 312 people assassinated in Ceará]. Uol, 6 March, https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2020/03/06/durante-motim-da-pm-312-pessoas-foram-assassinadas-no-ceara.htm

Arias, Desmond 2006. The dynamics of criminal governance: networks and social order in Rio de Janeiro. Journal of Latin American Studies 24(3): 293-325.

Alves, Jaime & João Vargas 2017. On deaf ears: Anti-black police terror, multiracial protest and white loyalty to the state. Identities, 24(3): 254-274.

Beaman, Jean. 2020. Underlying Conditions: Global Anti–Blackness amid COVID–19.

Best, Stephen, and Saidiya Hartman. 2005. “Fugitive justice.” Representations 92 (1): 1-15.

Bedecarré, Kathryn 2018. Doing the work: the Black Lives Matter Movement in Austin. Ph.D Dissertation. U of Texas, Austin.

Cobb, Charles E. 2014. This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed: How guns made the civil rights movement possible. Tuzcon: Basic Books.

Cooper, Frank Rudy 2020. Cop fragility and blue lives matter. University of Illinois Law Review, 2: 621-662.

De Souza, Raquel. 2016. “Cruel coexistence: Police violence and black disposability in Salvador/Bahia.” PhD dissertation. University of Texas, Austin.

DiAngelo, Robin 2018. White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. New York: Beacon Press.

Exame 2019. No Brasil, mais policiais se suicidam do que morrem em confrontos. Revista Exame, 26 August, https://exame.com/brasil/no-brasil-mais-policiais-se-suicidam-do-que-morrem-em-confrontos/

Fassin, Didier 2013. Enforcing order: An ethnography of urban policing. London: Polity.

FBSP 2019. Anuário brasileiro da segurança pública. FBS, 1 December.

Flauzina, Ana & Thula Pires 2020. STF e a naturalização da barbárie. Revista Direito e Práxis, 11(2): 1211-1237.

França, Fábio Gomez de 2019. “O soldado é algo que se fabrica”: Notas etnográficas sobre um curso de formação policial militar. Revista Tomo, 2(34): 359-392.

Hale, Charles R. 2008. Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harrison, Faye V. 1992. Decolonizing anthropology: Moving further toward and anthropology for liberation. Anthropology News,33(1): 24-24.

Kurtz, Donald. 2006. Political power and government: negating the anthropomorphized state. Social Evolution and History, 5(2): 91-111.

James, Joy & Edmund T. Gordon 2008. Afterword. In Charlie Hale, Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship, 371-382. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jauregui, Beatrice 2014. Provisional agency in India: Jugaad and legitimation of corruption. American Ethnologist, 41(1): 76-91.

Jucá, Beatriz 2020. Policiais amotinados aceitam proposta. El País, 1 March, https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2020-03-02/policiais-militares-amotinados-aceitam-proposta-do-governo-e-encerram-greve-no-ceara.html

Karpiak, Kevin G. 2010. Of heroes and polemics: ‘The policeman’ in urban ethnography. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33:7–31.

Karpiak, Kevin G. & William Garriott (eds.) 2018. The anthropology of police. London and New York: Routledge.

King. Noel 2019. Lena Waithe’s ‘Queen & Slim’ is an odyssey for the black lives matter era. NPR, 27 November, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/27/783223371/waithes-queen-slim-is-an-odyssey-set-in-the-era-of-black-lives-matter

Kraska, Peter B. 2007. Militarization and policing—Its relevance to 21st century police. Policing: a journal of policy and practice, 1(4): 501-513.

Kraska, Peter B. 1996. Enjoying militarism: Political/personal dilemmas in studying US police paramilitary units. Justice quarterly, 13(3): 405-429.

Larkins, Erika Robb 2013. Performances of police legitimacy in Rio’s hyper favela. Law & Social Inquiry, 38(3): 553-575.

Mães de Maio 2019. Memórial dos nossos filhos. São Paulo: Editora NósporNós.

Mbembe, Achille Necropolitics. Public culture, 15(1): 11-40.

McDowell, Meghan G. & Luis A. Fernandez 2018. ‘Disband, disempower, and disarm’: Amplifying the theory and practice of police abolition. Critical Criminology, 26(3): 373-391.

Miranda, Dayse & Tatiana Guimarães 2016. O suicídio policial: O que sabemos? Dilemas-Revista de Estudos de Conflito e Controle Social, 9(1): 1-18.

Mullings, Leith 2015. Anthropology matters. American Anthropologist, 117(1): 4-16.

Muniz, Jacqueline de Oliveira & Washington França da Silva 2010. Mandato policial na prática: Tomando decisões nas ruas de João Pessoa. Caderno CRH, 23(60): 449-473.

Muniz, Jacqueline, Haydee Caruso, & Felipe Freitas 2018. Os estudos policiais nas ciências sociais: Um balanço sobre a produção brasileira a partir dos anos 2000. Revista Brasileira de Informacao Bibliografica, 1(2):148-187.

Muniz, Jacqueline de Oliveria & Elizabete Albernaz 2017. “Moralidades entrecruzadas nas UPPs: Uma narrativa policial.” Cadernos Ciências Sociais, 3(2): 115–151.

NLEOM. Law Enforcement Facts. NLEOM, June 2020, https://nleomf.org/facts-figures/law-enforcement-facts

Nonini. Don. 2020. Black Enslavement and Agro-industrial Capital, FocaalBlog, Jan 20, http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/03/don-nonini-black-enslavement-and-agro-industrial-capital/

Pauschinger, Dennis 2020. Working at the edge: Police, emotions and space in Rio de Janeiro. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(3): 510-527.

Ralph, Laurence 2020. The torture letters: Reckoning with police violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1995. The primacy of the ethical: Propositions for a militant anthropology. Current Anthropology,36(3): 409-440.

Sclofsky, Sebastián 2016. “Policing race in two cities: From necropolitcal governance to imagined communities.”  Social Justice, 6 (2): 1-14.

Segato, Rita Laura 2007. El color de la cárcel en América Latina. Nueva Sociedad, 3(208): 142-161.

Seigel, Micol. 2018. Violence work: State power and the limits of police. Duhan: Duke University Press.

Shange, Savannah 2019. Progressive dystopia: Abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Salem, Tomas & Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2020. “Emergent Police States: Racialized Pacification and Police Moralism from Rio’s Favelas to Bolsonaro.” Conflict and Society 6(1): 86-107.

Souhami, Anna 2020. Constructing tales of the field: Uncovering the culture of fieldwork in police ethnography. Policing and Society, 30(2): 206-223.

Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.” Diacritics 17(2): 65-81.

Storani, Paulo.  2008. Vitória sobre a morte: a glória prometida: O ‘rito de passagem’ na construção da identidade dos operações especiais do BOPE. Niterói: Universidade Federal Fluminense.

Susser, Ida. 2020. Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?, FocaalBlog Jan 20, http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser-covid-police-brutality-and-race-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries/

Umoja, Akinyele Omuja 2013. We will shoot back: Armed resistance in the Mississippi freedom movement. New York: NYU Press.

Vaughn, Kenya 2019. Queen & Slim, a well-acted interpretation of a tragically flawed story. The St. Louis American, 27 November.

Vianna, Adriana, and Juliana Farias. 2011. “A guerra das mães: dor e política em situações de violência institucional.” Cadernos Pagu (37): 79-116

Wilderson, Frank B. 2018. ‘We’re trying to destroy the world’: Anti-blackness and police violence after Ferguson. In Marina Gržinić Aneta Stojnić (eds), Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance, 45-59. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Willis, Graham Denyer 2015. The killing consensus: Police, organized crime, and the regulation of life and death in urban Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wooten, Terrance. 2020. Cities Under Fire: a public Forum. Santa Barbara: University of California.

Cite as: Alves, Jaime A. 2021. “F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 27 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/27/jaime-a-alves-fck-the-police-murderous-cops-the-myth-of-police-fragility-and-the-case-for-an-insurgent-anthropology/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog

Samuel W. Rose: Disconnected Development Studies: Indigenous North America and the Anthropology of Development

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.


Image 1: Screenshot of 48 Stat. 984 (Pub. Law 73-383), part of the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934 (https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/48/STATUTE-48-Pg984.pdf, taken 10 Nov 2020)

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/

Blog

Don Nonini: Black Enslavement and Agro-industrial Capital

Don Nonini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Insa Koch’s recent (2020) FOCAAL blog, “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain,” reminds us that enslavement and the bodies of black people are profoundly interconnected, and the link to challenges to “the punitive turn” and police abuse in the UK by the Black Lives Matter movement protests are all but explicit in her piece. At the same time, other recent FOCAAL blogs have dealt with the connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and contemporary global capitalism.

Black enslavement and Covid-19 are intimately intertwined. The insurgency of Black Lives Matter during the months of May-June 2020 has its own dynamics. That said, the wide turning out of protests supporting Black Lives Matter in the streets of European cities and towns (London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Milan, Kraków, Dublin, Manchester, Munich…) demonstrates that the European left has strongly shown its ongoing antiracist solidarity with African-American struggles, seeking to come to terms with Europe’s own troubled imperial history of enslavements, and challenging its current neo-nationalist or fascist resurgence under declining neoliberal capitalism (Kalb 2020).

The links between black enslavement and Covid-19 start – and continue with – the formation of agro-industrial capitalism and its relations to transnational finance capital.

The Lash, Degraded Ecologies, Finance

There is a clear relationship between the emergence of modern enslavement and the history of a full-blown agro-industrial capitalism. The close connections between fully rationalized capitalist agrarian production, finance, and slavery are only recently becoming clear.

New research on the North American southern plantation economies shows just how advanced rationalized capitalist production was under the conditions of slavery (Baptist 2014). Beyond its monocropping ecology, “many of agribusinesses’ key innovations, in both technology and organization, originated in slavery” (Wallace 2016: 261). Slaveholders measured land only against the capacity of slave labor to transform it, setting the cotton production line in terms of “bales per hand,” with enslaved African men being “hands,” nursing mothers “half hands” and children “quarter hands.” The labor process of picking cotton was measured and held to a standard by another unit of measurement – the “lash.”

“Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck” (Baptist 2014: 130). As Baptist further points out, “on the nineteenth century cotton frontier… enslavers extracted more production from each enslaved person every year. . . the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip” (2014: 112). Planters managed a refined rationality based on the application of the whip measured out in lashes to the backs of a slave calculated relative to their infraction – how many pounds of cotton his basket fell short of making a bale, whether or not there were impurities in it, whether one slave helped another pick her quota – in which case the former received extra lashes. Under the circumstances, the rationality of increased “labor productivity” so vaunted by economists depended straightforwardly on graduated torture – with little contribution (the cotton gin aside) from “technological innovation.”

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 culminated the violent displacement of Indian nations from the Mississippi Gulf region and transformation of their territories into “new lands” of thousands of acres ready for slave-based production (Baptist 2014: 228-229). Cotton monoculture quickly exhausted the rich soils of the South, exposed the crops to rust, rot, and worms, while plowing rows of cotton aligned to the day’s sunlight to maximize yield eroded the land and exhausted aquifers within 10 to 15 years after clearing (Wallace 2016: 266).

Due to the lack of food self-sufficiency and the seasonality of cotton harvests, indebtedness by plantation owners to Northern financiers and cotton brokers became increasingly common. By the 1830s, the cotton plantations of Mississippi, Alabama and Eastern Louisiana had adopted new forms of finance and indebtedness, when the Consolidated Association of Planters of Louisiana was established to allow their member planters to mortgage their slaves as collateral for loans from international financiers, led by the Baring Brothers and the Bank of England, that pooled investments from Europe’s finest old and new upper classes to buy the lucrative bonds issued by the Association (Baptist 2014: 245-8).

Monocropping of plants and animals, the simplification and degradation of local and regional ecologies, rapid expansion of logistics over space, reliance on finance capital for loans to expand production, and the use of enslaved degraded labor – these design features of agro-industrial capitalism have remained in effect to the present.

Meat Markets, Neo-Slave Markets

The coerced use of black labor continued after the Civil War in the cotton sharecropping economy until its decline in the 1930s. At the same time, the new agro-industrial complex of livestock production in the U.S. South – again based on the hyper-exploitation of black labor – got underway. By the 1970s, the livestock industries of intensive hog, poultry, and beef production had become thoroughly institutionalized – through vertical integration (Heffernan and Constance 1994; Stiffler 2005), increases in slaughterhouse assembly-line tempos, and incorporation of meat eating as a universal practice within the diets of the U.S. population (Schlosser 2001, 2012; Stiffler 2005). Since the 1990s the meat industries have globalized to penetrate the BRICS economies, a process facilitated by the lubrication of capital provided by hedge funds and investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs’ deal-making in the sale of Smithfield Foods to Shuanghui in China (Wallace 2016: 269-271).

Subjugated and coerced black labor has anchored and offered up surplus value through U.S. agro-industrial cotton and meat production since the end of legal slavery. Since the 1960s, rural poor African-Americans, especially women, have worked in the meat processing plants of the Midwest, Mississippi delta and Carolinas regions experiencing intensified exploitation, sexual harassment and brutalized and unsafe working conditions. By the 1990s, they were joined by immigrant Mexican and Central American workers (Nonini 2003; Stiffler 2005; Stuesse 2016), with whom white plant managers sought to set them in competition.

The Great Migration of 6 million African-Americans from 1915-1970 from the South to cities in the northern and midwestern U.S. was a form of flight from re-legalized enslavement at the hands of Jim Crow whites. Migration to the Midwest and Northeast placed large numbers of blacks at the factory doors of the Fordist industries of the North. Relegated to secondary labor markets by discrimination from white industrial labor unions during the 1950s-1970s (Cowie 2010: 236-244), black industrial workers by the 1990s, like their white counterparts, were thrown out of work by the globalization of industrial production. The only exceptions were the neo-slavery of hyper-sweated meat processing and related industrial food labor.

“Broken Windows Policing” and the Expropriation of Black Lives

The grown children and grandchildren of these laid-off black industrial workers, with more recent Latinx immigrant workers, now form both the hyper-exploited workers in the food industries (meat processing, fast foods, farm work) and situated in the cities and small towns of the South, Midwest and the Northeast, and those who are chronically unemployed and underemployed, doubly discriminated against due to their poverty (forcing them to leave school before high school graduation), and their race. Those African-Americans who have more or less steady employment also show disproportionate levels of consumer debt – from credit cards, student loans, and medically -related debt. Whether steadily employed or not, a key insight is that by and large both groups draw on the same population of urban African-Americans.

The population of urban African-Americans has the profound misfortune of living in cities recurrently subject to gentrification at the new “urban scale” of globalized real estate and finance-rentier capital (Smith 2008: 239-266). Their residence in spaces made newly desirable by gentrification by the 2000s is the obverse of the fact that up to the 1990s whites fled inner cities in large numbers for segregated suburbs, while African-Americans found themselves only able to afford to live, and only allowed to live within, housing in these redlined inner-city districts.

By the 2000s, however, real estate in these districts had become “hot properties” for global finance capital seeking new sites for safe but extraordinarily profitable rent collection and property speculation in realizing value. This trend by the 1990s was both shaped by and reinforced through the “broken window policing” that targeted unemployed and underemployed African-Americans and Latinx populations (Camp et al. 2016).

What precisely is the role of broken windows policing in the gentrification process? Put non-too-subtly, even one broken window indicates the existence of a “criminal” – an undesirable element in a neighborhood. The role of such policing is the physical removal to jails or prison, or, if that is impossible, the destruction of African-Americans whose very presence threatens the “real estate values” that the finance industry and its local allies hold dear. This goes far to explain the more than 1000 people killed by local police every year in the US, of whom more than one fourth are African-American; the one third of African-American men between ages 19-35 who are “justice involved” – in jail awaiting trial, on bail, undergoing trial, in prison, on probation or parole; and their disproportionate representation in the US’s incarcerated population, the largest per capita in the world.

Nancy Fraser (2016) observes that there is an historical dialectic between the conditions that set out “normal” exploitation of the working force, and the conditions of expropriation of the lives, labor, and property of racialized and vulnerable (e.g. immigrant) populations — as two complementary means through which the accumulation of capital can and does take place under capitalism. Fraser argues that that the new being of neoliberal global capitalism is “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker,” and that “the racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits” (Fraser 2016:163).

A group of people holding a sign Description automatically generated
Image 1: Black Lives Matters Protests in Durham, U.S. (Credit: Durham Workers Assembly Durham, North Carolina, with kind permission) 

We can see these two modes of appropriation of surplus value in the tense interconnections between whites and the African-American population in the United States through the latter’s vexed history with respect to agro-industrial and finance capitalism. These interconnections are potentially the point of class differentiation between the increasingly precarious white “middle class” and urban African-Americans, who straddle a black employed working-class subjected to intensified exploitation on one hand, and a lumpen-proletariat subjected to police-impelled expropriation and dispossession, on the other. 

Ongoing criminalization and the indebtedness of black people (the latter a tool of finance capital’s domination) are the instruments driving large numbers of urban black workers disproportionately employed in the agro-industrial food sector toward the toxic mix of indebtedness, unemployment (where employers often refuse to hire blacks holding consumer debt), bankruptcy, evictions from shelter, police “stop and frisk” harassment, enforced fines and fees levied (via police and private firms working for straitened municipalities),  assault, imprisonment, and death (Wang 2018:99-192).  

Don Nonini is Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent books are “Getting by”: Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell, 2015), and The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux, co-edited (Routledge, 2020). His most recent publication in FOCAAL is “Theorizing the Urban Housing Commons” (2017). 

References 

Baptist, E. E. (2014). The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism. 

Camp, J. T. and C. Heatherton (2016). Policing the planet : why the policing crisis led to black lives matter. 

Cowie, J. (2010). Stayin’ alive : the 1970s and the last days of the working class. New York, New Press : Distributed by Perseus Distribution. 

Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3(1): 163-178. 

Harvey, D. (2018). Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York, Oxford University Press. 

Heffernan, W. and D. H. Constance (1994). Transnational corporations and the globalization of the food system. From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food. A. Bonanno, L. Busch and e. al. Lawrence, KA, University Press of Kansas Press: 29-51. 

Kalb, D. 2020. “Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations”, FocaalBlog, June 1st, http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/.

Nonini, D. M. (2003). American neoliberalism, ‘globalization,’ and violence: Reflections from the United States and Southeast Asia. Globalization, The State, and Violence. J. Friedman. Walnut Creek, CA, Altamira Press (Rowman & Littlefield): 163-202. 

Schlosser, E. ((2001), 2012). Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal, with a New Afterword. Boston, MA, Mariner books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). 

Smith, N. and D. Harvey (2008). Uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. Athens, University of Georgia Press. 

Striffler, S. (2005). Chicken : the dangerous transformation of America’s favorite food. New Haven, Yale University Press. 

Stuesse, A. Scratching out a living : Latinos, race, and work in the Deep South. 

Wallace, R. (2016). Big Farms Make Big Flue: Dispatches on infectious disease, agribusiness, and the nature of science. New York, Monthly Review Press. 

Wang, J. (2018). Carceral capitalism.  Semiotext(e) Interventions, 21. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e).

Cite as: Nonini, Don. 2020. “Black Enslavement and Agro-industrial Capital.” FocaalBlog, 3 July. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/03/don-nonini-black-enslavement-and-agro-industrial-capital/

Blog

Enikő Vincze: Post-covid “Economic recovery” in Romania: forget labor, save capital, and support militarization?

Enikő Vincze, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoc

On May 28th the liberal Romanian government published the last data on the employment situation. This is therefore a good time to review the fate of Romanian labor in and after the lockdowns. I argue that we see a deepening of the export oriented neoliberal paradigm that demonizes the “social” and represses social reproduction in favor of subsidies to capital. Moreover, some of those subsidies now go towards increased militarization and the further beefing up of policing. What the liberal government calls “economic recovery” policies, turn out to be nothing more than a return to the “normality” of state supported international capital accumulation that has characterized much of post-socialist Europe after 1989.

Reviewing labor contract data from the end of March to the end of May, one notices a steady increase in the number of both suspended and terminated contracts. By the end of April, this trend changes: suspensions decline while terminations increase. By the end of May, the total number of suspensions and terminations reaches alarming proportions: over 1 million. More than four hundred thousand workers (especially in manufacturing, retail, and construction) had their labor contracts fully terminated. These workers receive paltry unemployment benefits of 25% of the minimum wage, amounting to about 330 lei/68 euro per month. If they are lucky and can claim technical unemployment, they receive 75% of their salaries. This probably means that some 600,000 former manufacturing and retail workers will now receive a monthly benefit of about 1,000 lei/208 euro (75% of the minimum wage). By the end of May, then, about 1,100,000 workers have less than some 200 euro per month while the value of the minimum consumption basket is even in the official calculation more than double that amount (at the end of 2019, the minimum consumption basket was over 2650 lei/525 euro per month).

Image 1: “Poverty kills”, Romanian protesters in Cluj (Photo: Enikő Vincze, 2020)

The labor crisis is exacerbated by the return of Romanians who used to work abroad: 1,270,000 of them at the end of April, of which at least 350,000 are actively looking for a job and receiving unemployment benefits. Of a total Romanian population of 17/18 million, some 1,5 million people, then, live on an income that just allows for bare survival. However, one should point out that this is not new for them: they were pretty bad or very bad off even before the pandemic, when they had fully paid jobs. Now, they hardly differ from the more than 4,632,000 persons who, according to Eurostat 2019 data, lived below the official poverty line, meaning on less than 900 lei/191 euro per month. In sum, 30 years after the revolution and 12 years after EU accession, Romania, a belated but by now dedicated student of neoliberal transition economics, may well have some 6 million people just above or under the poverty line, about half the working population. Against the policy rhetoric, these people have no “normality” to return to after the pandemic (keep in mind that In the “old good times”, over 30% of Romania’s employees (or 42% of formal employment contracts) earned only half the value of the minimum consumption basket per month). But the current government does not even talk about inequalities, poverty, or the public responsibilities of the state for the dispossessions brought by capitalism. Instead, it dreams of returning to a fictitious normal that for many never existed. As in the past, the crisis of capitalism induced by the Covid pandemic is solved through the “normality” of state supported capital accumulation: further enrichment of the rich, facilitation of transnational capital, and even deeper impoverishment of the many.

The current government’s “economic recovery plan” is leading to the further pauperization of labor (for more details see here). The plan is based on state aid schemes used throughout EU in the context of the pandemic: guaranteeing commercial loans for firms, but also capital and investment loans for both small and medium-sized enterprises, and large companies; subsidizing the interest rates of bank loans; offering aid to newly established companies. Moreover, there are several other facilities granted to large property owners: reducing the price of electricity for large consumers, refunding VAT, halting seizure on their debts. The government also foresees some measures to support employers who keep employees in their jobs or plan on hiring new staff. However, it does not provide anything that would directly support labor, like raising wages or improving labor conditions. In short, it is imagined as an economic recovery but not for ordinary people.

These ordinary people are told the EU funnels billions of euro to aid Romania’s recovery. At the same time, the government refuses any talk of wage rises, social protection, or public housing investment. Such talk is branded “toxic populism” or “economic ignorance” of the critical role that investment rather than consumption plays in growth. Romanian labor is no longer interesting, not even as a consumer. This supply-side policy in support of capital is based on the expectation that labor must remain cheap (regardless of the problems that further decreases in demand would create for many local small enterprises), so that international capital may come along to exploit it. But will an export-led model work in a global economy interrupted by a global recession, with shrinking returns to capital? True, for Romania it did work in 2010. But will it again?

After the pandemic has shown so clearly that labor is the very carrier of production, the current Liberal government chooses to further disregard workers. Instead, it’s doing everything possible to grant state aid to multinational companies operating in Romania. For that goal this government is also ready to borrow on the international market or from international financial institutions, which will push debt over the 50% of GDP threshold that rules as “normality” in CEE, in which case international pressure will force it to cut public sector spending such as on public wages, social assistance, and social protection. Saving capital goes therefore hand in hand with austerity measures (as prescribed in the Convergence Program 2020 of Romania, see Vincze 2015). Once again we see the tasteless spectacle of arrogant private entrepreneurs being saved by the visible hand of the state, grinning with satisfaction at public sector cuts while claiming the right to be supported at all costs, looting the public sector on behalf of their apparently deserved private profits.

In contrast to the 2008 crisis, however, this time Romania bets that the military industry will save the economy. “Among the government’s priorities are greenfield and offset investments in industries such as the military,” says the prime-minister. This option crowns former initiatives such as the acquisition of the $ 3.9 billion American Patriot missile system, promoted by the country’s president since his first mandate. The 2020 budget allocations provide for an 18% rise of military budget as compared to 2019, while the Ministry of Internal Affairs can do with an extra 13% on top of the increased budget for the Romanian Intelligence Services.

In this increasingly troubled world with various contradictory scenarios for the future, there is a risk that the current crisis of capitalism will be resolved not only by the militarization of the economy but also by rising political and social fascism. There is consistency there. Promoting racialized hatred (Stoica 2020), provoking interethnic conflicts and tensions between social classes is part of the justification for investments in a police state with military muscle. As other branches of industry are struggling hard to recover from the recession, capital needs war industry investments to save itself. Perversely, Romania’s leaders also offer the domestic reserve army of labor the opportunity to make a career out of warfare. President Iohannis recently stated that Romania’s armed forces can be made available for participation in missions and operations outside the Romanian state, claiming “important resources for equipping the Romanian Army make it possible to achieve national defense capabilities within the collective defense system of NATO and, at the same time, coherent multiannual programs can offer the Romanian industry the chance to relaunch. especially through institutional cooperation with the companies of our allies.”

We may not be surprised by these developments, but we can and must revolt against them. We could begin by imagining different economic recovery scenarios. What if the state took over the companies that can no longer function according to the rules of the “free market”? What if state aid came with the demand for decent wages for the employees? What if the state taxed large fortunes in real estate and banking accumulated over the past decades? What if the state decided to implement measures in support of people rather than profit: banning forced evictions, municipalization of public utilities, controlling private rents, achieving a significant stock of social housing through various methods? What if the state acted for the benefit of labor? For peace and disarmament? What if we did all of this now, to mark 75 years since the defeat of fascism and the promise of a better era for humanity? Why long for the “normality” of capital accumulation when we can long for other possible worlds?

This is the English version of an article published in Romanian on the platform Baricada, June 4th, 2020. The Romanian version contains additional graphs and references. Accessible here: https://ro.baricada.org/relansarea-economica-a-romaniei/

Enikő Vincze is Professor of Sociology at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, and a political activist for housing justice with the group Căși sociale ACUM/ Social Housing NOW!

References

Stoica, Maria & Enikő Vincze 2020. “The suspension of Human rights during COVID-19: For Roma in Pata Rât they have been suspended for a very long,” LeftEast, April 27, https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/covid-19-roma-in-pata-rat/

Vincze, Enikő 2015. “Glocalization of neoliberalism in Romania through the reform of the state and entrepreneurial development,” Studia Europaea, 1: 125-152, https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=142030

Cite as: Vincze, Enikő. 2020. “Post-covid ‘Economic recovery’ in Romania: forget labor, save capital, and support militarization?” FocaalBlog, 19 June. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/19/eniko-vincze-post-covid-economic-recovery-in-romania-forget-labor-save-capital-and-support-militarization/

Blog

Mao Mollona: Fully Exterminated Communism, or Anthropology in the Time of Cholera

Mao Mollona, Goldsmiths College, London

One thing is sure. If just briefly, the pandemic struck at the heart of capitalism. It paralysed the economy, broke the bureaucratic machine of nation-states and forced conservative governments worldwide to pass quasi post-capitalist policies which, only a few months earlier, were considered too radical even for the radical Left. The renationalization of public utilities, the rolling out of universal basic income schemes, the debates on debt defaults, rent freezes, and recapitalization of the public sector, could be taken from the post-capitalist manifestos of Paul Mason or Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018).

Continue reading →
Blog

Don Kalb: Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations

Don Kalb, University of Bergen

At some point in late January I told my family over WhatsApp with the Marxist bluster they usually enjoy from me that if Covid was to come to the West it would be the end of capitalism. Wuhan was already in lockdown and a red alert was sounding for many other places in China, followed by South Korea and Iran.

Continue reading →

Blog

Gavin Smith: Rereading Marx on machines in the time of COVID-19

Gavin Smith, University of Toronto

“One of the many perils lies in normalizing the ‘batshit crazy’ presently underway.”
—Wallace, Liebman, Chavez & Wallace 2020: 5

The COVID-19 pandemic has stripped the veneer off capitalist society whether in its softer social democratic version or its bare-faced pseudo Darwinian version. Both the cause and the cure are down to the way capitals, now thoroughly integrated into states, have driven the direction of technology to produce this perfect storm. The staggering failures at the curing end are not just glaringly obvious in the present crisis; you’d have to be especially starry-eyed not to see that the wheels and most of the chassis had been stripped off public health well before now. But at the causative end “the normalizing [of] the batshit crazy presently underway,” risks being lost in the chatter.

Continue reading →
Blog

Don Kalb: HAU not: For David Graeber and the anthropological precariate

When HAU was launched, my grad students at Central European University were celebrating. Open access! Finally, a breach in the wall that separated the haves from the have-nots. Their local universities in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe hardly had the resources to pay for these Western journals offered at extortionate prices by the likes of Elsevier, Springer, Oxford, Chicago. Indeed, even CEU did not have sufficient means to pay all the subscriptions that scholars were asking for. Now the have-nots would finally have unlimited access. More, the HAU journal preached what it imagined itself to embody: self-conscious intellectual revolution in the apparently newly found horizontalist mode: Occupy anthropology! For the intellectual assertion of the commons! My rightly rebellious students loved it. And went on producing some great open access undertakings—but not in academia—that helped to feed the ongoing mobilizations in their countries (most prominently: http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast). They had all my support while we continued to disagree about HAU.

Continue reading →