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Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog

Alice Tilche & akshay khanna: The Village of the Dead

“Near Ahmedabad’s civil hospital, 

in a small dilapidated house. 

A dog lives with his wife and their children. 

After two days, the dog returns to his home. 

After seeing him, the wife says: 

“Oh! Look at your face, it is glowing 

First tell me where you have been for two days? 

The dog shakes his tail and tells her with a laugh: 

“Do you know today I ate human flesh, 

And the human was alive”. 

I return to this episode every time, ‘Murdon ka Gaon’ (The Village of the Dead). I watch it once more, working on a translation to Italian for a film screening, moving from the English subtitles while paying attention to the original Bhantu words that by now I mostly understand. I pay attention to the words, the pace of the story, I stop and listen again. Finding words in Italian, my mother tongue, strikes me – the words are more emotive than they sounded in English. They touch me more; perhaps it is also in the slow attentive viewing that I let them touch me. 

The core of the episode is simple: shot in a dark room, four people sit in a closed circle, telling a story, their faces folded into shadows by a candle placed in the middle. The image is dark and grainy, their voices varied but all intensely expressive. Sometimes, we cut to the image of a dog. Dogs sleeping, a dog roaming the streets at night, a dog licking its wounds. We move between close-ups of the faces of the actors and, occasionally, the dog. As I watch the film I am struck by the vivid, yet dark affects it provokes. The simplicity of the images on camera, and the ekphrastic storytelling (Favero 2018) allows you to watch and at the same time imagine the unimaginable – that which, in fact, is too inhuman to be represented. 

The story, an adaptation of the Hindi short story by Dharamvir Bharti, ‘Village of the Dead’, is told from the perspective of a dog, a dog that roams the streets at night to find half-dead bodies, the bodies of migrants, of slaves, of corona patients that are so hungry and thirsty that they begin eating themselves. It is a story of thresholds, of the threshold between the living and the dead, between humans and non-humans, between humans and slaves, between humans and hungry humans. 

Finding the city’s hospital dark and empty we follow the dog wandering towards the highway in search of food. Near the highway, the dog encounters thousands of migrants and their children walking “dhak, dhak, dhak, like machines” – an encounter that evokes the brutal images of the bleeding feet of migrants, walking thousands of kilometres to return home in the face of a lockdown of the country announced with a few hours’ notice, a mass migration estimated to be the largest in the history of the subcontinent. The dog sees a hut perched against some tall buildings, where a boy gasps, barely able to form the word water: “pa… pa … pani”. There is only an old man to listen to him, himself too helpless to help. “I will get relief if you die”, the old man shouts at the boy in an angry tone. The dog continues wandering through hallucinatory scenes of poverty, of hunger, of mothers trying to feed their children, of people who are too helpless to love, of humans that may have been dead but are in fact half-alive, eaten by the dog, then by flies, and who are so hungry and thirsty that they too drink their own blood. After digging its teeth in the flesh of a hungry human: 

“The dog got ashamed. And put his head down 

Because he ate the flesh of a hungry, slave migrant. 

Corona patients and hungry slaves are not humans” 

I find the storytelling format reassuring, about the four people talking softly, intimately – the intimacy of a story read before bedtime. The voice of the narrator, the dog, is soft. Perhaps this is done on purpose, like in many (terrible) folktales, where you are invited to trust, relax, be guided by the narrator to unimagined and terrifying places. This intimacy contrasts with the shocking images that the telling provokes, with the angry voice of the old man who tells the boy that the only relief is death. It contrasts with the reality that, perhaps unlike in folktales, we are presented with following the story. 

This vignette relates to one amongst several disturbing moments from an arts-based research project set in western India, which has sought to document and intervene in one of the most difficult collective experiences in recent human history. It was in May 2020, during the first wave of India’s Covid-19 pandemic, that a collective of indigenous theatre artists associated with Budhan Theatre and belonging to the ‘Denotified’[1] Chhara tribe began an extensive project of documentation of the lockdown and post-lockdown experiences of their communities through film and digital technology. This project had, by early 2022, produced two series of video podcasts in indigenous languages, disseminated through community social media platforms and messaging services such as WhatsApp. The first series filmed during the early days of the pandemic between May and December 2020 focussed inward, at the experiences of pain and loss of their own Chhara community. Starting in January 2021, the second series moves outwards, to document the experiences of other Denotified and Nomadic Tribes in the region and across the country. The third series, underway during this writing, brings the skills and experience developed beyond DNT communities by training young leaders from other marginalised groups in filmmaking.

Episodes in the series address the health, socio-cultural and politico-economic dimensions of the pandemic through multiple art forms that include theatre performances, story-telling, songs and poetry alongside more conventional forms of documentary film making such as interviews, fact sharing and event capture. They cover topics ranging from health and safety measures, changes in death and marriage rituals, precarious livelihoods, the lives of children and the gendered unfurling of the pandemic. The podcasts are an attempt to tell stories of the pandemic that do not find space in mainstream public spheres, to speak to one’s own community in one’s own language, as a companion, a community space in which to make sense of unprecedented suffering where the precarity, disenfranchisement and marginalisation of centuries took on another dimension altogether, where the fault-lines of a post-colonial society, subsumed in the everyday, rose to the gaze as the horrific realities of the reduction of the human to the inhuman. It is in this context that this particular episode serves as something of an index through which to navigate this moment. 

In the episode, the narration of collective suffering, made all the more effective through the absurdist use of the voice of the street dogs, sets the scene for an individual narrative of loss. Following the story told in a scantly lit room, we move to a brightly lit interview setting, with a widow and her son soon after they lost their husband and father to Corona. Sitting in a chair outside her house, dressed in a white ‘good’ sari, the widow speaks calmly. The widow is well held-together, as is her son. They do not cry. They both demonstrate utmost dignity, precisely that which has been denied to them, and which differentiates the dead and the living. As they speak, however, the precarity of their situation becomes clear: the debts they have taken to pay hospital bills, the unpaid school fees, the loss of livelihood. At the end of the interview, still keeping her composure, the widow turns to the camera with her hands joined pleading the government for help. Glimpses of death and its rawness break through the frame of respectability as interspersed with their story is the WhatsApp footage of the husband / father in hospital, intubated, gasping for breath – an image of the physical suffering of the disease that has been invisible from most representations of the pandemic. Contrasting with the composed telling of his story the image takes us back to “the village of the dead” – to that suffering beyond the human which only a dog can recount.

The telling of this story, and the images that it both evokes and presents, is an attempt at disturbing the political order of images and their associated experiences – and the relationships of visibility / invisibility that obliterate certain kinds of suffering and the possibility of its memory. Less than a year after the second wave of the Covid pandemic in India, its sheer horror and the absolute failure of the state to address it, is being aggressively erased. The various elements of the catastrophe, and in multiple registers are being denied – be it in terms of numbers[2], of causation of death and morbidity, of narratives of loss, emotional and spiritual distress – are thus at the risk of being ‘aggressively forgotten’. The project of holding on to experience, of creating portals to memory is thus a complicated affair, bringing together the material conditions for this creation, the emotive and affective challenges of recounting, the historical struggle of some of the most marginalised peoples of the world to articulate an intelligible voice, and the dramatic shifts in the materiality of public spheres, aesthetic and artistic practices in a post-COVID world.

This production of images also forces a reconsideration of the ethical debates around representations of suffering that frame ethical protocols within academia. In the late 1980s, at a time when shocking images of wars and famines became widely broadcasted, medical anthropologists criticised the ‘globalisation of suffering’ through which images become appropriated to appeal to global audiences (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996; see Ong 2019 for more recent debates). Scholars then argued that these iconic images involved a problematic commoditisation, and therefore thinning out, of the experience of suffering. Instead, they called for a kind of moral witnessing that is reflexive, that accounts for local realities by involving local participants in the development of images and interventions. These debates, however, continue tend to be structured by an imagination of the filmmaker, the anthropologist, the researcher, the producer of representations as outsiders, whereas those represented are imagined as objects bereft of agency. At the outset then, the representation of suffering itself comes to be suspect as a form of exploitation, and subject to technologies of taming, of decaffeination, so that representations may be considered and consumed without an engagement with the experience itself. There is thus a crucial misalignment between these ethical preoccupations aimed at protecting the vulnerable and the demand of communities to be heard and seen. The pandemic put indigenous communities in India in the grips of a devastating humanitarian crisis. Their vulnerability was greater because of their inability to enter and become visible in the public sphere.  If we engage with indigenous groups as active consumers and producers of images – through mobile phones, social media and through artistic practices like film and drama – what are the material, or ethical concerns that underly the making of images? What does it mean for a research to be led by the community?

In the following weeks we shall in this series of blogposts, share episodes from the project, alongside reflections on the questions that they force open or complicate, around the changing nature of collaborative research, the transformation of embodied performance into digital objects and processes, the emergence of a new visual and political language around suffering and the place of death in current political formations.

Alice Tilche is a lecturer in Anthropology and Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research at the intersection of art and activism employs visual, collaborative and arts-based methods to research social transformations – including work on the cultural politics of indigeneity, migration, nationalism and most recently Covid-19. Alice’s book Adivasi Art and Activism: curation in a nationalist age was published with Washington University Press in 2022. Her collaborative film projects including Sundarana (2011), Broken Gods (2019) and Budhan-Podcast (2021) have been selected for a number of international film screenings and festivals.

Akshay Khanna is a Delhi-based Social Anthropologist, International Development Consultant, theatre practitioner and amateur chef, with training in Law and Medical Anthropology and the author of Sexualness (2016, New Text), which tells a story of Queer movements in India, develops a framework to think the sexual from the global south, and introduces Quantum Physics into the study of the sexual.

References

Kleinman, Arthur, and Joan Kleinman. “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times.” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 1–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027351.

Favero, Paolo. 2018. The present image. Palgrave MacMillan.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69499-3_5

Ong, Jonathan Corpus. “Toward an Ordinary Ethics of Mediated Humanitarianism: An Agenda for Ethnography.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 22, no. 4 (July 2019): 481–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877919830095.

Notes

[1] ‘Denotified’ refers to tribes were ‘notified’ as born criminals during the British colonial rule under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. Despite their denotification five years after India’s independence the stigma of criminality continues to be associated with these groups, depriving them of citizenship rights and entitlements. The population of India’s Denotified and Nomadic is estimated to be around 10 % of India’s total population.

[2] The World Health Organisation estimates that the total number of excess deaths associated with the COVID pandemic in the year 2020 and 2021 is about 47 lakh/4.7million. The Government of India in turn rejects the report and insists that the number is 1/10th of the WHO estimate.

Cite as: Tilche, Alice and Khanna, Akshay. 2022. “The Village of the Dead.” Focaalblog, 31 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/05/31/alice-tilche-akshay-khanna-the-village-of-the-dead/

Blog

Markus Virgil Hoehne: Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia

Presidential elections will happen in Somalia on Sunday, 15 May 2022. This will most likely not bring peace and stability to the war-torn Somali society. To the contrary, the elections and their aftermath will, in all probability, perpetuate and even worsen to political crisis in the country. On the one hand, the electoral process has already dragged on for almost two years, producing violent clashes between government and opposition forces and instigating vote buying and other forms of political corruption (Gaas and Hansen 2022).  On the other hand, and this might even be worse, the country’s “democratization process” is out of tune with important political realities in Somalia, namely with the fact that the government only holds nominal power in parts of Somalia.

Militant Islamists control much of southern Somalia; the northwest of the country has declared its independence 30 years ago and exists since as the secessionist Republic of Somaliland. Other areas in central and northeastern Somalia are to some degree autonomous, partly controlled by clan militias. This means that the government controls only around 20 percent of Somalia’s territory. Foreign troops have to assist the government to hold its areas. Southern Somalia, where most of the resources and the economy of Somalia are concentrated, is still in a phase of active war (EASO 2021).

It can be assumed that the government in Mogadishu would, without external support, collapse even quicker than the Afghan government did in the wake of the US-withdrawal in mid-2021. Moreover, in the areas controlled by the government and its external allies, hardly any services are delivered to the ordinary population. The hallmark of the nominal Somali governments since many years is internal wrangling and massive embezzlement of the state’s budget including the income from foreign aid. The question is: what does the presidential election bring at all? My answer is: it helps to keep up a façade, which serves external actors, including the USA, Ethiopia, the EU and many INGOs and UN organizations, in that it allows the conduct of “business” (development business, counter-terrorism business, political stabilization business, humanitarian business) which enriches a few international and local elites, while it keeps the bulk of Somalis in extreme poverty and caught up in protracted conflict.

A story of many missed deadlines

Somalia should have had a new parliament and a new president long ago. The term of office of the current president Mohamed Ali Farmajo ended in February 2021. The UN and western donors including the USA and the EU have been pushing for free elections already for years (since around 2018). At the same time, the “one person one vote” formula introduced into Somalia’s politics was and remains unrealistic. While external actors, mainly UN officials, tried to push this voting-scheme through, President Farmajo actively undermined it by not taking any steps to prepare elections. This led to conflicts between the president and the prime minister, with the latter trying to steer the preparations of the elections. Eventually, as ACLED (2021) outlined, also in the face of ongoing war in southern Somalia, the major political actors agreed in mid-2020 to holding indirect elections in Somalia – in a similar way as the last elections in 2017.

This indirect election process is complicated: At the local level, family elders nominate a total of almost 30,000 electoral women and men. These then determine the 275 members of the lower house of parliament, the seats of which are not distributed according to party-membership, but according to belonging to patrilineal descent groups (and according to personal networks and who can pay which bribes). The 54 members of the upper house are nominated by electoral committees of the Somali federal member states. Together, the two houses then elect the president (Elmi 2021). President Mohamed A. Farmajo prefers indirect elections because they are strongly controlled by the presidents of the federal member states, some of whom are his supporters. Yet, he even did not push very energetically for the completion of this process. When his term ended on 8th February 2021, no members of parliament had been elected so that Farmajo was able to extend his mandate by decree for two years. This was, I would argue, the easiest way for him to stay in power.

However, it led to violent reactions. Temporarily, armed opposition supporters occupied parts of Mogadishu. The crisis finally calmed down in mid-2021 when Somali elites and external supporters agreed on indirect elections to be concluded by the end of February 2022. Although this deadline was missed, by the end of April 2022 all members of both houses had finally been elected and nominated. During the indirect election process, massive influence (buying of votes and exercising political pressure, even intimidating members of the electoral committees, elders or candidates) was exercised. The complete parliament can now vote for one of the more than thirty nominated presidential candidates. Again, much money is clandestinely changing hands these days in Mogadishu; and gun-prices are going up on the capital’s markets, according to The New Humanitarian.

Elections in a long-term battlefield

Violence in Somalia escalated from the end of the 1970s. In the context of the Cold War, first the Soviet Union and then the US and their respective allies (such as German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany) supplied arms to the dictatorship under Siyad Barre (1969-91) – even when it was evident that human rights violations would be committed with them. In 1991, rebels overthrew the dictatorial regime, but they were unable to agree on a new government. The state arsenals were broken open, and the population armed itself. Chaos and violence led to a famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of victims by the end of 1992. As a result, the USA and the UN intervened with up to 30,000 blue helmets to guarantee the supply of the civilian population with humanitarian aid and to restore political order. It was the first time in the history of the UN that blue helmets were deployed in a country without the government’s consent. The operation failed: the famine was alleviated admittedly, but the armed intervention intensified the fighting. The USA and the UN cooperated with some warlords and attempted to capture others, such as Mohamed Farah Aideed.
This led to the solidarity of many Somalis with Aideed, who, as a former army officer, was involved in the overthrow of dictator Barre. When American special forces tried to seize him in October 1993, fighting broke out in Mogadishu. Hundreds Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed in the house-to-house fighting (depicted, albeit with an extreme US-centric [and racist] bias, in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down). Subsequently, all intervention troops withdrew from Somalia by May 1995. The weapons and the warlords remained. The latter made “dirty” deals with foreign companies, for instance for dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast (VOA 2009).

Only after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Muslim nation of Somalia returned to the attention of Western governments. The USA and its allies – in the Horn of Africa especially Ethiopia – cooperated with several warlords to capture and eliminate Islamist terrorist suspects in southern Somalia. At the same time, the international community initiated a peace conference for Somalia in Kenya, at which, in mid-2004, former militia leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was elected president by a Somali interim parliament. However, he and his government could not enter the capital because the local population rejected him. Most Somalis were now aligned with the lslamic Courts, which promised an alternative political and economic order for Somalia, based on Sharia law. These lslamists were the only ones to ensure peace in the urban neighborhoods under their control and offered effective jurisdiction (Ibrahim 2018).

Image 1: Elections in Somalia through the lens of the United Nations (their caption: “Members of the Somali Federal parliament queue to cast their ballots for round two during the presidential election held at the Mogadishu Airport hangar on February 8, 2017. UN Photo/ Ilyas Ahmed”)


From early 2006, tensions erupted into fighting between the Islamists on one side and the government and allied warlords on the other. The militias that fought for the Islamic Courts finally gained the upper hand. They soon controlled large parts of southern Somalia. The Ethiopian army intervened in December and dispersed all but a small core of Islamist forces. This was the nucleus from which Al-Shabaab (The Youth) emerged in 2007. In the following years, Al-Shabaab evolved into the strongest Somali force, which temporarily (between 2009 and 2011) ruled southern Somalia including Mogadishu and other urban centers and was then from 2011 driven out by a massive campaign of more than 10,000 African Union-troops deployed to Somalia. As of 2022, some 22,000 AU forces are stationed in southern Somalia. Together with around 10,000 Somali National Army soldiers and a smaller number of USA special forces (waging drone war) they have not managed to defeat Al Shabaab, which not only fights a guerilla war against the Somali government and its allies but actually also governs substantial rural areas, delivering justice and security at the local level and building-up some basic legitimacy in this way, despite the fact that the violence of the extremists, exercised through harsh punishments of (alleged) criminals or enemies and through regular terror attacks with many civilian casualties mainly in Mogadishu appalls many Somalis (Hoehne and Gaas 2022; Bakonyi 2022).

No one is legitimate

While a new war – one characterized as “counter-terrorism war” – escalated in Somalia and has cost tens of thousands of lives between 2007 and today, international actors have been trying to establish a government in Mogadishu, based on a new federal constitution (which was partly drafted by German legal specialists working for the Max Planck Foundation, which contrary to the name is not a basic research institute but a consultancy firm). Based on that constitution, indirect elections were held for the first time in 2012, and Hassan Sheikh Mahamoud became president. He sought to implement the federal constitution and establish federal states. The idea was to achieve some division of power in the state and between (patrilinear descent) groups through federalization. Traditionally, in Somali society, affiliation is regulated less by territory than by descent in the paternal line. Mahamoud’s government succeeded in establishing some federal states, at least nominally. Nonetheless, Al-Shabaab still controlled the hinterland of southern Somalia.

Also Mahamoud’s government was extremely corrupt. Approximately 70 percent of the funds given from outside disappeared into the private pockets of government actors, as documented by the World Bank, among other sources. The term of office of the following president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, was accompanied by massive accusations of corruption as well. Farmajo negated the federal model of government and worked toward the centralization of power.

Given the limited function and low legitimacy of Farmajo’s government and the state in Somalia as a whole, the question arises why elections are nevertheless organized at great expense. It is common knowledge how corrupt the political actors are and that they have little support among the population. A leading UN representative said in a briefing end of 2021, at which the author participated, that “no matter how the election process turns out, it will not contribute to any improvement”. A German NGO worker told an expert panel in January 2022 (again, the author was present at this meeting) that his biggest concern was how the losing side would react after the corrupt election. Some fear a new escalation of violence.

One explanation is that Somali elites and external aid workers benefit from elections. Somali elites make sure that they get well paid for their participation in the farce that the elections are. In order to continue to carry out projects in the crisis-ridden country, Western aid organizations need administrative partners to sign off on projects – which is obviously an end in itself, because the aid often does not benefit the ordinary population, but the external actors and their Somali elite partners. Moreover, the elections formally support the narrative of Western governments that things are “getting better” in Somalia. In the end, even Al-Shabaab benefits from the election disaster. Although the militant extremists do not have a broad basis of legitimacy either, they only need to do things a little better than the government, and they can gain some support from the conflict-weary population.

Instead of holding elections, Somali political actors should seek reconciliation and strive for political dialogue with all relevant powers in Somalia, including Al Shabaab. Yet, in Somalia, this seems to be made impossible by an (informal) doctrine of military counter-terrorism mixed with a focus on formal democratization and institution building, no matter how hollow the construct of the thus erected “government” is.  

Markus Virgil Hoehne is a social anthropologist at the University of Leipzig researching on conflict, identity, state-building, and dealing with the violent past in Somalia and Peru. He has been working on Somali issues since 2001. He is the author of Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (Nairobi: Rift Valley Institute) and the co-editor of Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological encounters (New York: Berghahn).

Bibliography:

ACLED 2021: A Turbulent Run-up to Elections in Somalia. https://acleddata.com/2021/04/07/a-turbulent-run-up-to-elections-in-somalia/

Bakonyi, Jutta 2022: War’s Everyday: Normalizing Violence and Legitimizing Power. Partecipazione&Conflitto Vol. 15, No. 1: 121-138

EASO 2021: Country of Origin Information Report: Somalia Security situation. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/2021_09_EASO_COI_Report_Somalia_Security_situation.pdf

Elmi, Afyare 2021: The Politics of the Electoral System in Somalia: An Assessment. Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies: Vol. 21: 99-113, available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/bildhaan/vol21/iss1/10

Gaas, Mohamed Husein and Stig Jarle Hansen 2022: A Near End to Somalia’s Election Conundrum? RAAD Policy Brief 1:2022.

Hoehne, Markus Virgil and Mohammed Hussein Gaas 2022: Political Islam in Somalia: From underground movements to the rise and continued resilience of Al Shabaab, in J.-N. Bach and Aleksi Ylönen (eds.): Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa. London: Routledge, pp. 411-427.

Ibrahim,Ahmed Sheikh 2018: The Shari’a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and

“Islamic Law”.  Dissertation, the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology, City University of New York.

Somalia Corruption Report July 2020, available at: https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/somalia/

The New Humanitarian 12 May 2022: Gun prices soar ahead of Somalia’s presidential elections https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2022/05/12/gun-prices-soar-ahead-of-somalias-presidential-elections

VOA 30.10.2009: Waste Dumping off Somali Coast May Have Links to Mafia, Somali Warlords, available at: https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-15-voa34/306247.html

Cite as: Hoehne, Markus Virgil. 2022. “Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia.“ FocaalBlog, 13 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/05/13/markus-virgil-hoehne-perpetuating-conflict-through-democratization-presidential-elections-in-somalia/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Susan Paulson: Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds

Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies, I have been frustrated to see hegemonic ideals about care, kinship, and residence distract attention from empirical realities and adequate solutions. Examples range from the ubiquitous representation of care as embodied by women health workers and mothers to the shocking silence about disproportionate burdens of coronavirus illness and death born by men, and the wildly incorrect assumption that most humans live in and are cared for by nuclear family households.

Covid masculinities

Much attention has been drawn to vulnerabilities of women nurses, health aids, and caretakers. More gender awareness is needed for millions of men performing essential jobs as sanitation workers, truck and bus drivers, agricultural workers, miners, fishers, and loggers. These occupations are absolutely vital for public health, yet were already among the most dangerous and deadly before adding exposure to coronavirus. Around the world, they are performed overwhelmingly by men, in patterns of workplace violence so highly gendered that, in countries like USA, men suffer 92% of occupational deaths. The workplace, then, is a realm that calls urgently for improved care.

Data from countries around the world show that coronavirus infections tend to be much more severe among men than women, with death tolls as high as two times greater for men (Bhopal and Bhopal 2020). In the US, the death rate from coronavirus for men is 1.6 times that of women. This intersects with disproportionate burden of coronavirus infections and underlying conditions among racial and ethnic minorities, and among those who are less wealthy and less educated. In many contexts, then, it is poorer less-white men who are most vulnerable to suffer critical illness and death from coronavirus (Rushovich et. al 2021). Care for these groups needs to be much more visible in news and policy responses.

While analyses of structural inequalities in occupation, residence, and healthcare rarely address masculinities, some airtime has been dedicated to men’s behavior. Studies in various contexts found men to be much more likely than women to go without masks and to break quarantine. How can criticism of the behavior of individual men shift to societal commitments to supporting self-care among all humans, including variously positioned men?     

Is it useful to blame men for getting sick? Feminists have struggled to motivate compassion for women whose conditions constrain the development of skills and confidence needed to establish dignified lives for themselves. Transitions to care-full worlds will also require compassion for boys and men whose gender expectations push them to demonstrate their manliness by performing dangerous labor in hazardous conditions, by exercising and enduring violence, and by taking risks with their health and their lives. Perhaps the devastating gendered impacts of the virus can spark mobilization against gender-linked violence that harms men and women in different ways.

While some people find safety and comfort at home, others face conflict and crowding, or lack homes altogether. Reports from diverse countries indicate that domestic violence has intensified during lock-downs, impacting women disproportionately. People who don’t even live in homes face different kinds of vulnerabilities. In most countries, women outnumber men among residents in long-term care centers, while men make up majorities as high as 90% in prisons, jails, migrant labor camps, homeless shelters, immigrant detention centers, and military barracks, all of which became hotspots for the virus. In these residential patterns too, the forms of violence and discrimination borne by men intersect with ethno-racial and class inequalities. Demands of care for those not living in households call for moral and institutional shifts away from private family responsibility toward community and commons.

Normative households

Kinship and sexuality are also fundamental in the organization of care. Many public health messages, exemplified by those pictured below, reinforce the widespread—and incorrect—assumption that contemporary populations live mostly in heteronormative nuclear households. In the US, however, only 20% of households consists of nuclear families, as measured by the US Census Bureau. Can we do better at supporting the other 80% to respond to this pandemic and conditions of life beyond?

A public health announcement banner shows a photograph of a man and woman seated on either side of two small kids. Text reads: Covid-19. Es en serio! #QuédateEnCasa. AUS: Asociación de Usuarios Sanitas
Image 1: One of many COVID prevention posters depicting nuclear family households that dominate public health messages in the world

The false portrayal of residential life as reflecting a normative kinship model limits support for the actual residential and kin arrangements through which care and provisioning are organized in today’s societies. Inaccurate assumptions that all people live like the Flintstones, the Simpsons, or the Jetsons seriously limit public health efforts by obscuring empirical realities, which are plural. Those public messages also operate to demean and delegitimize other ways of living, and to stifle creative responses to coronavirus and other challenges.

An illustration of a Black person, wearing comfortable clothes, seated and reading a book with a houseplant in the background. Text reads: Stay Home, Yew Yorkers. Do your part to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
Image 2: New Yorkers Stay Home poster

Across wealthy countries, the most common household category is a single person living alone (27% US and Canadian households, 40% of Swedish households). This New Yorkers Stay Home poster taps into possibilities of nourishing companionship in uni-person households through literature and interspecies relations (human & plant). Another creative response to needs for care and conviviality is found in queer dance parties organized online with scopes ranging from local communities to celebrity-filled global gatherings. This is not a trivial example; opportunities to dance, laugh, move together not only provide care and acknowledgement needed in quarantine (and other isolating conditions), they can also build values and pleasures outside the realm of economic competition, consumption, and profit. Alliances with LGBTQ and related social movements help to honor the diverse household and kin arrangements that people are already living, and to support innovations provoked by the pandemic, as well as those motivated by desires for positive transformation.

Where did this ill-fitting model come from?

Generations of anthropologists and archaeologists have documented a rich variety of arrangements for care, protection, provisioning, and regeneration of human communities. These are often lumped together under the term “extended family,” reinforcing the false assumption that all kinship is based on the nuclear family, from which other relations may “extend.”

Today, much public discourse, together with a surprising amount of academic work, ignores the diverse realities of kinship across cultures and through history, and instead features an ideological model of (re)production that was established and disseminated with the rise of colonial capitalism, through the following historical processes:

  • conceptual and institutional divorce of market-oriented activities identified as “productive labor” from other activities identified as “reproductive care“   
  • designation of the first as “masculine” and the second as “feminine” allocation of disproportionate monetary value, resources, and power to masculine-associated production 
  • 20th century push toward nuclear family households as economic and residential unit
  • media, political, and educational messages convey expectations that human organization be based in heteronormative nuclear family households where men are excluded from care work
Images of three families from classic cartoons: The Simpsons, The Flintstones, and the Jetsons. All three family images include a father, a mother, one or more children, and at least one pet.
Image 3: Images from cartoon series suggesting that humans have always and will always live in single-family homes among heteronormative nuclear families with man bread-winner and woman care-provider. Audiences worldwide have watched the Flintstones since 1960, the Jetsons since 1962, and the Simpsons since 1989.

What drives ongoing pushes to keep imposing this model on populations that it so poorly represents? Why continue allocating responsibility of care to putative nuclear families in strategies that overburden some and fall short of needed care for many?

One key motive is the role this model has played as an instrument of industrial capitalist growth, adapted to engineer and to justify forms of appropriation that support profit and accumulation. The model has also been instrumental to the militarization of domestic and international conflicts related to this push. For me, then, challenging normative assumptions about this gender-kinship model is a vital move to curb and to heal eco-social damages provoked by the drive for growth.

What policies, practices, messages can support and motivate people of all identities to organize care with healthier arrangements of care?

A silver lining can be found in the potential of historical crises (like COVID-19 and climate break-down) to destabilize established orders, opening possibilities for new alliances toward healthier and more equitable worlds.

While respect for planetary boundaries demands degrowth of the total quantities of resources and energy transformed each day by the global economy, some features need to be nurtured and developed, namely infrastructures and institutions of care that enhance the well-being of more people in more places. Care-full paths forward are being explored by Degrowth and Feminism(s) Alliance (FaDA), in contexts including the coronavirus pandemic (Paulson 2020).

Amid the pandemic, we have been happily surprised to see governments experimenting with policies proposed in our book The Case for Degrowth (Kallis et al. 2020): companies and governments have reduced working hours, implemented work-sharing, and subsidized workers during quarantine and business closings. Enhanced public services have supported household and community economies, and mechanisms such as the US Defense Production Act have been mobilized to secure vital supplies and services.

Can we think about these moves as anticipatory strategies that may secure ongoing care for populations, and slow down the rush toward future disasters? For example, can provisional cash payments to sustain residents through the crisis lead the way to basic care incomes? Can defense budgets shift emphasis from updating military armaments toward protecting and regenerating human resources?

Policies like these may work in very different ways, depending on the degree to which they are institutionalized to stimulate economic growth or to promote equitable wellbeing; to prolong productivism or to support reproduction; to provide charity for vulnerable people or to replace hierarchical and exploitative social systems that produce those vulnerabilities.

Beware that these crises also nourish divisive and reactionary alliances. Amid the ongoing pandemic, powerful actors continue pushing to reconstitute the status quo, and to shift costs to others. There is danger that abilities to ally for change will be undermined by politics of fear, xenophobia, and blame; intensified surveillance and control; and isolation that constrains political organizing and all kinds of common efforts. Campaigns to discredit vaccinations and masks synergize with attacks against climate action, gender equity, and racial justice. All are rallied in the name of political economic stability and defense of geopolitical interests. On personal levels, this allied resistance to change is fueled by understandable fear of losing identities and relations that have been construed and experienced as natural, meaningful, and morally correct (even as I understand them as historically adapted to support growth). In the face of polarizing narratives and blame, what strategies can support shifts away from divisive competition toward mutual collaboration?

Conclusion

I would like to see economies slow down by design, not disaster, in ways that support societies to become more caring and equitable. However, it looks like transitions may be unplanned and messy, like those we are living through now. Finding ourselves amid global pandemic and climate change, we must seize opportunities to build healthier priorities, policies, and sociocultural systems. Such transitions depend on alliances among differently positioned actors. And they must involve attention to gender and kinship systems that honor diverse contributions, and that assure care and minimize vulnerabilities for all.

Susan Paulson is Professor at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies. She studied and taught about human-environment relations during 15 years in Latin America, and taught sustainability studies during 5 years in Europe. Paulson contributes to theory and practice in political ecology; degrowth; and gender, masculinities and environment.

References

Bhopa, Sunsil and  Raj Bhopal. 2020. ‘Sex differential in COVID-19 mortality varies markedly by age.’ Lancet 396 (10250): 532-533.

Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria 2020. The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Paulson, Susan 202. ‘Degrowth and feminisms ally to forge care-full paths beyond pandemic.’ Interface: A journal for and about social movements. Volume 12 (1): 232 – 246. https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Interface-12-1-Paulson.pdf

Rushovich, Tamara, Marion Boulicault, Jarvis T. Chen, Ann Caroline Danielsen, Amelia Tarrant, Sarah S. Richardson, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn 2021. ‘Sex Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality Vary Across US Racial Groups.’ Journal of General Internal Medicine 36: 1696-1701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-021-06699-4.

Cite as: Paulson, Susan. 2022. “Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds.“ FocaalBlog, 26 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/26/susan-paulson-gender-aware-care-in-pandemic-and-postgrowth-worlds/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Kalb: War: New Times

It is now becoming overly clear that this cruel and unjustifiable war in and on Ukraine is not going to last ten days – as the strategists in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington D.C originally expected – or ten weeks, as the pessimists thought. It may well extend to ten months and possibly morph into another ‘forever war’ (both hot and cold).

We are therefore turning our original FocaalBlog discussion, launched in the very first days of the war, into a rolling Feature that is open for any genre of submission: ethnographical, historical, theoretical, global.

So, this is an open call: we invite further contributions.

However, given the sprawling passions around this topic and the massive ideology production and propaganda on all sides, we emphasize that at FocaalBlog we continue to honor the elementary distinctions between description, explanation, historical contextualization, and moral justification. We are not in the business of the latter, and none of our authors engages in it.

A white man wearing a gray beanie and black tracksuit, with a cigarette in his mouth, carries a small dog and a grocery sack down a pathway surrounded by trash and rubble. A larger dog walks behind him and others follow in the distance.
Image 1: Bucha after Russian invasion, photo by Oleksandr Ratushniak

We remain deeply and intimately interested not only in what is going on in Ukraine and Russia, and with Ukrainian and Russian citizens of all sorts – including the young and better educated current refugees into the EU as well as the older vulnerable people who remain behind in the war torn villages and suburbs without food or water – but also in the critique of war, militarism, imperialism, violence, primitive accumulation, ideology, nationalism, fascism, racism, and the shifting power fields of the ever less liberal global order in which this war is embedded, into which it feeds, and which it may accelerate.

This involves any type of critique of all the main actors in this cruel and utterly dangerous drama started by Putin. There is no doubt, this is Putin’s war. While this is so in a juridical sense, we should carefully consider that the very possibility of this war, with the exact same stated reasons and objectives from the side of Russia (minus the ethno-essentialism), was already discussed between US Secretary of State James Baker and (former) President Gorbachev in 1992, long before Putin came on stage (Sarotte 2021). Thus, the critique also continues to include prominently the US, the EU, and NATO.

There are loud and self-advertised NATO anthropologists around these days who imagine that NATO can save us from the abys and must have been the solution all along. They should never forget this: while NATO was steadily expanding in Eastward direction towards Russian borders (CEE, Georgia, Ukraine), it was simultaneously waging war for one and a half decade in the Middle East, invading, occupying, and destroying countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, at the cost of close to a million official deaths (on Yemen, a proxy war, we keep counting). The US and the UK had acted on transparent lies and treacherous accusations, had blatantly ignored the United Nations, and pushed aside the principled objections against their aggression within NATO/the West. The unprecedented and globe spanning anti-war demonstrations of early 2003 made no impression whatsoever. Russia, not averse to superpower aspirations of its own, duly took note (as did China): this is apparently allowed. We as anthropologists and citizens (mostly) of the Western world do not have the moral luxury to forget this. This is ‘hard’ knowledge, and it is an anthropological sine qua non for understanding the contemporary world order.

We are writing almost two months into the violence (19 April 2022). The UN has openly acknowledged that a majority of the more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees will probably never actually ‘go home’ again. In the centers of war planning, it is also now gradually accepted that the expected but failed Russian blitz into Ukraine, which in Russia itself was not allowed to be called a war, is sliding unstoppably into a ‘proxy war’ between Russia and NATO, with heavy and advanced weapons deployed on both sides and both military colossuses determined not to lose. Ukrainians continue to heroically play their part and to actively imagine, and being made to imagine, that it is a war for their ‘sovereignty and freedom’. At some point, the distance between these abstract and lofty desires and the raw reality of death, destruction, and mass out-migration will for some begin to feel alienating. After the sinking of the Moskva missile cruiser on 16 April even TV commentators in Moscow, in emotional outbursts, are now allowed to call this a war. Patriarch Kiril of the Russian Orthodox church continues to defend the holy war of Mother Russia against the sinful West of the LGBT’s and the gay parades. Meanwhile, in a militarily surrounded and levelled Mariupol, the hard Right Azov Brigade, or what is left of it, refuses to give up its arms and has retreated into the underground tunnel complexes of the giant Azov Steel complex. They are betting that the massive soviet heritage of industrial labor they had so ardently wished to erase ideologically during the ‘de-communization’ campaigns and memory wars after the 2014 Maidan revolution, might in the end offer them some paradoxical protection. President Zelensky, chosen in 2019 on a platform that resolutely rejected the polarizing identarian logic of the nationalist-civilizational cleavages of Ukraine’s antagonistic governmental elites (‘European Ukraine’ versus ‘Russian’), saw his program quickly collapse in the face of determined right wing nationalist opposition, such as from the members and supporters of the Azov Brigade. The Minsk 2 peace process then all but stalled. Zelensky has now announced that if these circa 2000 national heroes of Ukraine get killed in the Azov Steel tunnels, there cannot be any peace negotiations and Ukraine must fight for final victory. All the actors are overwhelmed by the logic of war.  

Outside of the immediate theatre, much of the Global South and all the BRICS have refused to support the Western condemnation and isolation of Russia, which they find sanctimonious. The spiking inflation in the prices of energy and food probably mean that, after the massive build-up of pandemic related debt, many of these postcolonial nations are going to face simultaneous famine and debt-defaults by the end of the year, with likely resounding political consequences. The West, meanwhile, bootstrapping itself out of the embarrassing Afghanistan debacle of just half a year ago, and finding itself viscerally surprised about its own sudden unity, has accepted President Zelensky as the brave contemporary embodiment of its own historical ideals of liberty and freedom, so under siege lately by domestic ‘populism’. It has launched unprecedented financial punishment on Russia – deploying its continued exclusive control over financial circuits and values – and is seeking to isolate and cut down Russia for the long term by banning its oil and gas while claiming to speed up its own green transition. China, clearly, is far from ready to impose a Bismarckian moment (the Berlin conference of 1885 that carved up the world for colonialism) and seems willing to remain modestly supportive of the Russian side – indeed, Putin started his war directly after meeting privately with Xi. There is no doubt that the US is waging its proxy war also with an eye on teaching China what can happen if it does not abide by Western rules. Western Central Banks, meanwhile, faced with the highest inflation in four decades, revert to an earlier monetary normal, and are beginning to push up the interest rates, loosely talking about ‘a repeat of stagflation’ (a misplaced comparison with the 1970s), a possible ‘Volcker moment’, and a ‘necessary economic recession’. Global South and other big debtors are forewarned. Donald Trump is waiting rather quietly in the wings, as is Marine Le Pen, both (former?) admirers and clients of Vladimir Putin.

The palimpsest is utterly scary, full of actual and potential future violence, extremely volatile and dynamic, and full of powerful contradictions. We need to think, discover, describe, and analyze. On the ground and off the ground. New Times.

Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Editor at Large of Focaal Journal and FocaalBlog.

References

Sarotte, M.E. 2021. Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate. New Haven: Yale U.P

Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2022. ‟War: New Times.‟ FocaalBlog, 21 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/21/don-kalb-war-new-times/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Antonio De Lauri: The idea of a clean and efficient war is a dangerous lie

The war in Ukraine resuscitated a certain dangerous fascination for war. Notions such as patriotism, democratic values, the right side of history, or a new fight for freedom are mobilized as imperatives for everyone to take a side in this war. It is not surprising then that a large number of so-called foreign fighters are willing to go to Ukraine to join one side or the other.

I met a few of them recently at the Poland-Ukraine border, where I was conducting interviews with a Norwegian film crew with soldiers and foreign fighters who were either entering or exiting the war zone. Some of them actually never got to fight or be “recruited” as they lack military experience or proper motivation. It’s a mixed group of people, some of whom have spent years in the military, while others only did military service. Some have family at home waiting for them; others, no home to go back to. Some have strong ideological motivations; others are just willing to shoot at something or someone. There is also a big group of former soldiers who transitioned towards humanitarian work.

As we were crossing the border to get into Ukraine, a former US soldier told me: “The reason why many retired or former soldiers moved to humanitarian work might easily be the need for excitement.” Once you leave the military, the closest activity that can take you to the “fun zone,” as another one said, referring to the war zone in Ukraine, is humanitarian work – or, in fact, a series of other businesses mushrooming in the proximity of war, including contractors and criminal activities.

A white person stands in front of a destroyed house, wearing a camo balaclava, green jacket, and ammo and gear vest with a gun strapped across one shoulder. A Ukrainian flag is displayed on the chest of the gear vest.
Image 1: Fighter of the Ukrainian 43rd Territorial Defense Battalion “Patriot”, photo by Алесь Усцінаў

“We are adrenaline junkies,” the former US soldier said, although he now only wants to help civilians, something he sees as “a part of my process of healing.” What many of the foreign fighters have in common is the need to find a purpose in life. But what does this say of our societies if, to search for a meaningful life, thousands are willing to go to war?

There is dominant propaganda that seems to suggest war can be conducted according to a set of acceptable, standardized and abstract rules. It puts forth an idea of a well-behaved war where only military targets are destroyed, force is not used in excess, and right and wrong are clearly defined. This rhetoric is used by governments and mass media propaganda (with the military industry celebrating) to make war more acceptable, even attractive, for the masses.

Whatever deviates from this idea of a proper and noble war is considered an exception. US soldiers torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib: an exception. German soldiers playing with a human skull in Afghanistan: an exception. The US soldier who went on a house-to-house rampage in an Afghan village, killing 16 civilians including several children with no reason: an exception. War crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan: an exception. Iraqi prisoners tortured by British troops: an exception.

Similar stories are emerging in the current war in Ukraine too, even though mostly still “unconfirmed”. With the information war obfuscating the distinction between reality and fantasy, we don’t know if and when we will be able to verify videos such as one showing a Ukrainian soldier talking on the phone with the mom of a killed Russian soldier and making fun of her, or Ukrainian soldiers shooting prisoners to make them permanently injured, or news about Russian soldiers sexually assaulting women.

All exceptions? No. This is exactly what war is. Governments make big efforts to explain that these kinds of episodes don’t belong in war. They even pretend to be surprised when civilians are killed, even though systematically targeting civilians is a feature of all contemporary wars; for example, over 387,000 civilians were killed in the US post-9/11 wars alone, with more likely to die from those wars’ reverberating impacts.

The idea of a clean and efficient war is a lie. War is a chaotic universe of military strategies intertwined with inhumanity, violations, uncertainty, doubts, and deceit. In all combat zones emotions such as fear, shame, joy, excitement, surprise, anger, cruelty, and compassion co-exist.

We also know that whatever the real reasons for war, identifying the enemy is a crucial element of every call for conflict. In order to be able to kill – systematically – it is not enough to make fighters disregard the enemy, to despise him or her; it is also necessary to make them see in the foe an obstacle to a better future. For this reason, war consistently requires the transformation of a person’s identity from the status of an individual to a member of a defined, and hated enemy group.

If the only objective of war is the mere physical elimination of the enemy, then how do we explain why the torture and destruction of bodies both dead and alive is practiced with such ferocity on so many battlefields? Although in abstract terms such violence appears unimaginable, it becomes possible to visualize when the murdered or tortured are aligned with dehumanizing representations portraying them as usurpers, cowards, filthy, paltry, unfaithful, vile, disobedient – representations that travel fast in mainstream and social media. War violence is a dramatic attempt to transform, redefine and establish social boundaries; to affirm one’s own existence and deny that of the other. Therefore, the violence produced by war is not mere empirical fact, but also a form of social communication.

It follows that war cannot be simply described as the by-product of political decisions from above; it is also determined by participation and initiatives from below. This can take the form of extreme brutal violence or torture, but also as resistance to the logic of war. It is the case of the military personnel who object to being part of a specific war or mission: examples range from conscientious objection during wartime, to explicit positioning such as the case of the Fort Hood Three who refused to go to Vietnam considering that war “illegal, immoral, and unjust,” and the refusal of the Russian National Guard to go to Ukraine.  

“War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves,” wrote Leo Tolstoy. But it’s like holding your breath underwater – you can’t do it for long, even if you are trained.

This text was originally published in Common Dreams.

Antonio De Lauri is a Research Professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, the Director of the Norwegian Centre for Humanitarian Studies, and a contributor to the Costs of War Project of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He received an ERC grant for a project on soldiering and warfare.

Cite as: De Lauri, Antonio. 2022. “The idea of a clean and efficient war is a dangerous lie.” FocaalBlog, 18 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/18/antonio-de-lauri-the-idea-of-a-clean-and-efficient-war-is-a-dangerous-lie

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Martin Fotta: Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO

One of the casualties of Putin’s war on Ukraine will be European critical social science. While the war has instigated important discussions about ‘US-plaining’, ‘Westplaining’ and about Russian imperialism, we also see—so far in a clash of keyboards—a growing weaponization of scholarship. There are signs of growing censorship of those ideas that would not align neatly into friend-enemy dyads. In the fight against ‘misinformation’, diverging opinions are framed, often preventively, as problematic and even pejoratively as “pro-Kremlin.”

It is with this in mind that I revisit herein the campaign to amend the “EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine”, published initially on 26 February 2022 and amended on 15 March 2022. The case reveals how not only mainstream media and big tech are changing what is permissible, but how militarism, securitisation, and warmongering is creeping into anthropologists’ language and analyses, at times insidiously as they usurp anti-hegemonic and decolonial positions to enhance their credibility. Where it will take us is hard to predict, but it might be worth looking into the amendments of the EASA statement to cast light on possible futures in social anthropology’s debates and in order to make a case for anthropology as an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war discipline.

EASA’s statement on the Russian war and the protest campaign to rewrite it

On the 26th of February 2022, two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EASA executive committee (EASA EC) published a statement ‘EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine’. While in the context of atrocities its value is symbolic rather than practical, the EASA EC must be commended on the swiftness of their response and the clarity of their stance against the war and imperialism. The first two paragraphs of the statement are particularly strong:

The Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) condemns the Russian government’s illegal and unprovokedmilitary invasion of Ukraine: an imperialist war that is leading to immeasurable suffering and losses for the Ukrainian people, whose dignity, well-being, and independence we wholeheartedly support.

As scholars we reject President Vladimir Putin’s distorted interpretations of Russian and Ukrainian history and the assault against and brutal denial of Ukraine’s sovereignty that they seek to justify. We see him as the main aggressor in the current situation that – as many anthropologists working in the post-socialist world have shown through their work – has its roots in both the Russian imperial ambitions and the NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory.

The last sentence has since been removed. The preamble to the new statement explains:

As the Ukraine war has worsened in all sorts of shocking ways, the Executive feels that our statement needs to be unequivocal in order to avoid ambiguity of any kind. A group of EASA members contacted us to say that there were some ambiguities in our initial statement and therefore we have amended it.

How did this change come about? On Friday, 11 March, almost two weeks after the statement had been published, a group of anthropologists from East Central Europe wrote an email to EASA EC demanding that what they saw as ‘controversial ideas’ in the statement be revoked. In the meantime, they also uploaded a petition to GoogleDocs and started gathering signatures. They explained in earlier versions of the petition that if EASA did not retract the wording by noon on Monday, 14th March, they would feel ‘morally obliged’ to go public with the petition. As EASA EC changed the wording, the petition was never widely circulated.

Image 1: Screenshot from “EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine” (April 11, 2022; source: https://www.easaonline.org/publications/support/ukraine0222)

The style of the protest itself is quite stunning as it features moralistic-conservative language (‘controversial ideas’), forces the executive committee to decide over a weekend, and in many ways resembles wartime Realpolitik (the initiators speak of ‘kind appeals’ but set conditionalities and prepare to escalate further, justifying such their steps with reference to morality).  But it is the content of the protest that interests me here. As the authors of the petition explain:

While we fully agree that the war against Ukraine has roots in Russian imperial ambitions, we reject the suggestion that Russia’s armed aggression is caused by NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory. Such a statement would imply that sovereign countries of Eastern Europe do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves, justifying Russia’s colonialist and imperialist claims over countries in Eastern Europe. As anthropologists, we understand Ukraine’s defensive actions as resistance against the reactionary empire and recognize the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances. The sentence [this refers to the final sentence in the EASA EC statement quoted above; M.F.] also contains a deeply troubling ambiguity—referring to Putin as “main aggressor” implies that there are more aggressors in this war than Putin and Russia, assigning the blame for the war against Ukraine (even asymmetrically) to another party.

Don’t mention the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation

The “ambiguity” raised by the last point can be debated. On the other hand, most EASA members are not native speakers of English and thus there may always be ambiguity in written English statements from the organization. But I believe, it is clear from the statement condemning “Russian government’s illegal and unprovoked military invasion” in the opening sentence who is the aggressor.

It is, however, the arguments made in the first three sentences which are particularly striking. I ask the readers to take a look at the first two paragraphs of the original EASA statement quoted above again. How could a mention NATO’s role in the longer history preceding the invasion imply that sovereign countries do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves? What logical somersault was performed here? Does the protesters’ problem with EASA EC’s statement lie in the word “roots”? Do the protesters read this as equivalent to “the cause”?

It is certainly not a marginal position to argue that Putin’s actions are framed in geopolitical terms (where the key agents are the US and China) and that the West has not really tried to “inscribe Russia in a more comprehensive security agreement and all of the bilateral and multilateral agreements”. It is also not a marginal position to point out that NATO policies have made Russia’s invasion more likely. Moreover, pronouncements about Ukrainian membership in NATO (or in the European Union) had been merely symbolic. Even countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had never truly supported Ukraine’s membership until now (geopolitics, in other words), leaving it in a particularly vulnerable position. In no way, however, does acknowledging “the geopolitical confrontation between the US-led liberal “empire”, and the Russian imperialist project in East Europe” mean that Ukrainians are mere puppets without desires, hopes and agency, who should not freely express their will on which international alliances their country should enter, without a fear of becoming targets of military invasion.

Of course, most Ukrainians have no time and patience for such debates now—their country has been brutally attacked and the fight against the Russian invaders is all that matters to them. In this sense, it is good that the EASA EC removed the final sentence of the statement to avoid a social media storm that would have followed with the publication of the petition and which would have detracted from the statement’s overall message.

But let’s be clear here: there was no ambiguity in the original statement. The ambiguity was created by the initiators of the protest. Unless, of course, for anthropologists it is inconceivable that one can support the independence and sovereignty of Ukrainian people while seeing Russian tsarism and NATO enlargement as shaping the context of the invasion. But there is a danger that knee-jerk ascriptions of culpability and contests over the moral high ground will weaken our capability to take a critical view of ourselves, and to understand how our activities contribute to fascism and militarism.

NATO in CEE

The choice presented by the protest initiators is straightforward: if the EASA EC statement mentioned NATO as an actor shaping geopolitical contexts, it would go against Ukraine’s right of self-determination. This, to me, is a whitewashing of NATO. It is striking that it comes from anthropologists who must know that the pro-NATO position was never unequivocally embraced by Ukrainians. This is why, Volodymyr Arthiuk explains, “a silent majority” elected Zelensky who “promised to end the war, to not press issues of identity and language.” And while for reasons of bare survival under occupation, support for NATO membership, or at least for a closer cooperation, increased among Ukrainians in comparison with the pre-war period, these views will continue to be in flux and are regionally specific. As regards Ukrainians’ political opinions, one must also wonder what it will be in the future, given how NATO has failed to come to their defence.

Equating NATO membership unproblematically with popular sovereignty, with “the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances”, is even more disingenuous coming from CEE scholars, as in most CEE countries there were no referendums about NATO membership—there was no popular decision. And while in Poland or the Baltic countries, the majorities would have probably been in favour, even Václav Havel was against the referendum in Czechia, since the opinion polls were far from conclusive. In Slovakia, another country that I know well, barely 50% supported membership in 2003 when the country joined the alliance. Continued ambivalence of these two countries to NATO can be seen, for instance, in demonstrations against the installation of tracking radar and kinetic missiles in Czechia. Although politicians argued these would protect from attacks by rogue states, such as Iran, the public overwhelmingly (68%) rejected them. In Slovakia, just prior to the invasion, more people blamed NATO than Russia for the escalation of the tensions along Ukraine’s borders.

The petition was initiated by eight anthropologists – seven Polish and one Slovak (see ‘Protest initiators’). The petition now claims to speak for an “international anthropological community”, whereas the EASA website speaks of an initiative by “EASA members” that stimulated the change. Since the petition with signatures was never publicised, I must suppose that the executive committee decided to change the wording of the statement following the email from the protest initiators. A predominantly CEE character of the initiative is further reflected in the online social life of the petition: most of the signatures come from Poland, Slovakia and Czechia. And while a public campaign was stopped short by the EASA EC changing its statement, any momentum for obtaining a critical mass for the protest would have emerged from within this region.

In this way, the narrative of the protest echoes important discussions about the position of Central and East European anthropologists within the discipline, in which many signatories of the protest letter have been taking part actively. However, consider the irony it leads to: a group of CEE anthropologists led by former members of EASA EC end up defending NATO against EASA, which they imply is a Western hegemonic institution misunderstanding the region (even if it is currently presided over by a Bulgarian). Such positioning undoubtedly added to the pressure on the EASA EC, since it suggested that EASA’s statement was denying sovereignty to Ukrainians and to peoples of other “sovereign countries of Eastern Europe”, legitimising Russia’s imperialist claims.

We must be wary of such east-Europeanising re-alignments in the context of the prevalent view of Ukraine in many CEE countries as a failed state between Central Europe and Russia; the racialisation of Ukrainians as cheap and thus exploitable, also sexual, labour, but ‘white’ (good migrants and even refugees!). Likewise, it is important to critically reflect on the grading of Europeanness in the CEE public sphere, where NATO and EU membership have been constructed as its unambivalent symbols.

It would also be misleading to say that all CEE anthropologists found EASA’s original statement to be “the dangerous distortion” that the protesters saw it to be. Many disagreed, or would have disagreed, if they had been aware of the protest, and if not with the content of the protest, then with its tone. Indeed, there was a lively discussion on the mailing list of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA), with voices pro and contra. In the end, only a few members signed the petition. Of course, some were probably waiting for EASA EC’s response, while others might have thought this whole thing ridiculous, since, as one member put it, and I paraphrase, “Ukrainians need guns, not statements.” In any case, it shows that the options presented by the protest initiators as clearcut were not wholeheartedly embraced by all.

The need for anti-militarism

Let’s be honest here. Rather than an argument about popular sovereignty, the initiators’ position is a pro-NATO one. It presents a false dichotomy: if one is against Putin, one cannot be against NATO. To be sure, I understand where this position comes from. The feeling among many people in CEE, including my parents, confirmed by the invasion, can be summarised in the following way: only NATO membership protects our countries from becoming prey to Russia’s tsarist ambitions; it is therefore only NATO that enables people in member states to be safe and, by extension, CEE anthropologists to pursue our careers.

Certainly, such an argument is counterfactual, as the world where CEE countries would not be NATO members would be a different world. Precisely because any line of argument about the absence of NATO membership must remain counterfactual it invokes both fears and desires, and in its operation must reproduce legitimising narratives. These are things anthropologists should be mindful of. The argument is also problematic as it separates NATO’s past interventions and invasions from its role as a defensive alliance through which smaller states can protect themselves against an imperialist next door. Violence elsewhere (e.g., Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and with Turkey as a NATO members conducting a war against the Kurdish population within its borders and in Syria) and often against a threat of “tribal” or racialised “savagery” (Pierre 2013: 548) are treated in isolation from peace and European values at home. This compartmentalization is understandable in the context of Russian imperialist warfare, but it leads to simplistic listing of pros (NATO as a national-level ally against Russian colonialism) and cons (continued militarisation internationally; ‘humanitarian interventions’), which is a sophisticated approach to neither the history of imperialism nor to a critical anthropology of military alliances. As anthropologists, we must resist such a compartmentalization. Our discipline must be anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war, even though it is always practised from a specific locale, such as CEE. We must reject simplistic Manichaeism, labour against provincialism, and reject seeing anthropologists as Putin’s apologists, just because they are critical of NATO and of their own countries’ role in it.

Furthermore, the above line of argument promises only war; it extends Russia as a threat into the past with only war and crisis on the horizon. One must wonder how such “truths” (constructed through the piling up of historical analogies, which are now in vogue) skew anthropological sensibility, especially in and about Central and Eastern Europe. Gregory Bateson (2000: 265), among others, showed how our truths, premises and habits of thought recursively reinforce our understanding of the world and of ourselves, which leads further to the petrification of these truths.  Against the real threat of securitisation in European anthropology, I suggest we promote an anti-war anthropology, a part of a broader anti-war movement. To break the militarist habit of thought we should become apprehensive of how militarism and militarisation shape research topics and field sites (Gusterson 2007).

We should also proceed as if we knew that the forever war (as a problematic, not static ontology) was the ground on which we stand and from which we speak as anthropologists. This task is more urgent now when countries are increasing their military spending or when some argue for the need to destroy Russia in a long-term war, with the suffering borne by Ukrainians. We might find inspiration in abolitionist anthropology and rethink European anthropology as a speculative analysis that not only critiques the existing order, but in a move of counter-war imagination, reimagines and—through collective practical effort—reinvents the possible, “past the ruins of the world (and the discipline) as we know it” (Shange 2019: 10).

Two final comments

The fact that Putin clearly broke international law and the Russian army has been committing war crimes should not make us blind to the fact that the war has been going on in Ukraine for eight years preceding the invasion. As anthropologists we must recognise the complexity of that situation. This does not make us Putin’s apologists. In fact, the real problem from the point of view of the discipline is the way European anthropology chooses which ‘events’ it notices: while we have had discussions on Brexit and COVID (e.g., dossiers in Social Anthropology and two series of articles on FocaalBlog), the war in eastern Ukraine—with 14,000 casualties between 2014 and 2021—was never the focus of critical discussion (e.g., no dossier or EASA-sponsored roundtable, not even by the protest initiators).

Turning to the internal politics of EASA, it is important to note that many members would want the association to function as a learned society that abstains from activism and politics. For them, EASA’s past activities related to HAU, precarity, and possibly also the open letters published by the current EASA EC signify an unwelcome ideological move to the left.  It is ultimately EASA members who will decide on this in the future elections. I, personally, am proud to be a part of an association that published such a strong anti-war statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Organising biannual conferences, publishing a journal or facilitating various topical networks is not enough.

Martin Fotta is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. His current research focuses on the Romani diaspora across the Lusophone South Atlantic region.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2007. “Anthropology and militarism.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 36: 155-175.

Pierre, Jemima. 2013. “Race in Africa today: a commentary.” Cultural Anthropology 28.3: 547-551.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia. Duke University Press.

Cite as: Fotta, Martin. 2022. “Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO.” FocaalBlog, 14 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/14/martin-fotta-towards-anti-war-anthropology-on-easa-cee-and-nato/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Alexander W. Anthony: Covid in the confines of the US

Introduction

There is a calendar in my office which still hangs at March 2020; an artifact of the confusion and rush to ‘lockdown’ and to find shelter from the upcoming storm. I keep it there because it seems strange to take it down after so long, but also as a reminder that time is not as straightforward as we like to believe. The solitude of lockdown taught me that, but that was my privilege, that I needed such an extreme event to experience this beyond the boredom of standing in a long line or the lightning flash of an enjoyable night with friends. People who have been incarcerated know the absurdity of time better than most perhaps. As distressing as the past two years has been for society, for incarcerated individuals locked away and largely forgotten, the burden is unthinkable. U.S. federal and state prisons have acted as miniature epicenters where infection rates have been three to four times higher than national averages or those for surrounding communities. In recent months, as the Omicron variant has spread, New York City’s Rikers Island jail reached an astonishing 17% positive infection rate (Ceron 2021). Watching this unfold, I wondered why we, as a society, have so complacently left prisoners to this fate, and as Foucault (2015:1-2) noted, what we can learn about ourselves according to the “fate [we] reserve for those of the living whom [we] wish to be rid of…”

Running the Numbers

Two years into the pandemic, and as the Omicron wave continued to sweep through the country, the Covid Prison Project reported 541,538 positive cases among individuals incarcerated within prisons. At least 2,780 people have died of COVID while incarcerated. An estimated 531,060 individuals in incarceration have received at least one dose of the vaccine (covidprisonproject.com), although institutions have slowly become less forthcoming with internal statistics over the course of the pandemic, and some have stopped offering regular reports altogether (Schwartzapfel and Blakinger 2021). While the number of positive cases both inside of prisons and within the US has continued to increase, what is most concerning is that the ratio of positive cases between incarcerated and non-incarcerated individuals in the US has remained steady since the beginning of the pandemic. For example, as of May 2020, the infection rate in New York city (the global epicenter at that time) jails (including Rikers Island) was at 9.56%, whereas the city itself reported a positive case rate at 2.10% (Griffard and Ciaccio 2020). For further perspective, the previous global epicenter, Lombardy, Italy, had a positive infection rate of 0.78%. Thus, the infection rate within NYC jails was 3-4 times higher than the surrounding community. Further data indicates that this was an early foreshadowing of what would be the national norm in the following years. As of April 2021, a comparison of incidence and mortality rates between prisons and the US population indicated that within prisons there were 30,780 cases (per 100,000) as compared to the US population which was 9,350 (per 100,000). This ratio continues to hold steady as I write this today nearly a year later (covidprisonproject.com). It also needs to be noted that there may be some hesitancy for incarcerated people to report symptoms, as a positive test would likely result in solitary confinement, rebranded by the CDC as ‘medical isolation’ (Blakinger 2020). Thus, the actual number of infections within prisons is likely even higher.

Bodies Commodified

Long before the word ‘coronavirus’ was a household name, Wacquant (2009) noted the correlation between US welfare reform, the criminalization of poverty, and the “War on Drugs”, which he astutely noted was nothing less than a ‘guerilla campaign’ waged against young men living in the inner city for whom “the retail trade of narcotics has provided the most accessible and reliable source of gainful employment” (2009:61). Two observations can be taken away from this; first there are two economies operating in the US (and globally), one is deemed illegitimate and therefore illegal, but it provides a necessary livelihood for its participants.

Three men of color wearing jumpsuits and safety glasses work at industrial sewing machines amid piles of camo fabric.
Image 1: Prisoners in a UNICOR (Federal Prison Industries) program producing military uniforms, photo by Federal Bureau of Prisons

The second is the correlation between the ballooning incarceration rate due to drug related arrests and the boom of private-run prisons which began in the 1980s (Pelaez 2014; Wacquant 2009). Private prisons contracted by the Federal and state governments receive a fixed sum of money per prisoner held in their custody, regardless of the cost of maintaining that prisoner. Thus, the bodies of the poor have become commodified. The construction of private prisons reached its height in the 1990s (alongside welfare reform) under President Clinton, when the Justice Department contracted private prisons to incarcerate undocumented workers (Pelaez 2014). Again, workers selling their labor outside the bounds of the legitimate capitalist system. This is a for-profit industry that exploded at the closing of the twentieth century (Wacquant 2009).

The Alienation of ‘Commodified Bodies’

The pandemic shuttered global economies and only businesses providing essential goods or services remained open. Meanwhile, within the penal system, incarcerated labor was deemed ‘essential.’ Perhaps predictably as labor has long been associated with the modern disciplinary apparatus. Quoting Brissot; “’One will not succeed by locking beggars up in filthy prisons that are more like cesspools’; they will have to be forced to work. ‘The best way of punishing them is to employ them’” (Brissot quoted in:Foucault 1977:106). Additionally, public works have often been the source of that labor since the prisoner became the “property of society” (Foucault 1977:109). Incarcerated labor was used in just this way throughout the pandemic. For instance, Lo Wu prison in Hong Kong reportedly had female inmates working shifts around the clock to produce face masks for wages significantly under Hong Kong’s minimum wage (Grant 2020). Additionally, former New York governor Cuomo announced that the state would be using prison labor to produce hand sanitizer for schools, transportation systems, etc. (Grant 2020).

Amidst the pandemic prison labor demonstrates one of the most extreme examples of the alienation from the product of one’s own labor (Marx 1990). For instance, although many prisons used the labor of incarcerated persons to produce hand sanitizer,  most prisons ban products higher than 60% alcohol which includes most hand sanitizers (CDC 2020). Thus, the product which could have helped keep them healthy was taken to ship to the world outside the prison.

Time and a Social Death

Some useful parallels can be drawn between prisons and other sites of confinement which may help shed some light on the current plight or our incarcerated populations. For instance, on one hand, prisons and care homes are dramatically different environments. On the other hand, both effectively provide the same service to society: the removal of a particular class of individuals. The criminal has been disconnected from the public realm in response to a crime committed against society itself (Foucault 2015), whereas individuals in care homes have been removed from society to better ‘care’ for them. Thus, one has been confined to protect society – the other has been confined under the protection of society. Now, one parallel between these institutions is time. In prison, time is taken away as a punishment for an infraction, just as labor (which is nothing less than time-sold) is rewarded with wages (Foucault 2015:70). Thus, the criminal is detached from their social milieu, placed in confinement, and punished by the removal of “time to live” (Foucault 2015:72). The centrality of time within the penal system is apparent, but how is this relevant to care home facilities? I believe that it lies at the other end of this duality of time sold/time taken. In contrast, those living within care centers no longer, or never had, the ability to sell their time in the form of labor. The only greater affront to capitalism than the inability (care homes) to contribute to the production of accumulation is the refusal to contribute (penal systems). Thus, “any person hostile or opposed to the rule of the maximization of production” (Foucault 2015:52) is implicitly an ‘enemy of the state’. Of course, most people housed in care facilities are neither ‘opposed’ nor ‘hostile’ towards production directly, yet they are unable to contribute, which places them nearer on the spectrum to the ‘enemy of society’. Indeed, some of the earliest poor laws in the ‘West’ differentiated those who were able-bodied without work (vagabonds) against those who were physically unable to labor (beggars) (Marx 1990).

Incarcerated peoples, on the other hand, have been labelled as enemies of the state. The shift from the physical tortures of the Ancien Régime to the modern disciplinary apparatus included a change in who a crime was seen as perpetrated against. Instead of committing an offense against the sovereign, criminals were seen as committing crimes against society. Executions became fewer and confinement became nearly homogenous with the penal system. In order to rationalize long-term imprisonment and continued (if less occasional) executions, the ‘monstrosity’ of the criminal became a focal point (Foucault 1978:138). This has become a mantle worn by all criminals as ethnographic work has illustrated time and again (Conover 2001; Feldman 1991; Rhodes 2004). The inmate bears a stigma and somehow “we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human” (Goffman 1963:5). It is something Foucault witnessed during a tour of Attica, where he described living conditions as “a cage for wild animals” (Foucault and Simon 1991:29). It is no surprise that incarcerated lives are valued as ‘less than’ when society’s root metaphor for criminality is animalism (Turner 1975).

Lepers in Exile-Exclosure

Analysis of the societal response to COVID-19 has suggested that it reflects Foucault’s smallpox or quarantine model of power through the use of statistical analysis and empirical data (Sarasin 2020). This appears true; however, places of confinement seem to have regressed to a more primitive model of power. As the quarantine model served as the basis for the modern surveillance society, the ‘leper model’ was foundational to the formation of the quarantine model (Foucault 1977:198-199) and most closely reflects what is transpiring at sites of confinement. “The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-exclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate…” (Foucault 1977:198). Anecdotally, in discussions of the mass release of prisoners, opponents often essentialize all incarcerated people as ‘violent’. Yet, the data does not support this argument. Only 3.2% of inmates in the US federal prison system have been convicted of homicide, aggravated assault, or kidnapping (BOP 2020). Yet the stigma of crime has turned them into a mass of bodies which it is “useless to differentiate.”

This analysis has been somewhat more historical than anticipatory; however, history does tend to repeat itself. Incarcerated laborers have been exploited since the penal experiment of confinement began. As the pandemic has persisted, they continued to be disproportionately affected by sickness and death. For over two years, infections, and mortality rates inside of confinement exceeds what is occurring outside threefold. Unfortunately, I believe we can anticipate more of the same in post-COVID confinement. I would say that again, “capital [will continue to come] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx 1990:926).

Alexander W. Anthony is a doctoral student in anthropology at Syracuse University with a focus in historical archaeology. His primary research is on the influences of prison reform movements and ideology on the human and spatial/material dimensions and experiences of incarceration in late 18th – early 20th century Southern Italy.

References

Blakinger, Keri. 2020. As COVID-19 Measures Grow, Prison Oversight Falls. The Marshall Project 03/17/2020.

BOP. 2020. Federal Bureau of Prisons Statistics of Offenses, edited by Federal Bureau of Prisons, bop.gov.

CDC. 2020. Interim Guidance on Management of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Correctional and Detention Facililities, edited by Center for Disease Control. Center for Disease Control.

Ceron, Ella. 2021. NYC Sees Jail ‘Crisis’ on Positive-Test Rates over 17% at Rikers. Bloomberg Equality December 22, 2021. www.bloomberg.com.

Conover, Ted. 2001. New Jack. Vintage Books, New York.

Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2 ed. Random House, New York.

Foucault, Michel.1978 . The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Pantheon Books, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 2015. The Punitive Society: Lectures at the College de France 1972-1973. Translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Foucault, Michel, and John K. Simon. 1991. Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview. Social Justice 18(3):26-34.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Simon & Schuster Inc., New York.

Grant, Harriet. 2020. Vulnerable Prisoners ‘Exploited’ to Make Coronvirus Masks and Hand Gel. The Guardian. UK.

Griffard, Molly, and Vincent Ciaccio. 2020. COVID-19 Infection Tracking in NYC Jails. The Legal Aid Society https://www.legalaidnyc.org/covid-19-infection-tracking-in-nyc-jails/, accessed 5/5/2020.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin, England.

Pelaez, Vicky. 2014. The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery? Global Research.

Rhodes, Lorna A. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Sarasin, Philipp. 2020. Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault? foucaultblog, 3/31/20. https://www.fsw.uzh.ch/foucaultblog/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault, accessed.

Schwartzapfel, Beth, and Keri Blakinger. 2021. Omicron has Arrived. Many Prisons and Jails are Not Ready. The Marshall Project, accessed January 29, 2022.

Turner, Victor. 1975. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Politics, History, and Culture. Duke University Press, Durham.

Cite as: Anthony, Alexander W. 2022. “Covid in the confines of the US.” FocaalBlog, 1 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/01/alexander-w-anthony-covid-in-the-confines-of-the-us/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Andrew Orta: The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear

Responding to a question about future of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in the wake of the pandemic, the Dean of a top program recently suggested that “the future is bright,” but would require “a fundamental rethinking of business education. When the MBA was first established a century ago, there was a real sense that we would be forming leaders of business and society, a focus on forming values. I see a return to that earlier concept of business education.”

Just prior to the onset of the pandemic, MBA applications were sharply down, business and popular press were declaring the death or obsolescence of the MBA, and business programs were scrambling to reinvent themselves. But what a difference a global pandemic makes. My comments here build on ethnographic research conducted in MBA programs prior to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a recent sampling of online informational forums for MBA applicants, program websites, and business media to examine the ways MBA administrators are reframing the value proposition of the MBA, marketing the degree as a necessary feature of the “bright future” of capitalism after COVID.

Two men and two women, dressed in business attire, look at a whiteboard with a graph showing an upward trend.
Image 1: Business meeting, photo by Yan Krukov

MBA programs are zombies: always returning from the dead. Their death is announced every few years, usually correlated with scandals or catastrophes tarnishing the capitalist brand. But the MBA cheats death through periodic reinventions. Indeed, the legitimacy of the MBA and its purchase on civic life in the US has been an open-ended project from the founding of the degree just over a century ago.

The early 20th and 21st centuries are productive bookends for thinking about this. There are intriguing parallels of economic and social disruptions, transformations in globalization, epochal technological changes, and, of course, experiences of global pandemics. But rather than thinking with the Dean about these parallels, I want to highlight some salient differences in the anticipatory rebranding of the post-COVID MBA. Thinking against the grain of the Dean’s hearkening back to origins elucidates a sleight-of-hand in current directions in MBA training – having to do less with a reanimation of the early 20th century specialist manager, than with “his” disappearance.

Producing Managerial Subjects

A common misperception of MBA training is that the students learn nothing; the programs are merely credentialing exercises providing entrée to elite business networks. But, as I’ve argued in a recent ethnography of MBA training in US business programs, MBAs get more than they bargain for (Orta 2019). MBA programs present highly distilled versions of the concepts and habits of capitalism. Course content is simplified, to be sure, but this streamlining takes on compelling depth through the cascading reinforcement of material across the curriculum. Programmatic simulations of professional life further instill a habitus of fast-paced decision-making in overscheduled conditions, based upon imperfect information. MBAs learn to frame the necessity of this simplification as an index of “hard work,” for which they should be highly compensated.

MBA programs have developed an additional value proposition: technical skills are not enough; an effective capitalist leader requires “talent.” MBA programs sell themselves as spaces for the cultivation of talent, helping students become better versions of themselves to be more effective versions of “the MBA.” The “x-factor” of talent is cast as the necessary supplement to the shortcomings of technical business teachings when faced with the real world. And the connections of the MBA to the technical operations of capitalism as a systemic form of profit extraction are increasingly masked by the rhetoric of talent as a driver of corporate success – a talent theory of value.

MBA Programs on the Eve of COVID

On the eve of COVID, MBA programs were dying—reeling from a set of compounding crises, including the Great Recession and MBA complicity in the runaway financialization that led to it. A season of institutional soul-searching spurred updated curricula and non-finance focused program tracks. A second crisis involved MBA programs’ increasing dependence over recent decades on international student enrollments. The visa policies of the Trump administration triggered a precipitous drop in international MBA enrollments. Some programs closed; others rolled out a variety of online degrees aimed at a broader pool of international and domestic students.

The Continuous Reinvention of the MBA

Such challenges and changes were business as usual. The arc of MBA education has been a continuous project to legitimize and reinvent the MBA idea across a series of scandals, crises, and transformations of capitalism, beginning with the founding of collegiate business degrees at the turn-of-the-20th century. Seen as lowering institutional standards with vocational school commonness, nascent business programs sought to emulate more established programs in law or medicine. And they tapped into an intensifying cultural sense of “business” as a discrete realm and a driver of an American modernity (Cruikshank 1987, Daniel 1998).

While the earliest iteration of the MBA curriculum was thus tightly connected to claimed civic needs, those needs were in the service of a still emerging order of extractive capitalism. By the 1930s, the corporation could be taken as standing for a particularly “American” modernity and generative of what came to be seen as the American way of life (Berle and Means 1932, Chandler 1977). MBA programs connected their mission explicitly to serving this process (e.g., Johnson 1906, Donham 1931).

By mid-century, business education was an established part of the landscape of higher education in the U.S. “The MBA” was a recognizable avatar of capitalism, albeit a shifty one: subject to recurring reinventions in the face of critiques, challenges and crises over the post-War decades and beyond – including the fallout from 2009 and the enrollment crisis (e.g. Drucker 1950, Gordon 1959, Pierson 1959, Petriglieri 2012).

The MBA Value Proposition for a Post-COVID World

The MBA responses to the post-2009 and post-2016 challenges positioned the programs well for the COVID years. Flexibility in delivering the MBA was already becoming a habit as many programs developed online and hybrid MBAs to maintain access to international students as well as employed domestic students. “Rigor” is a new keyword as recruiters legitimate the online programs; there is now a separate infrastructure of rankings for online MBAs, reproducing the bounding and marketing mechanisms of the traditional programs.

“Diversity” is another keyword. Business schools continue to struggle with gender and, especially, racial inclusion and equity among students and faculty—a concern linked increasingly by administrators and business trade publications to BlackLivesMatter and the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color in the U.S. However, while many programs report statistics along lines of gender and race, the emphasis of much of the recruitment materials I have reviewed is on the “diversity” of professional fields represented in a cohort. This follows from post-2009 efforts to distance the MBA from finance. Deans now say things like: “many of our students come from homogenous worlds, but their classmates have a diversity of professional experiences in different careers.” Students echo the pitch, describing the ways the “MBA experience of working with people outside of your industry broadens horizons.”  

As MBA programs recruit for the post-COVID world, they are most aggressively selling their “transformational” impact on students – often downplaying traditional functional training in business. “Transformational impact is the mission,” said one Dean, adding, “Our realization is that a lot of that impact will not come from the classroom only.”  Students describe their “MBA journey” similarly, stressing how the degree allows them to “view things more holistically.”   “The MBA program forced me to look at what I value,” reports one student.  Others describe a growing sense of “confidence,” and tell prospective applicants, “the MBA helps bring more you into the world.”

While the MBA may help bring more you into the world, it does so in coordination with a curious managerial self-effacement. There is a lot of talk about teams and the value of delegating decisions to local levels. This squares with neoliberal the rhetoric of decentralization and agility, and is familiar from existing MBA emphasis on entrepreneurial talent and soft skills.

But there is something more in the mix: the disruptions and anxieties of the pandemic. Students are “rethinking what they are doing.” Programs now promise “lifelong career coaching” for careers of change and uncertainty. And at a time when routinized neoliberal truths of business are explicitly up for debate, MBA programs stress the importance of humility, of not knowing what to do, as a facet of leadership in uncertainty.

The focus on talent and leadership skills increasingly downplays the relevance of core functional practices of managerial capitalism. They are mentioned – usually as part of the effort to show the “rigor” of online programs. But current marketing of the MBA underscores an ascendant conceptualization of talent that eclipses the core disciplines of capitalist extraction and harnesses the post-COVID business leader to a differently imagined project.

MBA marketing explicitly positions the talented MBA as the solution to a set of social and political crises exacerbated by the pandemic. “Leadership is more important than ever,” commented one Dean as he described a three-fold crisis facing the post-COVID US: “health, economics, and inequality.” Further, he laments, increasing polarization from before the pandemic has led to a loss of trust in governmental and non-governmental institutions, which “typically provide the safety net in times of crisis.” Thus, he identified a fourth post-COVID crisis: “leadership.”

That amounts to a familiar reading of the times. But he caught my attention when he went on to say, “But the level of trust has gone up dramatically in the business community. This is a great time for the business platform. An opportunity that goes well beyond anything that has been there before. […] We can now tackle issues that go beyond traditional profit and loss. We can have a bigger impact on society. [T]he expectation is there that business will step in.”

This goes beyond a post-2009 trend in business schools to link business to transformative social solutions through electives in social entrepreneurship or sustainability. Those turned on a familiar vision of doing good through doing well (in business) and have spawned a host of metrics to measure (and therefore manage) social impact in familiar business style. The Dean’s comments decouple the impact of business leadership from the fundamental operations of business and gesture to political governance in ways that have not been an explicit part of the MBA project – at least with reference to the US.

There is good strategic reason for this shift, as the post-pandemic economy seems likely to be characterized by continuing changes in the neoliberal alliance of governing policies and capital. As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink puts it in his most recent annual letter to CEOs,

“COVID-19 has also deepened the erosion of trust in traditional institutions and exacerbated polarization in many Western societies. This polarization presents a host of new challenges for CEOs. […] In this environment, facts themselves are frequently in dispute, but businesses have an opportunity to lead. Employees are increasingly looking to their employer as the most trusted, competent, and ethical source of information – more so than government, the media, and NGOs.”  

Other guidance for the post-pandemic economy makes a similar point: “beyond building resilience in busines and the economy, public and private leaders must also build societal resilience.” As MBA programs are marketing themselves to prospective applicants whose concerns are shaped by the crises listed by the Dean, this message of civic leadership seems resonant.

The pandemic has made the contradictions of capitalism visible in new ways, including accelerating levels of inequality. While this has opened up new conversations about equity and governance and provoked commentary on the expanding job description of the CEO, there is no indication that extraction of profit is not still the name of the game. Yet, in marketing the MBA for the post-COVID world, there is a sleight-of-hand by which the extractive operations of capitalism are screened from view. This may be the apotheosis of the manager-turned-leader, as the training of capitalist managers has progressively erased direct reference to the technical ends of managerial capitalism.

MBA programs have long been adept at repackaging themselves to weather crises, and scandals. Along the way they have shaped an ideal of the capitalist manager that balances the technical operations of capitalist industry with the softer skills and innate qualities of leadership – even entertaining the claim that MBAs don’t really learn anything of functional importance from their programs. As they turn to their “bright” post-COVID future, MBA programs are continuing a longer project of producing the disappearing manager.

Andrew Orta is professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is author of Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture (California, 2019).

References

Berle, Adolf A., Gardiner C. Means. 1991 [1932]. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Reprint edition. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A: Transaction Publishers.

Chandler, Alfred. 1977. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. 1987. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908-1945. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press.

Daniel, Carter A. 1998. MBA: The First Century. Bucknell University Press.

Donham, Wallace Brett, and Alfred North Whitehead. 1931. Business Adrift. Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill.

Drucker, Peter Ferdinand. 1950. “The Graduate Business School” Fortune 42 (August 1950): 92-116.

Gordon, Robert Aaron, and James Edwin Howell. 1959. Higher Education for Business. Columbia University Press.

Johnson, Joseph French. 1906. “The Business School and What It Should Do.” The New York Times, September 15, 1906 page 9. 

Petriglieri, G. 2012. “Are Business Schools Clueless or Evil.” Harvard Business Review Blog Network.  

Pierson, Frank Cook. 1959. The Education of American Businessmen: A Study of University-College Programs in Business Administration. McGraw-Hill.

Orta, Andrew. 2019. Making Global MBAs. The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Cite as: Orta, Andrew. 2022. “The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/30/andrew-orta-the-mba-wont-die-but-it-is-trying-to-disappear/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Don Nonini: Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization

Introduction

Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point – whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to shift toward a new militancy toward capitalism. Now, two years into the pandemic, they have suffered severe personal hardships due to Covid-related illness, hospitalizations and deaths, and sudden loss of employment. These traumas have occurred even as they have experienced an historically unprecedented hiatus of relative economic security, given the Covid-related payments and protections they received from the US state, while many have been praised as “essential workers.” This essay seeks to review what has happened to them over the last four decades that has made this into such a turning point.

Anthropologists speak of the period since the 1970s as one of neoliberalism. Instead, in this essay I adopt a different perspective by exploring the conditions prevailing under the transition from the liberal nation-state to the corporate-oligarchic state that has occurred widely with the integration of platform-surveillance capitalism into state administration and the use of massive databases by corporations and governments to govern populations (Kapferer and Gold 2018). Freedom and enslavement in the contemporary United States are linked to two now converging phenomena. One is digitalization; the other is the expansion of expropriation as a mechanism of capital accumulation beyond its historically racially marked boundaries to encompass the racially dominant white population. These changes have taken place with the rise to domination of finance capitalism in the world economy, a new period of economic decline and social crisis in the West.

A large sign reads "CHECKS CASHED" on a small building with a curved roof, stone facade, and glass walls in a parking lot.
Image 1: Payday Lender in Durham, North Carolina, photo by Don Nonini

First, as to digitalization. It has not only led to unprecedented levels of economic inequality among the population, but also to new mechanisms of accumulation organized around the generalized dispossession of working-class people made possible by their indebtedness combined with corporate and state deployment of digital technologies with large-scale predictive capabilities. The rise of surveillance capitalism and its integration into the corporate state has taken the form of a massive, commercialized apparatus of surveillance – “a single behemoth of a data market; a colossal marketplace for personal data” (Harcourt 2015, 198).

The ascendance of finance capital has come to operate in tandem with a racialized corporate state formation using an apparatus of analog surveillance and control of working people combined with digital surveillance over them. This apparatus has come to rationally extract and then realize large volumes of surplus value from them outside the capitalist workplace. This apparatus employs digital technologies (i.e., artificial intelligence) to increase the hyper-exploitation and expropriation of racially vulnerable groups, but also extends to the racially dominant white population. I focus my attention on the United States because its relentless attachment to new forms of financialized repression of working people through capitalizing (on) their debt repayment and petty income streams leads the way for capitalist regimes in other “advanced industrialized” countries undergoing economic decline.

Second, connected to the dominance of finance capital since the 1970s there has been the generalization of mechanisms of expropriation beyond racially marked vulnerable groups to the broader majority/plurality white population. In an important article, Nancy Fraser (2016) argues that capitalism throughout its history has always been accompanied by the racialization of the populations governed by the states that support it, and that this has continued up to the present. She distinguishes the industrial exploitation of a Euro-descended or white population within the cores and peripheries of the European (British, French, etc.) and United States empires that has been set apart from the expropriation of people of color within the cores and peripheries of these empires. By expropriation Fraser means, “distinct from Marxian exploitation, expropriation is accumulation by other means. Dispensing with the contractual relation through which capital purchases ‘labor power’ in exchange for wages, expropriation works by confiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into capital’s circuits of self-expansion” (Fraser 2016, 166). This is important: dispossession as such is only the loss of labor-power, reproductive capacity, land, money, or property by those dispossessed. Expropriation, however, goes beyond dispossession to confiscate these use-values and transform them into exchange-values incorporated into capital’s circuits of accumulation. Expropriation leads to accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004: 74-75).

Fraser goes further to assert that as an historical regularity until quite recently capitalism has survived at times of economic crisis only because the expropriation of people of color accelerates the rate of capital accumulation beyond that possible through sustained exploitation of white workers within industrial production. “Expropriation… covers a multitude of sins, most of which correlate strongly with racial oppression… such as territorial conquest, land annexation, enslavement, coerced labor, child labor, child abduction, and rape” but also “assumes more ‘modern’ forms – such as prison labor, transnational sex trafficking, corporate land grabs, and foreclosures on predatory debt, which are also linked with racial oppression” (Fraser 2016, 167).

Although Fraser has captured an historical regularity of capitalism in the United States, she points out that expropriations by corporations and the US state are increasingly imposed on the dominant racial group of whites as well as on racially subordinate groups. In her periodization of capitalism since the 17th century, she refers to the current period of “financialized capitalism” which she dates from the 1990s to the present as characterized by the emergence of “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker, formally free but acutely vulnerable” (Fraser 2016, 176). To be more accurate, they are also exploitable and expropriable when they own petty property (e.g., low-end real estate), or are not “legal” U.S. citizens (e.g., “non-documented” Latinx immigrants among hyper-sweated workers in the meat processing industry). This figure refers to working people who racially may be of color or may be white.

Fraser’s (2016, 176) argument that “expropriation has become ubiquitous, afflicting not only its traditional [racial] subjects but also those who were previously shielded by their status as citizen-workers” has much support. This can be identified in the events leading up to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 when subprime mortgage lenders in 2000-2001 shifted their target demographic for peddling these mortgages away from African-American elderly couples and women toward “a white, blue-collar construction worker who drinks beer,’” in the words of Roland Arnall, the CEO of Ameriquest, one of the largest and most fraudulent subprime mortgage lenders (Hudson 2010, 148). Other subprime mortgage lenders followed suit. In consequence, 3.8 million families from 2007-2010 lost their homes due to foreclosures. Is the racialized class hierarchy within US capitalism being reordered by redefining the white/non-white boundary? Are déclassé whites becoming less “white” or even “non-white”?

How do generalized expropriation and digitalization now combine to characterize capitalist society in the United States? Expropriation made more precise and discriminating in its objectives by artificial intelligence is often but not always centered on taking advantage of working people through indebtedness (from subprime mortgages, payday lending, student loans, etc.). It allows for the rationalized and sustained extraction of working peoples’ income streams, thus allowing such extraction to be scaled up and “securitized.” Under these conditions, expropriation enhanced by digitalization directed at working people has become a major mode of realizing (surplus) value from working people, outside the “normal” profit-making by corporations through consumer markets.

The New Digital Scores and the Corporations’/States’ Management of Life

Consider persons’ awareness in the U.S. of their FICO credit score when applying for a loan. Most soon learn of their FICO Score and its importance but they may not know of other less-regulated consumer scores that evaluate their potential to incur, manage and repay debt, and tap on their income streams for money – scores like “ChoiceScore,” “Risk IQ”, the geographically defined “Median Equivalency Score,” and the “Consumer View Profitability Score” (Dixon and Gelman 2014, 43-44). Similarly, persons in the US may not know about many other aspects of their lives that are being quantified and analyzed through AI-based algorithms to create scores for them that predict and shape their lives. 

These scores are commercially available to any corporate or state buyer that can afford to purchase them. They assess the individuals forming the US population as debtors, potential job occupants, rent or utility payers, real estate buyers, hospital patients, disease sufferers, consumers of specific commodities, securitized air travelers, student borrowers, political dissidents, “street people,” defaulting child supporters, perpetrators of domestic violence, or criminals, among many other possibilities. My analysis of the data in Dixon and Gelman (2014) discovered more than 50 such common scores, and eight years later there undoubtedly are dozens more that have been invented and applied to the US population.

The Dynamics of Dual Enslavement: Analog and Digital

In addition to extracting super-profits from debtors (e.g., via “foreclosures”), there are other ways in which expropriation and digitalization appropriate value from working people. The Behemoth’s algorithms – the FICO credit scores, the legally unregulated “consumer scores” that profile individuals’ work, consumption, and credit histories, the predictive policing scores, the digitalized background checks for prospective job applicants and apartment renters, and much more – dynamically reinforce and cement the connections between the surveillance by digital technologies and the “on the ground” analog expropriations that once only targeted racial groups like African Americans for special treatment, but now extend to the working class as a whole. 

The defining characteristic of the putative “middle class” individual is the job. African-Americans are known to have lower average and median credit ratings than whites (Garcia Perez, Gaither and Darity 2020). One survey found that the 60% of employers surveyed ran credit checks of job applicants as part of the job application and review process (Wang 2018: 129). These could involve the applicant’s official FICO score, but more likely include one of the financial consumer scores referred to above (e.g., “Consumer Profitability Score”). In one study, one out of ten respondents who were unemployed were informed that they would not be hired for a job because of their credit report, while one in seven applicants with “blemished” credit histories were told they were not being hired because of their credit record. Those not even aware of the use of their electronic scores against them constitute many more who have been discriminated against. There is evidence that employers concerned about curbing their future health insurance costs due to unhealthy employees use health scores, scores from personality tests, and reputation scores to exclude persons with medical conditions when they apply for jobs (O’Neil 2017:213).   

Credit scores are now used routinely by landlords who require these from prospective renters before agreeing to rent to them. These credit scores are increasingly derived from massive digital databases of prior renters as well as applicants without prior rental histories, are increasingly refined by electronic vetting corporations, and are resorted to by the large-scale absentee corporate landlords that took over distressed apartment housing after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. TransUnion advertises its SmartMove ResidentScore as estimating “the reliability and level of risk” an individual rental applicant brings, draws on the prior credit, rental/eviction and criminal histories of the applicant, and brags that landlords will “get a 15% better prediction score than a typical credit score.” The codification of discrimination through these new scores that draw on underlying databases as one might expect leads disproportionate numbers of African-American applicants for rental housing to be rejected, but large numbers of whites and Latinx applicants are also excluded.

In the cases of job hires and rental applications, expropriations brought on by digital and analog surveillance not only deny applicants access to specific kinds of jobs and housing, but also drive them into more insecure hyper-exploitative labor and predatory rental markets – where their labor power and incomes can be confiscated and put to work for accumulation by employers and landlords.

Even those who are too impoverished to be creditworthy have use-values that can be capitalized by capitalists. This illustrates another connection between expropriation, digitalization, and value extraction. If the presence of “street people” in the way of gentrification jeopardizes the realization of the market value of real estate, they must be separated by force from its spaces. This leads to police harassment and arrests of young men and women, disproportionately African-Americans and Latinx, but also including many whites.

Their arrests transform incarceration itself into a commodity. Large numbers of urban poor people are arrested and remain in local jails on trivial misdemeanor charges because they cannot afford to pay bail – a form of debtors’ prison. The families of those arrested and jailed send them money to pay for their food and telephone calls, thus subsidizing the privately-owned industries providing these services ($1.6 billion and $1.3 billion respectively). Even though three-fourths of all prisoners in local jails are never convicted of a crime, their jailing leads their families to raise money to pay for their bail, thus providing a $1.5 billion subsidy to the bail industry.

Criminalization and imprisonment of poor people are not only inscribed in the official hardcopy records of City Hall, but also in the digital data on “justice-involved” African-Americans and others collected, analyzed with algorithms, and commercially disseminated as scores by data brokers. Their electronic “criminal records”, even just arrests without convictions, follow them into the digital world and are used against them in job interviews and rental applications. Algorithms for predictive policing software (e.g., PREDPOL, COMPAS) pull the impoverished urban defendant down more tightly under the yoke of electronic prediction and control. PREDPOL concentrates police “stop and frisk” in specific urban areas with “high crime” and reinforces previous discrimination and leads to more arrests, injuries, and deaths among the urban poor. COMPAS scores the degree of “risk” of those convicted of “crime” to help judges determine whether they should be allowed free on probation or conversely sentenced for longer periods of time.

Employers, realtors, bankers, speculators, et al. profit from the expropriation of use values from poor people when such confiscations yield the values these economic elites realize (e.g., lower wages paid, higher rents extracted, houses foreclosed on and resold, higher payday loan and student debt interest payments, court fines and fees assessed, bails posted). Allies of these economic elites also profit from such expropriations. Judges set high court fees and impose steep fines on arrested and convicted poor people to raise revenues for local governments (Wang 2018, 155-161). Police confiscate the cash, houses, and cars of arrestees suspected of  committing a crime through “civil forfeiture,” and use the plunder to benefit the local police force. Local Chambers of Commerce attract new capital to invest in gentrifying urban neighborhoods by supporting the evictions of poor residents from their rental units.

The Age of Covid: “Essential Workers,” Ironic Respite, Labor Militancy

Since March 2020, working-class people in the United States, especially African-Americans and other people of color, have suffered disproportionately from Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. They have witnessed  one of the largest direct transfer of wealth from the state to corporations and the 1% in US history – more than $2 trillion alone in one year in payments and tax breaks to corporations from the Covid-relief CARES Act. At the same time, they have also experienced the temporary economic security provided them by Covid-related transfer payments from the US state (CARES Act and American Rescue Plan), while a CDC-imposed eviction moratorium has only recently come to an end. Historically, this is the first time that the US state has intervened to provide basic income support for most of the working-class population over a protracted period of time, irrespective of whether they were employed. Finally, many have been rhetorically elevated in their status to “essential workers,” that is the idealized national sacrifice – most at risk of contracting and dying from Covid yet deemed most indispensable to “the economy.”  

These contradictory experiences – temporary economic security, awareness that corporations received far more support than workers, disproportionate losses from Covid and unemployment, and for some, praise as essential workers – have been a revelation for many considering the decades of expropriation and hyper-exploitation recounted in this essay. Deadly pandemics, like war, tend to revolutionize one’s self-awareness and concentrate one’s imagination of the possible. 

It is therefore not surprising that nurses, hospital orderlies, oil rig workers, Amazon warehouse laborers, and workers in cereals and agricultural equipment manufacturing  are showing a profound unwillingness to rejoin “the economy” on capitalism’s terms – including persisting risks to their health from Covid imposed by employers – through workers’ militancy. In increasing numbers, for the first time since the emergence of the corporate state and the domination of finance capital, they are organizing themselves to confront the abuses of capital. Hopefully, these militants will soon be joined in larger numbers by low-end service and gig workers, as is already occurring in the fast foods industry.

Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published extensively on Chinese trans-nationalism, on class and ethnic relations among the Chinese diaspora of Malaysia and Australia, and on local politics and race relations in the US. He has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous books and reviewed journal articles on these topics.

References

Dixon, P., and R. Gelman. (2014). “The Scoring of America: How secret consumer scores threaten your privacy and your future.” World Privacy Forum, 1-89.

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

García-Pérez, M., S. Gaither, and W. Darity Jr. (2020). “Baltimore study: Credit scores.” Working Paper Series, Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Washington, DC.

Harcourt, B. E. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in The Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (2004). “The New Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register 40, 63-87

Hudson, M. W. (2010). The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis. New York: Times books/Henry Holt and Company

Kapferer, B. and M. Gold (2018). A nail in the coffin. Arena Magazine 152, 37-43.

O’Neil, C. (2017). Weapons of Math Destruction. New York: Broadway Books.

Wang, J. (2018). Carceral Capitalism. Intervention Series, 21. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

Cite as: Nonini, Don. 2022. “Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization.” FocaalBlog, 28 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/28/don-nonini-scoring-the-u-s-working-class-expropriation-and-digitalization

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Ieva Snikersproge: Jobs or ecology? Why green growth is a pipe dream and how the pandemic could change this

My interest in the tensions between job preservation and ecological transition comes from my fieldwork among neorurals in Diois, a relatively isolated mountainous area in Southeastern France. The term neorurals (a literal translation from French néoruraux) refers to a diverse group of urban-to-rural migrants; one of its major components is back-to-the-landers who move to the countryside because they want to live in an environmentally friendly manner. The modern neorural movement is about fifty years old and has been at the forefront of inventing new, environmentally friendly ways of living. For example, neorurals have been pioneers in organic farming, they have experimented with environmentally friendly construction techniques, and have re-localized production chains, such as washing, brushing, colouring, and threading of wool, which disappeared from France because they were judged as economically unviable.

The economic dissolvability of environmental practice

It is curious that, despite neorural experiments using extant ecological alternatives for nearly fifty years, they struggle to become the mainstream. It is mainly because these ecological initiatives are more labour-intensive than conventional choices and, hence, are harder to access.  By and large, there are two ways to get to environmentally friendly goods, such as organic food, a passive house, and a locally produced woollen pullover. First, it is possible to buy them on the market, but they will inevitably be upmarket goods because the price needs to cover the longer working hours involved in producing them. This poses a serious limitation because these goods become out of reach for most people, particularly in rural areas, where there are very few jobs in competitive, well-paying industries.

A blonde, white person in a dirty jacket and work boots kneels on a gravel floor lined with boards, holding a power drill.
Image 1: A voluntary worker helping to build a self-constructed, ecological house in Diois, France, photo by Ieva Snikersproge

The second option for accessing these goods is self-producing them. In economically poor areas, such as where I did my fieldwork, this was a common, if complicated option. At first glance it might appear to be a “free” solution, but it requires access to space, land and/or other expensive inputs that cannot be self-produced and thus necessitate monetary resources. Moreover, in many cases, self-production imposes imperial time demands that are hardly compatible with a regular job. In the end, through self-production, essentially “productive” environmental practices, such as organic vegetable growing or construction of houses, become “reproductive” activities subordinated to money and time dispositions of everyone. There is a kind of economic insolvability innate to environmentally friendly practices because they require “uncompetitive” amounts of work.

Of course, neorurals represent a marginal fringe of French society, but the environmental crisis has become a mainstream policy concern. The neorurals show that, from a technical point of view, it is possible to dramatically reduce the footprint of our livelihoods by re-localizing production and reducing our needs. However, there are socio-economic impediments that limit the ability for this to become a mainstream solution. For now, environmentally friendly practices are either “free” but do not allow practitioners to make a living, or they allow for a living but are reserved for well-paid elites and well-funded institutions. In other words, ecological transition is not only a technical but also, and probably primarily, a socio-economic problem.

Economy and jobs: “No matter how much it costs”

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a major turnaround in France’s macro-economic policy. Emmanuel Macron, the current French president, is known as a follower of right-wing economic policy. Just to give a few examples, he has sought to reduce France’s sovereign debt by decreasing state expenditure and to increase the age of retirement to balance the budget of pensions. However, when Macron announced the first social confinement on March 12, 2020, he immediately added, “the government will mobilize all the necessary means (…) to save lives no matter how much it costs.” Macron’s speech echoed the European Central Bank’s (ECB) former president, Mario Draghi’s, famous phrase “whatever it takes,” which showed his willingness to open the tap of public money to assume all monetary costs of his political decisions.

Macron’s decision meant massive state expenditure, not only to buy medical equipment and boost hospitals but also to “avoid the collapse of the national economy and mass unemployment” (Coeuré and Inspection générale des finances 2021, 5). The logic was that it was less painful to keep the economy afloat artificially with state support than let the lockdown destroy enterprises and jobs that would need to be rebuilt afterwards. To achieve this, the economic plan included four key measures: First, state-guaranteed loans to enterprises (141 billion euros); second, a solidarity fund to small enterprises facing bankruptcy (35 billion euros); third, a partial activity/technical unemployment scheme for workers who cannot continue working full time because of the confinement (32 billion euros). And last but not least, it involved a scheme to cover the cost of small-to-medium enterprises whose activity was administratively suspended (8.4 billion euros). The plan confirmed French commitment to job preservation, as unemployment rates remain a major yardstick for assessing the performance of successive governments.

Unsurprisingly, these COVID measures caused French sovereign debt to skyrocket. A year later, a report commissioned by the prime minister estimated that COVID measures had created a loan worth 215 billion EUR and surged the sovereign debt from 98.1% of GDP to 120% of GDP (Arthuis and Commission pour l’avenir des finances publiques 2021). The report concluded that, under the current lending conditions (low interest rates due to the European Central Bank’s (ECB) PEPP program that bought loans worth 750 billion EUR), the loan is not putting the state in the difficulty of repayment. However, it argued that ECB would not be able to continue this policy endlessly. According to the reporters, the ECB was buying sovereign debts because its mission is to keep inflation under 2% and to avoid deflation. If inflation approached 2%, the ECB would immediately stop this policy (Ibid, p.23-24). Thus, again, according to the authors, it is important to create strategies that show France is taking its indebtedness seriously and is considering ways to reduce it. Until the onset of the COVID recession, France had not managed to stabilize its sovereign debt that it had contracted in previous decades. The report advised marking the COVID debt separately from the rest of the debt with the sole reason of “transparency.” Yet, the authors advised against all three publicly discussed solutions for handling the sovereign debt: first, effacement of the debt; second, making the debt perpetual; and third, confining the COVID debt to create a new mechanism/tax for paying this portion of the sovereign debt.

A week after the report, Bruno Le Maire, the French minister of economy and finance, said that he understands French worries about the repayment of the debt and that the subject requires “responsibility.” He said: “we could envisage dedicating a part of economic growth to the repayment of the debt. During the crises we have helped enterprises a lot (…). If in the near future they grow, if there is supplementary growth that increases income from the tax on enterprises, would it not be right just to use part of this tax to repay the COVID debt?” In other words, Bruno Le Maire envisages repayment of the debt from economic growth alone, as he specified, he has no intention of increasing tax on entrepreneurial activity. On the contrary, in 2022, it will decrease to 25%.

A green growth plan to mop up the sovereign debt and create jobs

As early as July 2020, the government announced that the state would mobilize extra funding to boost the French economy at the end of the lockdown. On September 3, 2020, the government unveiled a new program entitled “France relance” or “France restarts/relaunches” with a 100-billion euros envelope (of which 40 billion are covered by the Next Generation EU) to rebuild the economy. Macron presented the program by explaining that the most remarkable aspect was not its budget, but its project, i.e., France does not want to return to “pre-crisis normal.” Instead, it wants to turn the crisis into an opportunity by investing in sectors that “will make the economy and jobs of tomorrow”.

France relance consists of three pillars: ecological transition (30 billion EUR), competitiveness (34 billion EUR), and territorial cohesion (36 billion EUR). Ecological transition includes such measures as aid for energy renovation of (public and private) buildings, aid for buying more ecological cars, investment in trains as well as decarbonization of the industry. The competitiveness of the French economy is encouraged through support measures for export, investment aid for the development and modernization of the industry, aid to “digitalize” small and medium enterprises, and loans to help enterprises that want to invest but whose investment capacity has been affected because of COVID-19. Territorial cohesion includes many insertion measures, such as a special program for integrating young workers in the labour market, aid for reclassification schemes to avoid firing, investment in hospitals and allocations to local authorities for local infrastructure development projects.

While France relance includes a few investment schemes that tackle infrastructure and help households to consume better, the backbone of it is job creation through green growth. All documents and videos that present the program advertise it as a plan to “create employment that the French are waiting for.” The idea is that by greening energy and investing in innovative, cutting-edge enterprises, France will manage to create economic growth that will then create jobs. In fact, economic growth is sold as a panacea to three macro-economic problems: it helps to keep France’s sovereign debt sustainable; it permits (at least in theory) the creation of jobs; and it permits the state to raise funds for financing the “ecological transition.”

Jobs and ecology?

There are a few problems to this narrative. First, not all economic growth creates jobs (Kannan and Raveendran 2009). If it creates jobs, it first creates jobs in competitive economic sectors and only then, secondarily, in sectors that are centred on the reproduction of everyday life, such as public services, the care sector, agriculture, etc. (Davezies 2009). There is no guarantee that economic growth will trickle down to create and fund jobs that service local needs. Among neorurals, it was precisely the lack of income that limited their possibilities of remunerating local labour and generalizing environmentally friendly practices. Second, the competitive sectors might not be green sectors at all (like the automotive industry, nuclear energy, or aircraft building). To name this widespread phenomenon when job preservation takes priority over ecological concerns, sociologists have coined the term “jobs versus environment dilemma” (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011). Third, economic growth might not be strong enough to keep ahead of technological advancement and produce enough taxable income for both financing environmental transition and repaying the sovereign debt. Decades long sluggish economic growth (that Larry Summer analysed as “secular stagnation”) and desperate state attempts to boost it have largely contributed to the creation of sovereign debts in the first place. Finally, there is mounting evidence that green growth is impossible. Economic growth is not just (or not only) a manipulation of numbers, but also an increase in goods and services that use energy and other material inputs for their functioning (Hickel and Kallis 2020).

In short, France Relance is heading for green growth but it is most likely a misguided policy goal. The necessity to create jobs and service a humongous sovereign debt makes the French economy growth-addicted but imaging that economic growth can be simply “greened” appears to be a pipe dream. Of course, I would not like to suggest that, to live within the ecological limits of planet Earth, we should all become neorurals. The neorural experience, however, could invite us to find ways of remunerating environmentally friendly practices directly (Conditional cash transfers? Basic income schemes? Subsidies?) without engineering economic growth that will hopefully trickle down to all the layers of society in the form of jobs and produce enough taxable income. Where the pandemic could help – but only could because none of this has been acquired, far from it! – is to change the laws of monetary creation to fund the ecological transition without pushing for economic growth. The pandemic made many governments change their position on deficit spending; it also made the EU, for the first time in its history, take on a collective debt. Could the widespread explosion of sovereign debts finally change the rules of debt repayment and, with it, monetary creation? Or is it going to precipitate us first into unreasonable struggle for economic growth and then painful austerity measures that will curb government capacities to finance ecological transition?

Ieva Snikersproge is a post-doc research fellow at the Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. Her thesis, “Working Alternatives to Capitalist Factory Takeovers and the Return to the Land in Early Twenty-First Century France,” investigated two alternatives to capitalist ways of (re)production in Southern France. She is currently carrying out a large-scale quantitative study that seeks to understand the articulation of productive and reproductive economic practices for achieving ecologically sustainable livelihoods.

References

Arthuis, Jean, and Commission pour l’avenir des finances publiques. 2021. “Nos Finances Publiques Post-COVID-19: Pour de Nouvelles Règles Du Jeu.” https://www.viepublique.fr/sites/default/files/rapport/pdf/279092.pdf.

Coeuré, Benoît, and Inspection générale des finances. 2021. “Comité de Suivi et d’évaluation Des Mesures de Soutien Financier Aux Entreprises Confrontées à l’épidémie de Covid-19.” France Stratégie: Évaluer. Anticiper. Débattre. Proposer. https://www.viepublique.fr/sites/default/files/rapport/pdf/281253.pdf.

Davezies, Laurent. 2009. “The Residential Local Economy.” Géographie, Économie, Société 11 (1): 47–53.

Hickel, Jason, and Giorgos Kallis. 2020. “Is Green Growth Possible?” New Political Economy 25 (4): 469–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964.

Kannan, K.P., and G. Raveendran. 2009. “Growth Sans Employment: A Quarter Century of Jobless Growth in India’s Organised Manufacturing.” Economic and Political Weekly 44 (10): 80–91.

Räthzel, Nora, and David Uzzell. 2011. “Trade Unions and Climate Change: The Jobs versus Environment Dilemma.” Global Environmental Change 21 (4): 1215–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.07.010.

Cite as: Snikersproge, Ieva. 2022. “Jobs or ecology? Why green growth is a pipe dream and how the pandemic could change this.” FocaalBlog, 25 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/25/ieva-snikersproge-jobs-or-ecology-why-green-growth-is-a-pipe-dream-and-how-the-pandemic-could-change-this