Monthly Archives: June 2020

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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/

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Insa Koch: The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain

Insa Koch, London School of Economics

States’ claims that they are relieving human suffering have become a central element of their ongoing liberal legitimation amid their production of deepening inequalities. The British government’s modern slavery agenda in relation to “county lines” provides a case in point. County lines is the name given by the police to “Class A” drugs networks spreading from larger cities that rely on young runners to move the drugs. These runners – predominantly working class and ethnic minority young men who used to be criminalised for their involvement in the illicit economy – are now being discovered as modern slaves in need of saving. Yet, professionals also separate those worthy of saving from others who are the object of rightful punishment. The fraught politics of victimhood at the heart of the modern slavery agenda foregrounds the role of legal-moral control in governing disenfranchised populations in austerity Britain and elsewhere. It illuminates how states try to shore up popular consent beyond a politics of ‘law and order’ where decades of neo-liberal policy have brought their democratic mandates under attack.

Modern Slavery Policies: domesticating a humanitarian agenda

“More than 200 years ago the British House of Commons passed historic legislation to make the slave trade illegal. But sadly, the grim reality today is that slavery still exists in towns, cities and the countryside across the world. And be in no doubt, slavery is taking place here in the UK”. These were the words of Home Secretary and later Prime Minister, Theresa May, in 2014 when introducing her flagship policy, the modern slavery agenda. The agenda was spearheaded by the Modern Slavery Act 2015, a piece of legislation that introduces both a prosecution and a defense tool for cases of human trafficking, slavery and servitude. It has also seen the creation of anti-slavery partnerships at local authority levels, the appointment of an anti-slavery commissioner, and the expansion of the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the government’s official identification mechanism for modern slaves.

Concerns over human trafficking and modern slavery have been on the international humanitarian agenda for some time (Davidson 2015). There, the slave victim has tended to be identified with the figure of the ‘exotic other’ – typically the black or brown woman from the global south – trafficked for purposes of sexual and domestic exploitation (Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008; Woods 2013). However, increasingly, the language of relieving human suffering has also become prominent in governing disenfranchised domestic populations in the global north (Fassin 2011; Feldman and Ticktin 2010). Miriam Ticktin has argued with respect to human trafficking discourses that the key to the appeal of this agenda lies in its unquestioned universality: ‘the underlying assumption is that we recognise suffering whenever we see it, because there is a common denominator to being human, located in our bodies, particularly in our bodies in pain’ (2011: 11).

The discovery of modern slavery as a matter of domestic policy constitutes an exercise in technocratic legal-moral governance. A wide range of actors – from NGOs, social movements to state actors – come to create, transgress and navigate ‘political relations […] through techno-moral means’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016; Kosmatopoulos 2014; Steur 2018). According to Bornstein and Sharma, in ‘mixing the language of law and policy with moral pronouncement, state and non-state actors posture themselves as defenders of rights and keepers of the public interest as they push their agendas and stake out distinct positions’ (2016: 77). But legal-moral governance also tends to reframe questions of inequality in purely technical or scientific terms (Feldman and Ticktin 2010). It typically replaces a struggle between ‘right’ and left’ with a moral struggle between ‘right and wrong’, thus further reinforcing what Steur (2018) recognizes as the displacement of the political into the legal realm.

County lines: the making of modern slaves

The depoliticising effects of legal-moral governance are illustrated in the case of “county lines”, a key area where the domestication of humanitarian agendas has taken off. County lines is the name given by the police to the expanding economy of “class A” drugs of heroin and crack cocaine spreading from cities to market, coastal and smaller towns, operating through designated mobile phone lines, the so-called ‘county lines’. Over 2000 county lines are said to be in operation, with thousands of young people being exploited. Horror stories have been circulating, with common images including those of teenagers and occasionally children as young as seven (Dearden 2019) being recruited by drug lords higher up the chain to ‘plug’ the drugs inside their bodies (Adams 2018), being taken to unknown location and kept in ‘trap houses’ (Mohdin 2019) and going missing for weeks on end (Marsh 2019).

Since 2018, I have been carrying out ethnographic fieldwork on the discovery of modern slavery in county line cases. This research, prompted by developments I stumbled across in my long-term field-site – a large post-industrial council estate in England (Koch 2018) – has led me to spend months talking to working class families, the police, local authority figures, defence and prosecution barristers and to cross between Britain’s disenfranchised urban housing estates to the country’s central criminal courts. Through this research, I have watched new logics of care and control being rolled out as frontline officials traditionally trained in enforcing a ‘war on drugs’ against young, black and minority ethnic males, are learning to recognise some of these same demographics as victims in need of support. Being identified as a modern slave engenders potential forms of redress, including limited welfare and housing support and relief from prosecution for drugs and other offences.

Image 1: Modern slaves’ and their exploiters often come from Britain’s post-industrial social housing estates (Photo by Insa Koch, 2017)

And yet, the recognition of abject suffering also engenders new forms of legibility and control. My research shows that the suffering of a county line victim hinges upon the figure of the groomer. Groomers are typically presented as residing in the same community as their victims. The alleged proximity between victims and perpetrators further enables the authorities to reframe intimate relations through a lens of exploitation as quasi-legal categories are applied to everyday relations in working class communities – terms like ‘remote mothering’, ‘cuckooing’ and ‘mate crime’. Those who are found to be behind exploitation are subject to harsh punishment. This is illustrated in the case of KWA (Marsh 2019b), one of the first successful prosecutions brought against alleged slave traffickers – three young black men from inner-London housing estates – under modern slavery law.

From punitive control to legal-moral governance

Much has been made of the ‘punitive turn’ (Koch 2018), as governments across the global south (Comaroff and Comaroff 2017) and the global north (Wacquant 2009) have responded to the insecurities generated by neoliberal rule by going tough on ‘law and order’. On the face of it, the discovery of ‘modern slaves’ in the case of county lines challenges these developments as some of the most disenfranchised demographics are no longer being criminalised but rather recognised as slaves in need of state compassion and care. And yet, the picture is not so simple. As my research shows, at the heart of the British government’s modern slavery agenda lies a murky politics of victimhood, one which not only conjures images of the internal traitor in disenfranchised working class communities but which also activates a host of technical and legal mechanisms of control in the name of saving the vulnerable.

Rather than seeing the discovery of modern slavery as an aberration from the punitive conjuncture, it then constitutes a deepening of its logics through legal-moral means. In Britain today, growing inequality, topped by a decade of austerity, have generated widespread discontent with government, as evident in widespread levels of voter withdrawal alongside the more recent ‘Brexit’ vote in the referendum on leaving the EU (Koch 2017). Against this backdrop, the discovery of abject suffering in the figure of the domestic slave becomes a means of conjuring moral legitimacy on the part of the state, one which takes the language of hierarchy between the deserving and the undeserving common to neo-populist discourses to the realm of law (Kalb and Mollona 2018: 5). As Brace has argued modern slavery presents an ‘intractable, moral problem, an evil that lurks within our hearts, a beat in the shadows’ (Brace 2018: 220). At a time when decades of neoliberal rule have brought democratic mandates under attack, it is precisely this ‘lurking in or hearts’ that is galvanised by liberal government to shore up popular consent.

And yet, the veneer of legitimacy always runs thin. Take the case of Kieron, a fifteen-year-old male from a large urban housing estate. In 2018, he was designated a ‘modern slave’, having been arrested with Class A drugs. Initially, this resulted in Kieron’s family being offered an organised housing transfer to the countryside. But support has also come at a cost. Various professionals have been closely monitoring his life and his daily social relations. Meanwhile, his parents are struggling to find adequate employment in the area they were moved to. When Kieron was arrested in 2019 with drugs on him again, the tables turned. ‘Now the police are saying that he can be prosecuted because he did not accept their help’, his mother told me. The situation has come full circle: the authorities went from seeing Kieron as a petty criminal to a slave to a criminal, once more.

Insa Koch is Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and the author of ‘Personalizing the State: An Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain’.

Bibliography

Adams, Richard. 2018. “Taskforce Warns of Risk to Children from ‘County Lines’ Gangs.” The Guardian. Retrieved (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/14/taskforce-warns-of-risk-to-children-from-county-lines-gangs).

Anderson, B. and R. Andrijasevic. 2008. “Sex, Slaves and Citizens: The Politics of Anti-Trafficking.” Soundings 40(1):135–45.

Bornstein, E. and A. Sharma. 2016. “The Righteous and the Rightful: The Technomoral Politics of NGOs, Social Movements, and the State in India.” American Ethnologist 43:76–90.

Brace, L. 2018. The Politics of Slavery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff. 2017. The Truth about Crime: Knowledge, Sovereignty, Social Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Davidson, J. 2015. Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dearden, Lizzie. 2019. “Children as Young as Seven Being Used by ‘county Lines’ Drug Gangs.” The Independent, July 4.

Fassin, D. 2011. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Times. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

Feldman, I. and M. Ticktin. 2010. In the Name of Humanity: The Govenrment of Threat and Care. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Guardian, The. 2019. “Three Convicted of Trafficking in Landmark ‘County Lines’ Case.” April 17.

Kalb, D. and M. Mollona. 2018. “Introductory Thoughts on Anthropology and Urban Insurrection.” Pp. 1–30 in Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Strugges and Urban Commoning, edited by D. Kalb and M. Mollona. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

Koch, Insa. 2018. Personalizing the State: An Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kosmatopoulos, Nikolas. 2014. “The Birth of the Workshop: Technomorals, Peace Expertise, and the Care of the Self in the Middle East.” Public Culture 26(3):529–58.

Marsh, Sarah. 2019. “Revealed: Surge in Vulnerable Children Linked to UK Drug Gangs.” The Guardian.

Merry, Sally Engle. 2016. The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Mohdin, Aamna. 2019. “Airbnb and a Free Lunch: How County Lines Drug Gangs Lure Teenagers.” The Guardian, September 15.

Steur, L. 2018. “Contradictions of the ‘Common Man’: A Realist Approach to India’s Aam Aadmi Party.” in Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Strugges and Urban Commoning, edited by D. Kalb and M. Mollona. Oxford, New York: Berghahn.

Wacquant, L. 2009. Punishing the Poor : The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke University Press.

Woods, T. 2013. “Surrogate Selves: Notes on Anti-Trafficking and Anti-Blackness.” Social Identities 18(1):120–34.

Cite as: Koch, Insa. “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain.” FocaalBlog, 12 June. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/12/insa-koch-the-making-of-modern-slavery-in-austerity-britain/.

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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).

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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.

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