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Blog, Bullshit Jobs, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Andrew Sanchez: Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs

There’s a Committee for Committees!

A few weeks ago, I received a message from a colleague. It was the sort of funny thing that one friend says to another when their most ridiculous suspicions have been proven true. It said:

“There’s a committee for the membership of committees!”

My colleague discovered this while filling out a form at the University of Cambridge that required her to declare all the committees she sits on (ostensibly to keep an eye on conflicts of interest). I had to complete the form too because I am a Trustee of the University. This means that committees play a substantial role in my working life. Too substantial in fact. As of December 2021, I sit on about 20 of them.

I spend hours per month sitting in one committee, checking the minutes of other committees that I also sit on. Sometimes I write reports that are technically addressed to myself. This is not the satisfying and intellectually curious life I imagined when I became an academic. It feels like I am trapped in an Escher picture, walking endlessly up and down a looping stairway to nowhere. So of course, there would be a Committee for Committees. That’s what happens when a university has so many committees.

Image 1: Maurits Cornelis Escher lithograph “Convex and Concave” (1955), photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões

Like so many aspects of human social life, Graeber has an idea about this experience. It is an idea about that feeling of wasting your time on tasks that are not worth doing. The idea is called Bullshit Jobs (Graeber 2013, 2018). It says that most of us spend our time doing jobs are unsatisfying and serve no real purpose for society. Graeber says that capitalism has given us these jobs to keep us busy.

The Bullshit Jobs book (2018) was adapted from an essay published in Strike! Magazine (2013). One of the most memorable arguments of the essay is that there is an inverse relationship between one’s salary and the genuine social importance of one’s work. The more important you are to society, the less you get paid. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Graeber was proven correct when lockdowns prompted many nations to categorise some people as essential workers without whom society would collapse. If you had to go to work, then you were genuinely important to society. But you probably didn’t get paid a lot for being so. This maps well onto Graeber’s vision of a world of dockers, nurses, and rubbish collectors, ranged against all the management consultants and people sitting on pointless committees.

Like so much of Graeber’s work, the essay made me question why we do the things that we do. In the true spirit of anarchism, the work was destabilising. Which means that it revealed the injustice and weakness of the existing social order and showed the possibility for change. As I once heard Graeber say in a 2010 London Teach-Out shortly before a riot, ideologies of power are like the glass windows of a jewellery store. They tell you to stay in your place. But if enough people smash them, it becomes clear that they were always just glass.

The Bullshit Jobs essay was in this spirit. It was a prompt to imagine a different world, and I loved it. But when that prompt was expanded to the length of a book, it was stretched so thin so that you could see through it. I am going to talk about Bullshit Jobs by considering three things. First, whether Graeber misunderstands how bullshit tasks relate to one another in complex systems. Second, whether the thesis misunderstands capitalism’s tendency towards profiteering and the disregard for marginal populations. Finally, whether the thesis is focussed on the wrong sort of human satisfaction in work. But this is a short essay, so each issue will only be addressed briefly.

Bullshit Tasks

One of the main problems with the book was the research method, which largely rested on asking people which aspects of their work were ‘bullshit’. This is a problem, because by focusing solely on the emic experience of work, we do not necessarily understand the structural significance of that work. A person paid to guard an empty warehouse may seem to be doing a ‘bullshit job’ and perhaps it feels that way too. But the work is generative of profit for somebody else, even in an attenuated manner. In this instance that job would be integral to an opaque structure of risk assessment and insurance that dooms some of us to stand in front of empty warehouses because doing so is in the economic interest of other people. The Bullshit Jobs model tends to conflate questions of work satisfaction with those of wider structural and economic significance.

More importantly the model does not grapple with the fact that there is no necessary consistency of experience in bullshit jobs through time. The model implicitly rests on the assumption of a continuous temporal imagination of work, where satisfaction is to be had all the time or not at all. That is not how work functions. And it is especially not how bullshit, box-ticking work functions. Such forms of bureaucratic work make up a substantial proportion of Graeber’s analysis. One may spend all day checking whether a box on a form has been ticked, and it might feel pointless. But on the odd occasion where it turns out that the box has not been ticked, or where the form contains a lie… that is the moment where the value of the exercise becomes clear and a bullshit job can be socially transformative.

Imagine that you are the absurd character of a (once) working class, Marxist academic in an elite university, spending hours a week trawling through committee papers. Perhaps your soul aches with the suspicion that you are wasting your time and have sold out. Until you find an innocuous line of text tucked away in a committee paper; a text that if unchallenged would quietly remove permanent employment status from everybody in your university that changed their institutional role at any point in the future. Suddenly it seems important that somebody is there to read all these papers. And it seems especially important that the people doing the reading should not assume that the work is bullshit.

Bullshit jobs are not usually bullshit all the time. It would probably make more sense to rather talk of bullshit tasks. One should then consider whether those tasks coalesce into something more impactful, and why this is integral to the nature of complex economic and institutional action. You would be prudent to pay more attention to the box ticking bureaucrats, because even if you consider their work to be ‘stupid’ (Graeber 2015) the combined aggregate of their tasks will nonetheless shape the world around you. However, you probably wouldn’t know about it, because bureaucracy is by its very nature quiet and anonymous (Kesküla and Sanchez 2019). The transformative dimensions of much bureaucratic work are slower, and they are crucially less individualised than other types of work. But they coalesce into forms of power (Bear and Mathur 2015), and as power they can never be bullshit.

Many of Graeber’s bullshit jobs are artefacts of social complexity, and their impact is distributed at a social and temporal scale that exceeds his model. I doubt the existence of a coherent category of bullshit jobs. There is also no evidence that they exist to keep people out of trouble.

Capitalism Doesn’t Have a Committee

Modern capitalism lacks the concerted agency to create mass pointless work for reasons of social engineering. It principally strives towards the economic exploitation of mass populations, and is content to abandon those that it cannot readily exploit.

Graeber (2013) says that the only societies that used to give people pointless work were state socialist ones. They did this to redistribute wealth and keep people out of trouble. However, he argues that in the late 20th century increasing mechanisation and the shifting of production to the developing world left much of the working population in wealthy capitalist societies with nothing to do. That population was a threat to the established social order, and needed to be given bullshit jobs to distract them and tire them out.

This claim is incorrect. Neoliberal capitalism doesn’t have a committee. It certainly doesn’t have the type of committee that engages in a coherent global endeavour to stop us from sliding into thoughtful idleness. Some people would like to believe that neoliberalism doesn’t exist at all and is only conjured into being by left wing social scientists. Those people are wrong. There are explicit packages of policies, reforms, professional networks, and ways of looking at the world that make neoliberalism a real thing. But still, neoliberal capitalism does not have a committee.

I appreciate anthropological attention to the discursive and moral life of neoliberalism, and I have written about how neoliberal actors may feel that they are doing good in the world (Sanchez 2012). However, for a structural analysis like Bullshit Jobs what matters is the core motivation of capitalism, which is profit. The notion of a world of pointless employment that does not exist to make money, simply does not fit with what we know about most of economic life. More broadly, there is the lingering issue that capitalism is untroubled by the fact that plenty of people in wealthy societies have not been given pointless work.

If I can be permitted to stick with the anecdotal style of Bullshit Jobs here is an example to illustrate my point: I was raised on a British council estate where a good proportion of people were completely without any form of work. Some tended to get into trouble, and aged into lives where they harmed themselves and others. Feasibly, those populations could be imagined as a threat to social order. But the Committee was untroubled by that possibility. Capitalism was happy for our family to live on state benefits for years, treading water below the poverty line, sliding into depression and violence. Although the hateful notion of a ‘Chav’ underclass would suggest otherwise, people in those environments often have critical perspectives on how the world works. And sometimes they try to do something about it. It was in just such an environment that I was radicalised as a young teenager, and grew into the person writing this essay. This personal example is perhaps a little cloying. But the fact remains that there are too many people left behind by the Bullshit Jobs Committee, for the idea to make sense.

Or less anecdotally we might consider populations at the acute end of the social marginality spectrum, those apparently expelled by capitalism as if they are somehow worthless, condemned to lives of floating marginality, living in refugee camps or prisons, standing by the road at labour markets waiting for a gig that never comes (Sassen 2014). It is mistaken to see such populations as lacking in creativity and will (Alexander and Sanchez 2019). It is also mistaken to not recognise them as sources of economic value for capitalism. Bourgois’ (2018) work on predatory accumulation shows this, as does older thinking on the Prison Industrial Complex. It turns out that those allegedly dangerous populations are still worth something to somebody. If this were not so, then marginalised communities would not be beset everywhere by landlords, credit agencies, racketeers, brokers, and for-profit providers of social and justice services.

Capitalism has not found ways of giving dangerous populations bullshit jobs to keep them out of trouble. Rather, capitalism is all too often immune to the trouble that they might cause, and indeed routinely finds them to be a useful area of exploitation.

What Isn’t Bullshit?

When Bullshit Jobs discusses how people feel about their work, it rests on Graeber’s theory of value, where action that is meaningful is that which is socially productive. I am a fan of Graeber’s theory of value. But his reconfiguration of it for a discussion of work tasks is not quite right. For Graeber, work is socially productive principally when it cares for the world. I believe that this idea is trained at the wrong level of action. The ability for one’s work to ‘care’ might be better conceived as just one expression of the ability to transform the world.

As I have argued elsewhere (Sanchez 2020), the single most important factor in peoples’ determination of satisfying work is an engagement with processes that make demands on one’s ability to affect change upon the world. Put simply, people like work that challenges them to alter something, be it the material form of an object, the value of a commodity, the dispositions of other people, or the skills and capacities of themselves. Troublingly, transformative work does not map onto ‘caring’ and some people may find it enjoyable to do impactful things that harm others. More broadly, transformation is not restricted to an impact on human relations, or a lasting contribution to social life.  

I have spent my working life talking to people about their working life. And because I am an enthusiast, I tend to do this even when I am not ‘working’. My experience is that there are many jobs that I would find pointless to do myself, but which other people do not. That is because they have found a meaningful transformative dimension in their work that would elude me, and they therefore find it satisfying to manage IPOs, trade stocks, or write advertising copy. The transformative action of work needn’t happen in an instant. And indeed, it often takes lots of people to make it happen at all. People are smart enough to know this, which is why the daily grind of bullshit tasks does not necessarily translate into a wholly bullshit job. Every now and again, the box hasn’t been ticked properly, and it matters.

Conclusion

I think that Bullshit Jobs is basically wrong. Nonetheless I like the fact that a book like this exists, and I wish that there were more of them.

Anthropology is often mired in citations and pedestrianism. Or else we are that other type of Anthropologist (my least favourite): the one mired in pretentious, performative theorising. As a consequence, we are a discipline that often struggles to say anything original and of wider social significance. But in Bullshit Jobs we have a work that is imaginative, fun to read, and about issues that most people can relate to. It is the voice of a man speaking to the reader not as an academic showing off or trying to intimidate you, but as though he had met you at a party, and you were lucky enough to be chatting to somebody that really made you think. 

That’s what I love about Graeber’s writing; the essential humanity of it. His work conveys the mind of a person that cares enough to look at things that matter to everybody else, and who cares enough to speak about them in a way that is exciting and intelligible. Even when Graeber was wrong, he made you think. And what he made you think about was invariably something important. That’s what an academic is for.

Andrew Sanchez is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published on economy, labour, and corruption, including Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India, Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity co-edited with Sian Lazar, and Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination co-edited with Catherine Alexander. 

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on “Bullshit Jobs”.

References

Alexander, C. & Sanchez, A. (eds). 2019. Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination. Berghahn

Bear, L. & Mathur, N. 2015. ‘Introduction: Remaking the Public Good’ The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33(1): 18–34

Bourgois, P. 2018. ‘Decolonising drug studies in an era of predatory accumulation’ Third World Quarterly, 39(2): 385-398

Graeber, D. 2013. ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant’ Strike! 3

Graeber. D. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House

Graeber, D. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Allen Lane

Kesküla, E. & Sanchez, A. 2019. “Everyday Barricades: Bureaucracy and the Affect of Struggle in Trade Unions” Dialectical Anthropology 43(1): 109-125

Sanchez, A. 2012. ‘Deadwood and Paternalism: Rationalising Casual Labour in an Indian Company Town’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(4): 808-827

Sanchez, A. 2020. ‘Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work’ Social Analysis 64(3): 68-94

Sassen, S. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press.

Cite as: Sanchez, Andrew. 2022. “Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.” FocaalBlog, 4 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/04/andrew-sanchez-work-is-complicated-thoughts-on-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog, Features, War: New Times

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

Image 1: Czar Vladimir, by BakeNecko.

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

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William Suárez-Gómez and Ismael García-Colón: Puerto Rico: Resistance in the world’s oldest colony

In July 2019, Puerto Rico was in turmoil. An organic movement asking for the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló emerged throughout this US colonial territory. After 12 days of mass protests, the governor resigned on 24 July. The international media portrayed his resignation as a successful and peaceful outcome. This is the first time that protests and the will of Puerto Ricans removed an elected governor from office. Yet, his resignation may only be the beginning of an uphill battle against those who benefit from corruption and austerity.

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Ståle Knudsen: Debts and the end for infrastructure fetishism in Turkey

The immense new Istanbul Airport, additional spectacular bridges over the straights, the Marmaray metro/train tunnel under the Bosporus, high-speed trains, highways, extension of the Istanbul metro network, energy projects. These were highlights in a campaign video for the Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidate Binali Yıldırım in the rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election in June. The video was made by a “social media follower” and acclaimed by Yıldırım, who shared it on his Twitter account. It was accompanied by the text “Well, who made this?”

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Evan Smith: Love milkshakes, hate racism: A short history of throwing food at the Far Right

An earlier version of this article first appeared on Hatful of History.

In the last month, milkshakes have been lobbed at several far-right candidates in the European elections campaign across the United Kingdom. First it was former English Defence League (EDL) leader Tommy Robinson, then UKIP’s misogynist YouTuber Carl Benjamin, and now Nigel Farage as he was out campaigning in Newcastle for his new Brexit Party. When Farage visited Edinburgh, the local police advised McDonald’s not to sell milkshakes, and there has been further news that Farage refused to step off his tour bus after being threatened with further milkshakings.

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Stephen Campbell: Touring Myanmar’s leftist history

For more by the author, see his article “Putting-Out’s Return: Informalization and Differential Subsumption in Thailand’s Garment Sector” in Focaal, freely available to all readers until 22 May 2019.

Opening his 1990 political history, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Burma, the Bangkok-based journalist Bertil Lintner summarized the then recent end to the party’s 40-year insurrection: “It’s cessation was not the outcome of a successful government offensive or of a generous amnesty policy, but of an all-out mutiny within the rank-and-file” (1990: 1). The party, by then deeply invested in the Golden Triangle’s heroin economy, had long since lost the level of popular support it had once achieved for advocating the interests of workers and peasants, and for its role in fighting Japan’s World War II fascist occupation and Britain’s postwar efforts to reassert colonial rule. Meanwhile, the military-backed Burma Socialist Programme Party, which since the 1962 military coup had ruled the country as sole legal political party, itself imploded in the face of mass anti-government protests in 1988. In any case, the party had long ago eviscerated its meager socialist credentials, as when it dispatched soldiers to massacre workers participating in the 1974 general strike. To this day, discussion of leftist politics in Myanmar is overdetermined by these inglorious historical facts, which mark the declining years of socialism and communism in the country.

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Tereza Kuldova: Think before you “heart” it: NZ street gangs guarding mosques in the aftermath of terror a PR stunt

Over the past two days, my Facebook feed has been flooded with shares of articles featuring New Zealand patched street gangs and outlaw motorcycle clubs—Mongrel Mob, Black Power, King Cobras—acting in solidarity with the Muslim community and the 50 victims of the recent terrorist attack, be it by performing the traditional haka or promising to “guard” local mosques during Friday’s jumu’ah. Media love the spectacular images of gang members and outlaw bikers, and the news caught like fire across the globe. Many, including some of my leftist comrades, embraced the gangs’ actions with uncritical support—“hearted,” liked, and shared it.

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Heiko Henkel, Sindre Bangstad, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen: The politics of affect: Anthropological perspectives on the rise of far-right and right-wing populism in the West

This is the first part of a panel held during the 2017 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. The second part is freely available to all readers in the most recent issue of Focaal here.

Over the past decade, the dramatic ascendance of ethno-nationalist and right-wing populist movements and projects has been reshaping the European and North American political landscape. While such movements and projects have played crucial roles in European politics since the emergence of the nation-state—most dramatically so with the rise and fall of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s—they have hitherto remained mostly at the margins of established national and international politics in post–World War II Euro-America. A string of political events, most notably the election of Donald Trump and his turbulent presidency, the Brexit referendum that is about to propel the United Kingdom out of the EU, and the electoral successes (if not always victories) of decidedly nationalist and far-right populist parties across Europe, however, have underlined the viability and dynamism of ethno-nationalism, right-wing populism, and far-right political projects in Europe and the United United. Crucially, it has also become clear that many of these projects and movements both represent and amplify a passionate rejection of what is often described as the failings of the “liberal elite.”

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