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Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy

David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his scholarly legacy is slowly emerging. I want to contribute to such a critical assessment of his oeuvre by concentrating on his book “Utopia of Rules” published in 2015. This assessment has resulted from my participation in the roundtable “On David Graeber’s Work: Potentialities for a Radical Leftist Anthropology” at the conference of the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA) in Bremen on 28.9.2021, the stream of which can be watched on Facebook.

I propose that a scholarly book can be evaluated according to three criteria:

  1. Does it present new facts—that is, results of research according to accepted research protocols, be they ethnographic or others?
  2. Does it engage with theory, and the body of existing knowledge, in a novel way?
  3. If that is not the case, does it present new ideas, even if only in a more essayistic way, e.g. without the necessity to give evidence; or does it present old ideas in a better way than they have already been presented elsewhere.

Even if a book is written for a larger audience, as this book clearly is, it should still stand the test of at least one of these criteria. This is in fact in line with what Graeber himself (in a highly unusual six-page response to a five-page negative review of his book) demanded—i.e., that the book should be judged “according to the actual arguments and the evidence assembled to support these arguments” (Piliavsky 2017; Graeber 2017: 118). These criteria can be summed up in the question of whether I would put the book, or parts of it, in a list of core readings, say for a course on the anthropology of bureaucracy.

I will limit myself to the introduction to the book and the central essay on structural stupidity (ch. 1). The chapter – the only one with an anthropology pedigree – first came into being as the 2006 LSE Malinowski lecture under the title “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity” (https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:viz386gos). Later, however, Graeber did not want the lecture to be cited any longer. He replaced it by the text “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture,” which he published in HAU (a journal that he co-edited) and which, in a strangely bureaucratic turn of phrase, he declared “the official one” (Graeber 2012: 105 fn. 1; https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau2.2.007). It finally turned into a 2015 book chapter. Each time the text became longer. I have found lots of praise of the book, but predominantly from outside anthropology (but see Piliavsky 2017) and mainly from journalists (see the praise page of the book).

The central argument seems to be that the world is faced with an increasing bureaucratisation whereby public and private bureaucracies, as well as neoliberal capitalism melt into each other and form a total structure of oppression and exploitation which furthermore relies on technology and sheer physical violence. This over-bureaucratisation of the world stifles creativity and imagination, in particular revolutionary imagination, so the left needs to reflect on how to get out of this trap (which according to Graeber it has not done, therefore the need for his intervention).

I say this “seems to be” the argument, as Graeber’s writing is not very structured. He writes more by way of analogy, and about whatever comes to his mind. His style of writing has been called “ruminative” by a reviewer; the author resembles a happy deer strolling across a sunny alpine meadow, picking a weed here, plucking a shamrock there, and then chewing the whole thing several times over. So, to give the reader a selection of topics touched upon: the two chapters jump from huge generalisations on « the » Germans, Americans, and British (p. 13), to Graeber’s experiences as a customer of an American bank (p. 15), student debt, again in the US (p. 23), chats with a World Bank economist at a conference (pp. 25-26) as well as with a British bank employee at another occasion (note 15 p. 231), newspaper opinion pieces which he presents as results of ethnographic research (p.22), the shape of bank buildings “when I was growing up” (p. 33), surprising but unsubstantiated references to Goethe as a supporter of Prussian bureaucracy (p. 39), similarities between refugees and female applicants to London music schools (p. 41), a visit to an occupied factory in Marseilles (p. 43),  his mother’s death (pp. 45-50), problems of registering his car in New York (p. 48), to academics complaining about too much paperwork (pp. 53-54), why a thick description of a bureaucratic document is impossible (p. 52, but see Göpfert 2013), violence as the weapon of the stupid (p. 68), gender roles in American situation comedies of the 1950s (p. 69), stories about American teenagers that somebody told him but he doesn’t remember who it was (note 59 p. 242), to what a friend told him about degrees in library science (note 26 p. 233), what “most of us” think about the police (p. 73), to vampires (p. 77), Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (p. 78), and American prisons (p. 102).

Now my criterion 1: where is the evidence, and what about new knowledge? Graeber has a remarkably cavalier use of what is habitually called evidence. I can only give two examples here: In the beginning of the introduction, he claims that “we” (a pronoun, like “us” and “ours”, he frequently uses but never defines) are increasingly faced with paperwork. He then presents three graphs to prove his point (pp. 4-5). At closer inspection, however, the graphs – presented without any source – rather show how often “paperwork” or associated terms like “performance review” have appeared in English language books over time, which of course is different from the thesis it is supposed to illustrate, and rather refutes his other thesis, that “nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy” (p. 3). In fact, Graeber admits that he is purely “imagining” graph no. 2 (his words, p. 4; see also p. 15) which supposedly shows that people spend ever more time filling out forms. In any case, he has a penchant, throughout the text, for terms like “apparently”, “I suppose”, “we all know that”, “most of us believe”, “apparently”, the subjunctive form of the verb, and what “everybody knows” (p. 27).

Apart from these imagined figures, Graeber’s main type of evidence are personal anecdotes, which for him apparently assume the function of explanations. He starts off chapter 1 with the problems he had when, after a life mostly spent as a “bohemian student” (p. 48), he was suddenly faced with different bureaucratic hiccups when his mother had a stroke, the problems being caused by a particularly incompetent notary. Like this coming-of-age story, all the other anecdotes are also taken from his immediate personal experience, almost exclusively concern the US and the UK and not rarely relate to narcistic insults he suffered from some apparently stupid bureaucrat who did not recognize his, Graeber’s, intelligence (e.g., p. 48, p. 64). In fact, he also has six pages on Madagascar where he essentially says that outside the capital city, state bureaucracy is practically absent, but then immediately nuances this statement with respect to schools (pp. 61-66; one would wonder what this evaluation would say about health centres, for example, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and more generally, also). As an Africanist, that doesn’t surprise me (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 1997), but Graeber does not consider the fact that this widespread absence of state bureaucracy in the highlands of Madagascar might in fact invalidate his general thesis of total bureaucratization as a planetary phenomenon.

A bureaucratic travel document related to the author's research. The form is officially signed and stamped.
Image 1: A utopia of rules? The bureaucratic embeddedness of ethnographic research (Photo: Thomas Bierschenk, 2009)

What about criterion 2, the engagement with existing knowledge and theory? Graeber clearly is somebody who does not like reading but prefers writing up and sharing with the world whatever comes to his mind. In the introduction, he claims that despite the increasing importance of bureaucracy, nobody is interested in analysing it, so that is why he must do it. This sounds a bit overly self-confident, as there is a huge body of social-science literature on bureaucracy and organisation since the beginning of the 20th century, mainly in sociology, but from the 1980s increasingly also in anthropology (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2021). Graeber simply does not know this literature. And when, here and there, he does mention selected topical works, he does not engage with them (e.g. note 44 p. 238).

What about theory? The book cover claims that we are faced with “a powerful work of social theory in the traditions of Foucault and Marx”. This might be discounted as commercial overselling but then Graeber himself sees his book as “an exercise in social theory” (p. 75). However, throughout the book, he is very eclectic in his theoretical references. He likes neither Weber nor Foucault, but dislikes Foucault more than Weber, and sees both as intellectual frontmen of neoliberal bureaucratic capitalism, in passages on the history of ideas, which he himself qualifies as “caricaturish” (p. 57). On the other hand, and surprisingly, Graeber likes Lévi-Strauss, and structuralism in general (pp. 76 seq.). As for Marx, he prefers to lie low, but stresses repeatedly that he was a man of his times (e.g., p. 88). Many of his renderings of theorists, say Weber, appear somewhat crude to the educated reader, if not outright wrong. In the passages where that is the case, and when you turn to the footnotes, you are then puzzled to read from Graeber’s pen a sentence like: “I am aware this (i.e., his own [Graeber’s] claim about Weber in the main text, p. 74) is not really what Weber said.” (fn. 64 p. 243). Elsewhere, he admits that his reflections are not new but have already been formulated somewhere else, and possibly better (e.g., by feminist standpoint theory or critical race theory, p. 68). But he admits to this only in passing and shares his inspirations with the reader anyway. It is also interesting to reflect upon what social theory Graeber leaves out. To name only a few authors who immediately come to my mind as they clearly resonate with Graeber’s concerns but are absent from his book: Hegel’s and Sartre’s theorem on the dialectics of the master-servant relationship, Gramsci’s writings on hegemony, the whole Frankfurt school of critical theory, and in particular Herbert Marcuse’s One-dimensional Man, or the sociology of critique of Boltanski. So, in sum, the happy ruminator, in this book, has confidently waded into areas where he didn’t have many bearings, and not surprisingly, he got lost.

I do not think I need to dwell much on criterion 3 as the reader will not be surprised by my negative answer. One could ask why, after all, the book has been rather successful even if much less successful than the Debt book (Graeber 2011). I have two answers to that, one of which I will present later. My main charge against the book is that it essentially confirms middle-class readers and fellow academics from the Global North, in particular the Anglo world, in their clichés about and grudges against bureaucracy. In fact, in Germany which remained rather untouched by the hype around Graeber, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), a left-wing daily, titled its review of the book “cliché as scholarship” (Klischee als Wissenschaft) and notes the author’s “love of the commonplace” (Walter 2016, https://taz.de/David-Graebers-Buch-Buerokratie/!5280790/). It is true that there are interesting ideas in the book, which are not, however, developed (for example, was Foucault a neoliberal thinker? In fact, I wonder if Graeber is not a neoliberal thinker himself.). Other propositions are pure reinventions of the wheel. How many books and articles have been written about the bureaucratisation of the world? (See for example the solidly researched Hibou 2015). Other statements are truisms, like that all banks are regulated (p. 16) or commonplaces like “most human relations … are extremely complicated” (p. 58). Again others are outright wrong. All this is woven into a text with no discernible structure, and basically from a perspective, which implicitly makes the claim that a middle-class perspective from the Anglo-academic world describes the global default situation.

In sum, I would not give the book to anthropology undergraduates to read. It would be embarrassing if they got the impression that this is what anthropology is about, and it would be wasting their time. Anthropology is, I propose, about creating new, and preferably counterintuitive knowledge. It is about discovering the unknown, putting question marks behind common sense, and not about confirming what “we” anyway believe we know. The book may have clicked with many people because it resonates with widespread uneasy feelings especially among fellow academics that “we” are wasting our time in meetings and with paperwork. However, that a book confirms common sense is certainly not a sufficient criterion for its scientific quality.

We should realize (Graeber does not) that criticism of bureaucracy is as old as bureaucracy itself; since its invention in 18th century France, it has been criticised from the left (not acknowledged by Graeber), but more prominently from the right (Fusco et al. 1992). This criticism from the right came in two kinds, and not just one, as Graeber claims: there was and is indeed the bourgeois right which is concerned with red tape over-regulating the market and thereby diminishing profits. But there also have been aristocratic critics who were more concerned about being restricted by rules, rules which may be appropriate for the lower classes, but which inhibit the freedom of the gentleman to do whatever he pleases. Graeber’s critique is dangerously close to the latter position; as he admits himself in passing, it is a critique from the positionality of somebody who likes to see himself as a bohemian.

Which brings me to Graeber’s theory of revolution, as far as it can be ascertained from this book. Graeber is an anthropologist who is not only interested in what is, but also how to make the world a better place “without states and capitalism” (p. 97). In other words, he aims at an emancipatory theory of revolution. The classic model here is Marx, who analysed not only the way capitalism functioned – after having spent years in the British library reading the whole body of political economy of his time – but also the internal contradictions of capitalism, which in the long run would lead to its transformation, and, most relevant for the point I want to make, which the social actors were best positioned to bring about these transformations. Graeber is silent, at least in this book, on the first point (the transformational dynamics of contemporary bureaucratic capitalism) and very short on the second (the social carriers of revolution). He only speaks of “social revolutionaries” who profess immanent—i.e., practically grounded—conceptions of utopianism, and who act “as if they are already free“, in alliance with avantgarde artists (p. 89, 97). There is nothing about the class positions of these revolutionaries. Who are they? US-American and European anthropology students under the guidance of their enlightened teachers? Here, again, the figure of the bohemian lurks in the wings. Neither do we read much about realistic strategies, necessary for any successful revolution, of how to seize the masses, to paraphrase Marx (“The weapon of critique cannot replace the critique of weapons; material violence must be overthrown by material violence; theory alone also becomes material violence as soon as it seizes the masses”, Marx 1843/44, p. 385). The catchy phrase “we are the 99 percent,” which Graeber is often said to have coined (regarding whether that is true or not, see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html), is not very helpful in this respect. It is pure populism, coupled with a nostalgic over-reading of the impact of the global justice movement of his youth.

Finally, I want to come back to why the book has sold well. I think the cover explains that. I have already referred to the über-promotion on the back cover, while on the front cover, Graeber is presented as the author of a previous, highly successful book. As Wikipedia explains, after the success of the previous book (Graeber 2011), the same editor quickly entered into a new contract with the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules; see also Walther 2016). Obviously, both the commercial editor and author were trying to capitalize on Graeber’s acquired reputation and his having “captivated a cult following” (Roberts 2020). The mechanism is well known, and thereby the book is a very good example of the capitalist economics of reputation, which govern the academic book market and which function according to a winner-takes-all logic (similar to international soccer, social media, and investment banking). The expression of this logic is the star cult, which in the academic world takes the form of the cult of the genius, and it explains how an altogether, from a scholarly perspective, bad book becomes a required citation. One may detect a slight contraction here between the anti-capitalist substance of the book and its capitalist form. So, while I do not recommend the book for an undergraduate course on the anthropology of bureaucracy, it would make fascinating case material for a postgraduate course on the political economy of the academic world.

Thomas Bierschenk is professor emeritus at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz/Germany. He has worked on development, the state, bureaucracy, and the police in Oman, Central and West Africa, as well as Germany, and has co-edited, together with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Leiden: Brill 2014). More about his work at: https://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/prof-dr-thomas-bierschenk/

References

Bierschenk, Thomas, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 1997. Local powers and a distant State in rural Central African Republic. Journal of Modern African Studies 35(3): 441-468, https://www.jstor.org/stable/161750.

Bierschenk, Thomas, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 2021. The anthropology of bureaucracy and public services. In Guy Peters and Ian Thyme, eds., Encyclopedia of Public Administration (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics). Oxford: Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2005.

Fusco, Sandro Angelo, Reinhart Koselleck, Anton Schindling, Udo Wolter, and Bernhard Wunder. 1992. “Verwaltung, Amt, Beamter (Administration, office, functionary).” In Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-historischen Sprache, vol. 7, pp. 1-96. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt. The First 5000 Years. London: Melville House.

Hibou, Béatrice 2015. The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era: An International and Comparative Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Göpfert, Mirco. 2013. “Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie.” American Ethnologist 40(2): 324-334, doi: 10.1111/amet.12024.

Graeber, David. 2006. “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity. LSE memorial lecture.” https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:viz386gos).

Graeber, David. 2012. “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor.” The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 105–28, doi: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau2.2.007.

Graeber, David. 2015. The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. London: Melvin House.

Graeber, David. 2017. “A Response to Anastasia Piliavsky’s The Wrong Kind of Freedom? A Review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 30(1): 113-118, doi: 10.1007/s10767-016-9248-0.

Marx, Karl. 1843/44. Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts-Philosophie, 1843-1844 (Karl Marx/ Friedrich Engels – Werke. Band 1), Berlin/DDR 1976, pp. 378-391, http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me01/me01_378.htm#S385.

Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2017. “The wrong kind of freedom? A Review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 30: 107-111, doi: 10.1007/s10767-016-9246-2.

Roberts, Sam. 2020. “David Graeber, caustic critic of inequality, is dead at 59.” The New York Times, 4 September 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html.

Walther, Rudolf. 2016. “Klischee als Wissenschaft” (“Cliché as scholarship”). TAZ (Die Tageszeitung), 6 March 2016, https://taz.de/David-Graebers-Buch-Buerokratie/!5280790/.

Cite as: Bierschenk, Thomas. 2021. “On Graeber on bureaucracy.” FocaalBlog, 19 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/10/19/thomas-bierschenk-on-graeber-on-bureaucracy/.

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Steven Sampson: Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism

QAnon, Deep State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers… We slow-working, ever so reflective anthropologists are being inundated with one conspiracy theory after another. A May 2021 survey reveals that 15% of Americans and 23% of those who call themselves Republicans believe that ‘the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation’ (PRRI 2021). The evil conspirators are often termed a ‘cabal’ (a word derived from the Hebrew ‘kabbalah’/esoteric teachings). This subversive cabal is viewed as embedded in our governments, collaborating with the global financial elite and the Davos crowd, within the US and European Left, the Hollywood elite, the mainstream media, and with transgender activists and Critical Race Theory proponents, even with the West European welfare states with their Covid-19 lockdown/vaccine policies. Cabals are the secret agents of conspiratorial plots. To study conspiracy theory is to do cabal anthropology.

Conspiracy theories are stigmatized knowledge. This has led some anthropologists to view conspiracy theorists as ‘contesting’ power. Conspiracism becomes a form of resistance by the powerless against the arrogant elites and elite institutions (Pelkmanns and Machold 2011, Dean 2000, Fassin 2021). So, what do we anthropologists do about the kind of stigmatized knowledge promoted by the QAnon believers? Who assert that America is threatened by a Satanic, pedophile cult from which only Donald Trump can save us? What do we do about the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who say that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by the U.S. government, or the ‘birthers’ who assert that Obama (whose mother was an anthropologist!) was born a Muslim in Kenya? Should we view Holocaust deniers, the Stolen Election crowd and the racist Great Replacement adherents as ‘contestation’?

We all like ‘speaking truth to power’, but what about those who speak untruth to power? Are there good and bad forms of contestation? Are we anthropologists in danger of becoming what the philosopher Cassam called ‘conspiracy apologists’? What, in fact, can we anthropologists add to the now frantic discussion of conspiracy theories?

Theories of conspiracy versus conspiracy theory

In the ordinary forensic sense, a conspiracy is simply a secret plot to do something bad, such as robbing a bank or political subversion. Conspiracies require secret plans, malevolent motives and a group of conspirators. Forensic conspiracies are commonplace. Some succeed, others are discovered and in most cases the plotters exposed, caught and punished. The bombing of the World Trade Center garage in 1993, and the suicide plane hijackings of September 11, 2001 were both forensic conspiracies.

What we call ‘conspiracy theories’ are also secret plots, to be sure, but the plotters tend to be all-powerful, sophisticated, and diabolical. Their project is more than robbing a bank, tapping phones or a terrorist attack. It is nothing short of total control and world domination. Conspiratorial plots of this kind do not occur alone. They are connected to other plots over space and time (Illuminati, Freemasons, Jews, Communists, Trilateral Commission, Icke’s ‘lizard people’, alien abduction, ‘New World Order’, the Neocons, the Deep State, etc.).

Because the conspirators are considered to be so deeply embedded among us, the work of a conspiracy theorist is to expose their deception. The 9/11 truthers, for example, believe that the Bin Laden-based, ‘Official Conspiracy Theory’ is one such deception, what they call a ‘false flag operation’. They believe that the World Trade Centers collapsed because U.S. military/intelligence organs, perhaps helped by the Mossad, planted explosives in the buildings. Somehow, these explosives detonated precisely when the planes flew into the buildings, and it is assumed that a third building close by, Building no. 7, also collapsed not due to fire but due to explosives. How and why this was done remains unexplained.

Of course, no conspirator has ever been found. The truthers believe that the U.S. government decided to murder thousands of its own citizens in order to achieve some nefarious end, presumably connected to domination of the Middle East and its oil and to create a military/security state in the U.S. The QAnon conspiracy theory is even more elaborate, with narratives of child kidnapping and blood libel in a plot that has long anti-Semitic roots, but which now brings together the Clintons, the Democratic party left, and their Hollywood friends. Whether 9/11 truth or QAnon, conspiracy theorists see themselves as ‘truth tellers’ or ‘truth-seekers’ (Toseland 2018). They are not just propounding theories; they are on a mission.

Conspiracy theory: the state of research

Conspiracy theory research has focused on the logical structure of conspiratorial explanations and why these are so attractive to so many. For the cultural theorist Michael Barkun (2014), all conspiracy theories revolve around three premises: Nothing happens by accident, Nothing is at it seems, and Everything is connected. Conspiracy is thus the reverse side of transparency. Anything on the surface is false or misleading. Hence the need to look deeper in search of the real, more significant truth. According to the philosopher Karl Popper, who was the first to coin the idea of a ‘conspiracy theory of society’, conspiracy theory begins with the death of God. When God was around, all disasters and misfortunes could be attributed to this higher power. With the Enlightenment, however, disasters and misfortunes are now blamed on human actors (secret cabals in the King’s court), newly powerful social groups such as the Freemasons, or outsider groups such as Jews or Roma. During the Enlightenment, conspiratorial thinking becomes a theory of total agency (Wood 1982). Bad things happen because secret sinister groups of people intend them to happen.

Social psychologists have speculated on the attraction of conspiracy theory, based on the premise that conspiratorial beliefs are a danger to society. Clearly, conspiracy theories give believers a simple, all-encompassing explanation for adverse developments or disasters. We obtain a ‘who’ behind a complex or chance event. For ardent conspiracy believers, this also gives them a mission, and the chance to enter a community of fellow believers seeking to expose the sinister cabal. The Trump ‘stolen election’ conspiracy – whose culprits are corrupt inner city Black voting officials, Democratic Party swindlers and evil voting machine companies with ties to Venezuela – has now become the latest ‘cabal’. In this narrative, political power was stolen from the American people, and Mr. Trump will help them get it back.

Part of the conspiracists’ mission is to connect the dots. For conspiracies do not occur alone. The death of JFK junior, Covid-19, faked moon landings,  the ‘stolen election’ plot, transgender activism, Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory can now be related to a secret elite and their lackeys in government, in Silicon Valley, in the media, etc. This is the QAnon project. Outside observers have described this mission as falling down the ‘rabbit hole’. Hence, a recent book on QAnon adherents invokes the ‘rabbit hole’ imagery no less than 22 times (Bloom and Moskalenko 2021).

The work of the conspiracy theorists is to uncover and interpret ‘evidence’, to discover the truth. They are truth-seekers who do research (googling) by ‘connecting the dots’, interpreting the evidence and communicating their interpretations to others in meetings, forums and chat rooms.  Like others involved in political advocacy projects, conspiracy theorists – be they truthers, birthers, QAnon followers, anti-Covid activists —  are emotionally engaged and articulate. They are ready, willing and able to promote their views and defend the most minute points, armed with ever more evidence along. This is because conspiracy theorists are not simply propagating ‘theories’. Their explanatory theories are ‘unlikely’, their premises are ideological, and their mission is political, as the philosopher Quassim Cassam has argued (2019).

The QAnon community, heavily overlapping with ardent Trump supporters and right-wing extremist, is typical. QAnon revolves around the cryptic tweets, called ‘drops’, issued every few weeks by ‘Q’, someone supposedly deep inside the U.S. government (for a discussion of who Q might really be see Bloom and Moskalenko 2021, ch. 1; on QAnon see also CBS News 2020, Quandt 2018, and further references below). These texts are then interpreted, and often associated with tweets by Trump or his followers, and connected to signs of an impending ‘storm’ or ‘awakening’ that will come but never does (that Hillary Clinton would be arrested, that Trump would assume power in March, now in August). The QAnon narrative is continually expanding, with any attempts at refutation viewed as part of the plot to destroy its followers.

Populist expertise as Latourian matters of concern; but why?

The 9/11 truthers and QAnon are forms of ‘populist expertise’. Imitating experts, they assemble facts, assess evidence, pass on newly found explanations for enigmatic or troubling events (Marwick and Partin 2020). If Latour and STS described the ‘social construction of scientific facts’, we now have a populist construction of ‘alternative facts’.  Latour’s ‘matters of concern’ have outrun us (Latour 2004).

QAnon, the 9/11 truthers, the birthers, the 5G telephone protesters, the antivaxxers who believe a chip is being implanted in their bodies, they are Foucault run wild. To the extent that QAnon followers and other conspiracists question established knowledge regimes and authorities, they are certainly ‘critical’. This generates some sympathy among those who see conspiracists as performing a valuable function for society, what Cassam calls ‘conspiracy apologists’. But the conspiracists’ critique is based upon a profound and yet naïve distrust of established institutions, a resistance to any kind of falsification or data that would contradict their ‘findings’, and a vicious anti-Semitism and racism that the apologists tend to overlook (Byford 2015). Conspiracy theorists may be naïve or sympatico as individual human beings, but conspiracism is a pernicious masquerading as science.

With the rise of QAnon pedophile blood libel conspiracy, the Trumpian ‘Big Lie’ and anti-Covid protests, we now face a presumed ‘rise of conspiracism’. The fear of conspiracism, a veritable ‘conspiracy panic’ is nothing new (Bratich 2008, Thalmann 2016). Past or present, one overarching question takes center stage, a question posed by the media and addressed by various experts who view conspiratorial thinking as dangerous: Why do people believe this stuff? 

The search for an answer forms the basis for the entire conspiracy research industry, from ERC research projects to panels among our own tribe of anthropologists (including a panel that I co-organized at EASA in 2018), to EU policy papers and government reports proposing various counter-conspiracy measures (Institute for Public Affairs 2013, European Commission 2021; Önnerfors 2021). My own fascination with conspiracism began with my research in Romania, long before 1989, where I noticed how people believed in all kinds of outlandish rumors and conspiracies about domestic and foreign enemies (including me as spy; Sampson 1984). I then followed conspiracies about the EU, the Soros Mafia and the Western NGO industry, which led me to years of following the 9/11 truthers, many of whom are older male, end-of-career academics, taking similar positions in society as myself and other anthropologists.

Indeed, the 9/11 truther activists share with us in anthropology that they search for ‘evidence’. Many are familiar with the protocols of the peer reviewed journal article; as I have argued for  the pretentious Journal of 9/11 Studies and its truther editorial board (Sampson 2010). Indeed, conspiracy producers, consumers and conspiracy entrepreneurs are not just lonely ‘losers’ sitting in a basement staring at a screen all day. They are active members of a community who ‘produce content’, and keep abreast of events, even in mainstream media. So why indeed do people believe this stuff?

A spread of book covers about conspiracy theories
Image 1: How important is it to be paranoid? A selection of readings (photo by the author)

Conspiracism as epistemology

Early theorizing on the ‘why’ question begins with Hofstadter (1964), who depicted conspiracy believers as acting out a ‘paranoid style’, perhaps socially disoriented, isolated and even cognitively disabled. Recent surveys of those arrested in the January 6th riots at the U.S. Capitol finds that a sizeable percentage of participants have (had) a variety of mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression and PTSD, and estrangement from their children (Bloom and Moskalenko 2021, who also highlight the propensity of ‘truther’ women for some of these sufferings). Along with the mental instability argument, Sunstein and Vermeule (2009) argue that conspiracism is based on a ‘crippled epistemology’. This individualized understanding, based on the psychological or cognitive characteristics of ‘the conspiracy believer’, or the conspiratorial mind-set, focuses on conspiracists as somehow irrational, as overly fearful as frantically searching for someone to blame for their personal troubles or social deroute.

Their anxiety both reflects and results in an intense distrust of institutions, authorities, or established science and thus a susceptibility to conspiratorial explanations of suspicious events, disasters or other misfortunes, ranging from 9/11 to Covid-19 to Trump’s election loss. Moreover, since they trust no institution, imploring them to ‘believe the science’ is useless. Scientific experts and institutions are themselves suspect. Conspiracists must do the research themselves, on the internet, encouraged by like-minded conspiracy theorists and amateur experts who can parlay their academic expertise from one field into another: the leading 9/11 truther, David Ray Griffin, is a professor of religion. This distrust of authorities has a derivative effect: conspiracists can be easily manipulated by populist politicians (Bergmann 2018).

The conspiratorial mindset was also depicted in a famous study by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (1956) when they described how a UFO cult that predicted the end of the world was only more reinforced in their belief when the disaster did not happen. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance approach seems to be supported by the hardcore support for Trump and his ‘stolen election’ theory, culminating in Trump supporters’ invasion of the U.S. Congress on January 6th 2021, and the election of QAnon supporters to political office. The consensus among conspiracy theory researchers is that conspiracy theorists cannot be combatted by any kind of fact-checking enterprise. People do not get converted, nor do they see the light, simply because they are confronted with contradictory evidence, new facts or sophisticated counter-arguments. The conspiracy mindset is not about facts and evidence. It is about social engagement, political projects, and belief.

The problem with explanations of conspiracy followers as people who are somehow socially, emotionally or cognitively disabled is that these explanations are far too general. After all, who among us does not at times feel disempowered, confused, uncertain, insecure or distrustful of institutions and science, most especially in this Covid-19 era? How much should we ‘trust science’ when scientific explanations are contested or change? If we all suffer from ‘confirmation bias’ or other such psychological syndromes, then why aren’t we all conspiracy theorists? Could it be that a healthy scepticism about the scientific enterprise is a core theme in the work of STS and anthropologists of policy? Are the conspiracy theorists just another form of institutional critique? Do we regard Holocaust deniers, Great Replacement adherents or QAnon activists as fellow compatriots ‘contesting authority’? What indeed is the difference between an outrageous conspiracy theory and hard-hitting critique of subtle powers and hidden agendas in state institutions and global capitalism?

What is belief?

Let me come back to the question of “Why people believe this stuff”?

Anyone who has argued with a conspiracy theorist, a religious zealot or political true believer of any kind knows that refutation of their evidence is fruitless. You point out contrary facts or illogical arguments and your remarks are simply cast aside as irrelevant or confirmation of the conspiracy. This is because the conspiratorial narrative is in fact an expression of belief. The problem, then, is not about the facts but about belief. Conspiracy theorists do not assert claims. They express beliefs. What does it mean to believe, for example, that Trump won the election with 70% of the vote or that the US military blew up the World Trade Center? What is belief all about?

I decided to re-read a bunch of anthropological analyses of belief. Virtually all of these were written to explain religious beliefs, as when Evans-Pritchard wrote that the Nuer ‘believe’ that twins are birds. I think that we can fruitfully apply the discussion of religious belief to secular, conspiratorial beliefs as well. There are obvious overlaps between religious and conspiracy belief systems: grand forces of good and evil; an apocalyptic reckoning some time in an imminent future; scriptures and texts that provide clues; esoteric interpretations and discussions of what the clues mean; struggles over orthodox and deviant interpretations; and an institutional practice in which communities of believers seek out converts, debate skeptics, and ex-communicate apostates and perceived heretics. The conspiratorial universe thus contains conspiracy producers, conspiracy consumers, and even conspiracy entrepreneurs (David Icke, Alex Jones, etc.). It includes not only true believers and former believers  (read QAnon causalities on Reddit), but also anti-conspiracists, the debunkers.

Being in a conspiracist community involves work, or ‘research’. The 9/11 truthers, for example, include many students and retired academics who do internet googling, organize evidence and hold conferences, even selling truther merchandise. The QAnon community has gatekeepers who run the web portals, moderate chatrooms, assemble narratives, sell merchandise, and retweet the preferred interpretations. Like any religious community, conspiracy communities have their rites and rituals. Long before January 6th, QAnon followers were appearing at demonstrations, recruiting followers and arguing with skeptics and debunkers. We need to recall the very banal, anthropological insight that conspiracy theory is not just about a bunch of random facts and a set of outlandish, unfalsifiable beliefs. It is also a set of practices. Conspiracists do not just stare at a screen. They do things with the screen and in real life. They search for confirming evidence, they connect the dots, they discuss their findings with like-minded others, they try to unmask provocateurs, etc. It’s the doing that creates that passion and the commitment behind conspiracism. The conspiracist ‘rabbit hole’ is not a place of isolation, it is a community. This passionate community explain the sense of exhilaration common to many true believers. It’s so wonderful to know the truth and to share it with others, especially after having experienced an adverse life event or a traumatic experience (as so many QAnon followers have, according to surveys; see Jensen and Kane 2021).

So perhaps the anthropological discussion of beliefs can help us understand the power of beliefs in the conspiratorial universe of truthers, birthers, QAnon followers, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, New World Order proponents, Holocaust deniers, alien abductionists and similar groups.

Back to Needham

In 1972, Rodney Needham published Belief, Language and Experience, a long philosophical treatise on belief, much of it inspired by Wittgenstein. What do we mean, asked Needham, when we say that members of tribe X ‘believe’ something? Needham stressed that ‘statements about belief’ made by our informants should be distinguished from belief itself. Ethnographers love eliciting such statements, but for Needham these are the result of informants’ effort at introspection. For Needham, statements about belief are not belief. Belief is an inner state. This inner state may be articulated as an accepted doctrine (‘I believe that…’), as knowledge (‘I know the truth about…’) or as an emotional conviction (‘I believe in …’). Needham concludes that we just cannot know what is inside people’s heads. We can elicit statements, listen to what they say, we can observe what they do, and at best try to infer some kind of inner state that we call ‘belief’. Yet Needham is skeptical: the concept of belief is so vague that it should be thrown out. Needham does not believe in belief.

Pouillon (1982), in a widely cited essay, reminds us that we must distinguish between believing in something versus believing that something. Expressions of belief in reveal whom we trust, who has legitimate authority, in whom we have faith.  In contrast to ‘believe in…’ believing that is about a coherent doctrine of propositions. If belief is ultimately about faith, the project of debunking beliefs, e.g., showing conspiracy theories to be based on incorrect facts or illogical arguments, is beside the point. Conspiracies are not about facts or evidence. They are about ‘beliefs in’. And we cannot disprove beliefs. People can articulate, adjust or renounce beliefs. As such, beliefs are tied more to emotional commitment rather than facts. Conspiracy theories, despite the quasi-scientific label of ‘theory’, are clearly of this kind. They are beliefs, not theories in the scientific sense.

We often assume that conspiracy theorists articulate a coherent, fundamental set of propositions. Yet anthropologists have shown us that people can operate with overlapping, fragmented, alternative and contradictory belief systems, what we now euphemize as ‘syncretism’. Hence, J. Mair reminds us that ‘[not] every believer […] is a fundamentalist or a systematic theologian’ (2012, p. 45). Our analysis should therefore focus not so much on what people believe but rather how they believe. We should focus on what Mair calls ‘cultures of belief’. Studies of religious groups reveal how people can comfortably maintain two or more sets of beliefs that are complementary or even logically contradictory. Numerous studies of the anthropology of Christianity describe people who are sincerely converted Christians, but who also interact with spirits, react to witchcraft accusations or believe in reincarnation (Stringer 1996, Robbins 2007). While these studies have been applied largely to religious believers and converts, they are equally valid to those who have fallen down the ‘rabbit hole’ of  QAnon, 9/11 truther, Holocaust denial, Great Replacement, alien abduction or other conspiratorial narratives. Like religious groups, conspiratorial communities are also full of dual, overlapping, contrasting and conflicting belief systems.  An ethnographic approach to conspiracy theories might therefore profit from a ‘situational belief’ approach (Stringer 1996). The focus here should be less on who assents to certain propositions (‘I believe that…’;) and more on what kinds of truths and authorities people commit themselves to  (‘I believe in….’ ‘I have faith in…’).

Practicing conspiracism

The QAnon belief system has its logical fallacies. Some may fully believe in the pedophile plot, while others focus only on the Deep State. However, they are united in their sources of authority (Q ‘drops’ and Trump statements, supplemented by various authoritative interpretations that are then retweeted and discussed). Exposing the cabal is both ‘research’ and an act of faith.

Anthropological approaches to religious belief have always included descriptions of religious practices, rites and rituals. Conspiracy adherents are no different. They also have their rites and rituals. They meet on line, in hundreds of web communities. They recruit followers and argue with debunkers. And they meet in real life at demonstrations, political meetings, in anti-vaccine gatherings, and of course, on January 6th. Conspiracists have been busy trying to expose the Covid vaccine chip insertion plot (led by Bill Gates). They have been digesting the shock of Trump’s defeat; promoting the narrative of the Stolen Election and his imminent return; reading and interpreting the  QAnon clues; and fighting the regulations to wear masks. They do the work of textual interpretation. They re-tweet and add comments. They discuss these messages with family members, argue with skeptics, and end up in echo chambers of like- minded conspiracists who can confirm and reinforce their ideas.

What all this means is that we need to show how conspiratorial belief and conspiracist practice interact, as we have done with the study of religious beliefs and practices. Regrettably, conspiracy theory research has tended to focus on the psycho-social vulnerabilities of the most radical believers. Certainly, these committed conspiracists have from emotional ‘baggage’, social isolation or violent tendencies (as the recent QAnon studies show). But most conspiracy adherents are only partially or borderline committed; many view conspiracy theory adherence as more of a social activity than an all-out ideological commitment, much like church attendance can be more a social obligation than a religious act. Second, the focus on individual vulnerability assumes some kind of coherent ideology among conspiracists. It ignores the way people use religious belief in creative ways, amalgamating, adapting and converting it to strategic ends. Conspiratorial ideas have a political message: the evil plot by the sinister outsiders, but it is also a personal project, a voyage of discovery that gives people new meaning in their lives as they become part of history. Both religious and conspiratorial practice are more than acting out an ostensibly coherent set of beliefs. Our understanding of conspiracists is best served by observing what they do: how they are recruited, how they participate, how they recruit others, and even how they often exit or even express regret (see again the Reddit thread for ‘QAnon Casualties’; or the testimonies of ex-Truthers).

From how to why

Let me close with the question of why does one become a believer? Robbins (2007) described how some converts to Christianity are truly sincerely converted, but we also have examples of conversion for purely strategic reasons. This distinction between sincere and instrumental conversion may be simplistic, but it is worth recalling when observing why people might join the QAnon, truther, anti-vaxx or alien obduction community. We join groups for many reasons: to resolve existential problems, to gain some control over the world, to obtain social contacts or to re-affirm our political beliefs. Conspiracy groups seem to solve all these tasks at the same time. Moreover, joining one conspiratorial community seems to lead to others: QAnon people form the core of Covid denial and anti-vaccination resistance, as well as 5G-telephone skepticism and of course, they are enthusiastic supporters of the stolen election theory. Since belief is an inner state that we can never really know, the best we can do as ethnographers is to listen to statements and observe behaviors.

What then, is a believer? Believers here don’t just read tweets. They save them, comment on them, retweet them, discuss them, embellish them, delete them, switch platforms, go to meetings, participate in demonstrations, buy merchandise, and spend hours of their day looking for further clues and reinterpret these. Their closed groups can decide to ban or unfriend others. They may have fallen down a rabbit hole but they are also actively exploring new paths, routes, tunnels and dead ends. Conspiracy is not just about belief; it is also about community.

If we are to understand conspiratorial movements like QAnon or those following the Deep State conspiracy, we anthropologists need to promote our own insights about what belief is all about.  While Needham argued that the concept of belief was useless for anthropology, we still need to explain what it means to be a believer. We need to go beyond the conventional wisdom that every conspiracy theorist suffers from some kind of cognitive deficiency, emotional damage or social isolation. The leaders and mobilizers may be emotional, committed, even fanatic (as so many leaders of social movements are), but the followers and adherents are much more like us than we’d like to admit. Resorting to a psychological explanation is not sufficient. Who among us has not suffered from anxiety, depression, loneliness or a traumatic event that might lead us to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole? Who among us has not spent hours on line immersed in some incessant search to solve a puzzle? The conspiracy followers are hardly exotic. Take away their beliefs, and they suddenly become just like us, ordinary men and women with family obligations, precarious jobs, worried about their future and their place in it. They are both strange and familiar at the same time. And it is this contrast that makes them the perfect object of anthropological scrutiny. The task of anthropology, after all, is to show that the strange is actually familiar, and that the familiar has its exotic elements. We need more cabal anthropology.

Cabal anthropology might therefore provide a corrective to the journalists, psychologists and political commentators who so often classify conspiracy theorists as lonely, alienated souls. The narratives being promoted by conspiracists (QAnon anti-pedophiles, Deep State, Obama birther, 9/11 truth, stolen election, New World Order, Covid anti-vaxxers) are clearly false and pernicious. But the issue not just about the kind of evidence they use or the doctrines they promote. They reflect new forms of commitment. We need to understand how ‘believe that…’ interacts with ‘belief in …’

In this sense, QAnon and other conspiracy theories are secular forms of religious revival. The search for Satanic forces, and the premonitions of a great reckoning led by Trump are obvious parallels with religion. Alongside this are the conspiracy theorists’ profound mistrust in our financial institutions, elite universities, government institutions and in scientific expertise. Lack of trust in these institutions is why the ‘stolen election’ discourse has stayed with us. No amount of fact checking or debunking will solve the conspiracist wave. This is because conspiratorial thinking is not about incorrect facts or crippled epistemologies. It’s about the power of belief and the communities of believers. What beliefs did QAnon replace? What bonds of trust have been dismantled in order for QAnon to move in? How could these bonds be reconstructed? How are conspiracy communities being manipulated by unscrupulous conspiratorial entrepreneurs and political actors? Here is an agenda for cabal anthropology. The rabbit hole awaits.

Steven Sampson is professor emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology, Lund University (Steven.sampson@soc.Lu.se). He has done research on Romania and the Balkans, NGOs, the anti-corruption industry, conspiracy theory and business ethics. For a list of his publications with open access see: https://www.soc.lu.se/steven-sampson.

Bibliographic Note: For a longer version of this article and a more extensive bibliography on conspiracy theory see my working paper at https://www.soc.lu.se/en/steven-sampson/publication/3ec05ab0-528f-40bb-92bd-7e7c3e47a8f2

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Cite as: Sampson, Steven. 2021. “Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism.” FocaalBlog, 13 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/13/steven-sampson-cabal-anthropology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Myth of Police Fragility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maroon Anthropology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Dragan Djunda: Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia

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

When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after

Image 1: House of Culture Dojkinci. Meeting between the villagers, the architects and the movement Let’s defend the rivers of the Stara Mountain regarding a new revitalization project (photo by the author, 2020)

the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.

The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs. 

Renewables between liberalization and water-grabbing

The Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation. From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12 years.  FITs are the means of subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of subsidized electricity prices

If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.

Investors and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources. The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through FITs.

Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).

In this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards, allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018). This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.

Struggles against SHPPs

I first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes through room rentals.

Image 2: Panorama of Topli Do (Photo by the author, 2019)

Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).

“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.

Image 3: Protest banners in Topli Do: ‘A lot of money, little energy, zero fish’ and ‘For rivers to death’ (Photo by the author, 2019)

I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.

Unlike in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for some Serbian communities.

Whose market, whose energy transition?

SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.

These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.

While the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources. This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.

Such investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.

Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.

Bibliography

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain. Indiana University Press.

Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara Mountain].

Ristić, Ratko, Ivan Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA, Vol. 50 [Derivate small hydropower plants: Insignificant energy contribution and unmeasurable ecological damage].

Bankwatch, 2019. “Western Balkans Hydropower: Who Pays, Who Profits?” Accessed February 23, 2021. https://bankwatch.org/publication/western-balkans-hydropower-who-pays-who-profits.

Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/

Blog

Aliki Angelidou: “It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn

On February 22nd police forces entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating many students, arresting 31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff. Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting against a new bill on “Admission in higher education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced. The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.

The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.

Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.

Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.

In the context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation, political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no surprise that they are being attacked first.

The Neoliberalization of Higher Education and Law 4777/2021

The efforts to alter the public, free, and open character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017, Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article 16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in higher education over the past two decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’ degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack the prestige of public universities.

However, when Nea Dimokratia came to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum. If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world, in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses – unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th. Interestingly, this law was not introduced by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in educational affairs is unprecedented.

To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.

The new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore, fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore, the law allows for many disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.

All of these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20 million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.

The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.

The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.

Towards a closed and authoritarian university

The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.

More generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship, and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in Parliament that, under the new law, “it is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.

Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.

References

Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera A., Heintz M. & A. Horolets (eds.), Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe: An Intricate Institutional and Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.

Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra 2000. “Disciples, Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp. 256–78.

Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online petition.

Screenshot of a petition header which reads "Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS. Email: NoUniPolice@gmail.com.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)

Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/

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Juzimu: Jack Ma: Wherever the Wind Blows

One day last October, I happened to spot an acquaintance’s post on Wechat. It was a simple message thanking all ‘Ant-izens’ (people who work in Ant Financial of Alibaba) for their hard work, followed by a short video advertising Ant’s upcoming IPO. It came from a data scientist who had given up his high-paid job in the US, returned to China, and joined Ant Financial three years earlier. Ant shares were then expected to start trading in Hong Kong and Shanghai on 5 November.

Jack Ma, the founder of Ant and affiliate Alibaba Group Holding, had declared it a “miracle” that such a large listing would take place outside New York. It was poised to raise up to $34.4 billion in the world’s largest stock market debut and would create a vast group of new billionaires. The data scientist’s post, like many posts on social media, was a showoff: it was a subtle public announcement that he was going to become extremely rich in two weeks’ time. The post contributed to a rather complicated, self-consciously suppressed feeling among many professional Chinese Americans: once again they were tasting the bitter feeling of being stuck in the US middle-class, left behind by those who had managed to jump on the fast-track train of China’s economic growth, grabbing opportunity in the mainland and realizing their ‘Chinese Dreams’ by finally becoming ‘financially independent’ (meaning rich enough that you and your offspring would never need to worry about money again). 

Then, on 3 November, two days before the feast, the IPO was suddenly called off by the Chinese government. Immediately thereafter, China ordered Ant Group to rectify its businesses and comply with regulatory requirements amid increased scrutiny of monopoly practices in the country’s internet sector. Such a blow! The data scientist kept a dignified silence; my professional friends kept a polite silence. And Jack Ma, the real protagonist of the drama, kept a cautious silence. He has since disappeared from public view (only reappearing on 19 January 2021 with a video emphasizing his social work). Where is he? What is he doing now? What would happen to him? Why would all this happen? What does the state’s intervention mean to Ant and Alibaba, to the whole ecommerce industry, and to the whole private sector? What does it say about the logic of the state apparatus in this enigmatic yet so important country? Where will it go? And how would this affect the rest of the world, especially the West? So many questions and so much drama.

Image 1: Jack Ma, who created Alibaba.com in Hangzhou, China in March 1999
(Source: JD Lasica, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/292160777)

Unsurprisingly, the Western liberal media have maintained their usual cold-war tone, by interpreting the drama as a typical attack initiated by a post-socialist authoritarian state towards this too powerful private entrepreneur out of fear or simply for the vanity and narcissism of Your Highness Xi. The Financial Times, for example, compared it immediately with the Khodorkovsky case in Russia (Lewis 2021, paywall). The implication was clear: you can never trust those former socialist authoritarian countries. They would never respect private property, follow the rules of the liberal world, and become “us”. Equally unsurprisingly, some Western Leftists have maintained their idealist tone towards a China that may perhaps be capitalist but is at least not Western capitalist. For them, the crack-down on Ant signifies a determined fight by the state and the population against greedy capital and capitalists.

Most people in China indeed seem to have welcomed the crackdown and support the state’s actions. There are various reasons for such support. One economist I talked to supported it for financial security considerations and for the state’s antitrust efforts. She mentioned the extremely high and hence hazardous financial leverage that Ant Financial is playing with, as well as the antitrust efforts against Facebook and Google in the USA. One private entrepreneur also supported the action for financial security considerations, but based on different reasoning. According to him, since there are many different kinds of capital (including foreign capital) behind Alibaba and Ant, Ant’s IPO would further open the door for foreign finance capital to enter the Chinese market. Some intellectuals talked about the vulgar and disgusting advertisements made by Ant Financial aiming to encourage irrational consumption, as well as the irresponsible private loans it has given out, and how all these behaviors have disrupted social order and degraded social morals.

All these reasons were evident in the government’s statements for halting Ant: to regulate the financial market, enforce antitrust legislation, and create a healthier consumption environment (Yu 2020). This all seems valid except that the role Ant is playing is largely as a platform––a middleman between state banks and individual small-loan borrowers. Much of the capital given out as small loans by Ant actually comes from the state banks. The state banks were not allowed to engage in these high profit businesses. They also do not have access to the necessary consumer data and data science. They normally deal with state owned enterprises. So, Ant stepped in to help state banks exploit a previously untouched financial market: grassroots personal loans. They then divided the profit. As some observers rightly pointed , Ant has always aimed at creating partnerships with big banks, not disrupting or supplanting them. More importantly, quite a few important government-owned funds and institutions are Ant shareholders and were expected to profit handsomely from the public offering (Zhong & Li 2020). Thus, the claim that Ant squeezed out the state banks is spurious. They were basically in the same boat. That is why the state never really regulated Ant before. Meanwhile, we should not forget that the informal financial market has long existed in Chinese grassroots society due to the inaccessibility of bank loans for most non-state economic entities and common people. Ant actually formalized (to a certain degree) this informal market. Yes, Ant did play the financial game of ‘asset-backed securities’ to enhance its financial leverage, but hardly to the extent that Wall Street is used to doing. Finally, what about the irrational consumption encouraged by easily accessible loans (especially for youths)? Maybe. But most such loans still come from other smaller and less responsible lending agencies  following in Ant’s steps, which try to grasp crumbs from the huge cake but do not have the technology and data required to avoid excessive risk. It is these smaller and less technologically capable actors that are in fact creating chaos in credit supply. In short: even if we all agree that financial capital has always been highly speculative, and that Ant is no exception, some of the official statements justifying the intervention into Ant’s IPO still sound fishy.

Meanwhile, the poor in China still seem the most determined supporters of the state’s crackdown on Ant. They supported it out of their hatred toward big capital. On the internet, they lambasted the bloodsucking behavior of Ant, and called it “Leech Financial” instead of Ant Financial (Leech is pronounced in Chinese as “Ma Huang” and ant is pronounced as “Ma Yi”). There is also a popular cartoon being circulated on the internet that depicts Jack Ma as a beggar in his old age—homeless, fragile, and sad. One blue-collar worker told me that any big capitalist whose  main objective is to extract money from the poor should be dragged down.

Tellingly, the state has intentionally toned down popular indignation. The relationship between state and capital in this country has always been much more complicated than the mere antagonism imagined by liberal commentators. The state can’t afford a strong group of capitalists with too much power and resources; but neither can it afford losing them and scaring capital away. It has always been an art of balancing. As we have seen, Jack Ma has reappeared recently with a more solemn appearance. His Ant is now required to deploy necessary ‘rectifications’ under the tighter rein of state regulation (CBNEditor 2021). It is, nevertheless, the right thing for the state to do, no matter the underlying aims. Ma, of course, should always keep in mind that there has never been an Era of Jack Ma; it has always been the Chinese Era that created him, as one Chinese official newspaper publicly warned him as early as 2019.

As for those professional Chinese Americans who believe that they have missed the recent gold-digging opportunities in China and have started to doubt their earlier decision to go abroad, the crackdown on Ant—or more specifically, the broken dream of becoming a billionaire data scientist—has taught them a rather comforting lesson: miracles, whether for a country, a company, or an individual, are slippery. A boring yet relatively predictable middle-class suburban life in the West should at least be bearable, perhaps even enviable.

Juzimu is an ethnographic researcher of Chinese capitalist transitions and writes here under pseudonym.

Bibliography

Lewis, Leo, “What we can read into Jack Ma’s disappearance: Printed speech holds key to Alibaba founder’s invisibility — and rehabilitation”, Financial Times, January 8, 2021. https://www.ft.com/content/b3a94f55-5e44-417f-a869-a542d0527fe7

Yu, Chao, “Anti-Trust Rugulation is for Better Development,” Renmin Daily, Demember 25, 2020. http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2020-12/25/nw.D110000renmrb_20201225_3-07.htm

Zhong, Raymond & Cao Li, “Ant Challenged Beijing and Prospered. Now It Toes the Line.” The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/technology/ant-group-ipo-china.html?_ga=2.55348649.308985693.1613408960-1859810252.1601304805

CBNEditor, “Ant Group Has Established Rectification Team for Business Overhaul: Chinese Central Bank”, January 18, 2021, China Banking News, https://www.chinabankingnews.com/2021/01/18/ant-group-has-established-rectification-team-for-business-overhaul-chinese-central-bank/

“There Has Never Been an Era of Ma Yun; It Has Always Been the Chinese Era That Created Ma Yun,” People’s Financial Comments, September, 17, 2019.

Cite as: Juzima. 2021. “Jack Ma: Wherever the Wind Blows.” FocaalBlog, 8 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/08/juzimu-jack-ma-wherever-the-wind-blows/

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Bruce Kapferer and Roland Kapferer: The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities

Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments of radical process. They form a dynamic in and of themselves. They express the chaos and transition of the moment but they are also and at the same time forces in the transformation and transmutations of capitalism and world history, perhaps, with the complications of the COVID19 pandemic, virtually an axial moment, a switch or turning-point of crisis, as Don Kalb has argued on FocaalBlog early in the pandemic (Kalb 2020).

This involves a re-consideration of what is fast becoming the master narrative concerning Trump, with ideological implications of its own. Trump is presented as a spectre of a fascist past rather than a foretaste, a mediation into, the potential of an authoritarian totalitarian future involving major transmutations in capitalism. What follows concerning the Trump phenomenon is written with all this very much in mind. 

Our guess (a risky gamble in these times when almost anything seems possible) is that Trump will fade. There are doubtless many other political figures similar or worse who could take his place. With the going of Trump so may his “movement”. What crystallized around him was more an assemblage, a loose-knit heterogeneous, motely collection of diverse persons and groups ranging from the extreme far right to the more moderate, whose organizational cohesion may be more illusory than real. Not yet a political ‘Party Trump’ it is as likely to melt into air and go the way of most populist movements as it might congeal into a longer-lasting force of opposition headed by Trump.

This is not to gainsay the shock of the storming of the Capitol on the otherwise ritualistic day of the confirmation of Biden’s victory that concludes the liminal transitional period conventional in the US-American democratic cycle. Such a liminal space (Turner, 1969) is a relative retreat and suspension of the state political order as the presidency is renewed or changed. This is often a festive time given to all kinds of political excess when the people vent their potency in the selection of those who are to rule them. Trump encouraged and intensified the potential chaos of liminality at its peak when, ideally, it should subside and political order be fully restored. He aimed to disrupt this critical moment and to maintain his uncertain presence as the Lord of Misrule, if not necessarily to effect a coup. Named as “God’s chaos candidate” by some evangelicals who supported him, Trump promoted, even if unwittingly, a moment of extreme chaos that was all the more intense for the liminal moment of its occurrence when the participants themselves blew out of control.

Night of the World, Pandemonium at the Capitol

In the nightmare of the event, newscasts presented visions of a fascist future filled with Fascist and Nazi images and other commonly associated symbols. There was a strong sense of dialectical collapse along the lines of Hegel’s “Night of the World” of demonic appearances when forces in opposition dissipate against each other and lose their meaning. The representatives of the nation cowered under their desks fitting gas masks while those who would challenge them in festive mood and drunk with brief power put their feet up on desks aping their masters and carried off the mementos and spoils of their invasion. Exuberant chants of “this is our house” echoed down the corridors of power.

Shades of the past paraded in the present, foremost among them that of the enduring trauma of the rise of Nazi Germany.  What Sinclair Lewis had warned in It Can’t Happen Here – a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of the democratic world – anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s apotheosis, seemed to be actually materializing. This accounts for the excitement on the steps of the Capitol – “this is America 2021 y’all!!” Arlie Hochschild captured the millenarian Nuremberg feel of his campaign rallies when researching Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Hochschild 2016), her excellent ethnography of the white far right and their sympathisers in Louisiana, America’s poorest state and a Donald Trump heartland. Hochschild recounts at a lecture to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin a scene, reminiscent of the opening frames of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, when Trump’s plane, “Trump Force One”, appears through the clouds and, as if from heaven it descends “down, down, down” to the waiting crowd; electrified in expectation of the saviour’s endlessly repeated sermon of redemption of the deep resentment that they felt for having been pushed aside from the promise of the American Dream. 

But here is the point: The immediate reaction to the storming of the Capitol gave further confirmation to the real and present danger of Trump’s fascist threat fuelled in the rumblings of class war which Trump has inflamed and exploited. It is a liberal fear, mainly of the Democrats but including some Republicans, who are the chief targets of Trump’s attacks. His demonisation of elite liberal value (marked by accusations of moral perversities aimed at unmasking the claims to virtue) is at one with his condemnation of the liberalism of Federal political and social economic policies which he presents as contributing to the abjection of mainly white US-American working class and poor; to be seen in the rapidly increasing power of global corporations, policies of economic globalization, the privileging of minorities, refugees, recent immigrants etc.

The 2012 Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C. tied to a large trailer. The truck cab has a sign that reads "From one national treasure to another."
Image 1: When surprises were minimal and manifest destiny kept on giving. The Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C., Nov. 26, 2012 (Foto: US Forest Service/Keith Riggs, accessed 8 Feb 2021)

It might be remembered at this point that the violence of the Capitol invasion–the marked involvement of military veterans, the carrying of weapons, baseball bats, the reports of pipe bombs–that shocked so many, reflects the fact that all modern states are founded on violence. This is particularly the case in the US where the US Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in defence of democratic rights. In an important sense the violence of those invading the Capitol refracts back at the middle class and especially the ruling elite the very violence that underpins the structure of their rule. If liberal virtue was shocked by the events on January 6 it was also confronted with the violent paradox deep in its democratic heart (see Palmer 2021). Thus, this paradox slips into paroxysm at this critical moment in American political history.

The transitional figure of Trump feeds on the prejudices of his intended constituencies and exploits an already ill-formed class awareness building on ready commitments and vulnerabilities – the well-rehearsed fascist and populist technique – creating indeed a false consciousness (there is no other way to say it) that is not only destructive but in the hands of the likes of Trump integral to intensifying the feelings of impotence and the miseries that give Trump his relative popularity. Slavoj Zizek says as much in what he describes as “Trump’s GREATEST TREASON”.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator,’ was quick to counter the white supremacist, macho, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper and Three Percenter elements highly visible in media newscasts with a Conan the Barbarian performance. This was his take on the dominant brand of Make America Great Again. (Really, all those along the political spectrum participate in MAGA – Democrat Party badges and hats from the recent election read “Dump Trump Make America Great Again”). He focussed on his own immigration away from his native Austria and its Nazi associations to the liberated American world of his success. For Schwarzenegger, the Capitol invasion and its vandalism equated to Kristallnacht. Noam Chomsky likens the storming with Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 observing that it effected a greater penetration to the heart of power than did Hitler’s failed attempt. But Chomsky, with characteristic acuity, adds that the fascist danger lies in the anti-democratic class forces (including electoral and political manipulations on all sides) that provide the fertile ground for fascism; forces that have acutely and early been pinpointed by anthropologists (Holmes 2000, 2020; Kalb and Halmai 2011; Kalb, forthcoming).

But the point must be taken further. New class formations are in the making right now and they are being driven in the explosive nature of technological revolution (see Smith 2020). This is something Marx himself was very much aware of and why he wrote more than one hundred pages on the machine and the human in Capital. This is also the concern of Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (2002) and the continued focus of today’s accelerationists such as the Nick Srnicek (2017) on platform capitalism.

Creative Destruction, the Transmutation in Capital and Corporate State Formation

The rise and fall of Trump (not discounting the possibility that Humpty Dumpty might come together again, which is the fear of the master narrative) may be understood as expressing a transition between two moments of capitalism during which one formation morphs into another. Trump is the embodiment, instrument, and anguish of this transition, a tragic figure in a theatre of the absurd. Grand Guignol almost, but in Gothic American Horror Story style. The accession of Biden is the apotheosis of the new in the hopes of most; he is a vehicle for healing the divisions in the U.S. that Trump brought to a head and are still very much present. But Biden’s rise has ominous oppressive indications of its own.

The Trump events have all the hallmarks of the crisis and rupture of transformation or, better, transmutation. The millenarian spirit that Hochschild captures in her account is one born in the capitalist ideology of the American Dream; fortified in the religious fundamentalism of Trump’s many followers that revitalizes their hopes in that American Dream in the face of abject failure. The rallies and the impassioned actions of those invading the Capitol are filled with revitalizing energy.

Such millenarian explosions, distinct in their own historical contexts, occur at many other points in global history. It was apparent at the dawn of capitalism in Europe, at later moments of crisis and redirection in capitalism up to the present – indeed at the inception of the Nazi horror, and at points of the disruptive expansion of capital in the western imperial/colonial thrust as in the Cargo movements of the Pacific (Cohn 1970, Lanternari 1960, Worsley 1970 (1959); Neveling 2014 for a link between Cargo Cults and neoliberal capitalism).

The rupture of transmutation in capital, the crisis that the Trumpian progress manifests, is an instance of what Marx and others have understood to be the creative/destruction dynamic of capital; whereby it reproduces, renews, revitalizes its potency against contradictions and limitations to its profit motive that capital generates within itself as well as those thrown up against it in the very process of its own expansion and transformation.

The circumstances underpinning the current transmutation in capital relate to the revolutions in science and technology those associated particularly with the digital age and advances in biotechnology). The rapid development of capital (and especially that of the still dominant, if declining, US-American form) was driven by the innovations in knowledge and technology (something that Marx and many others admired in US-America). What became known as the nation state (the dominant political form that nurtured capital) and the class orders that were generated in capitalism and necessary to it (not to mention the over-population and ecological disasters that grew in capital’s wake) also constituted barriers and limitations to capital’s growth.

The new technological revolutions are a response to the limitations on capital emergent within its own processes. Technological innovations enabled revolutions in production and consumption, creating new markets and increasing consumption, reducing the need for human labour and the resistances it brings with it, overcoming problems, and opening up novel lines, of distribution; forcing the distress of unemployment (especially among the erstwhile working class), creating impoverishment and uncertainties reaching into once affluent middle classes as captured in the neologism ‘the precariat’; shifting class alignments; redefining the nature and value of work, of the working day, the expansion of zero hours and, as an overarching manifestation, a sense of the return of a bygone era.

The current technological revolution is a key factor in the extraordinary growth in the monopolizing strength of corporations such as Google, Amazon or even Tencent. The dot.com organizations (the flagships and spearheads of capitalist transformation with huge social transmutational effect) have wealth that dwarfs many states and they are functioning in areas once controlled by the state (from what used to be public services to the current race to colonize space). Indeed the corporate world has effectively invaded and taken over the operation of nation-states (Kapferer 2010; Kapferer and Gold 2018).

This is most noteworthy in those state orders influenced by histories of liberal social democracy, in Europe and Australia for example, which tended to draw a sharp demarcation between public interest and private enterprise. The nation-state and its apparatuses of government and institutions for public benefit have been corporatized so much so that in many cases government bureaucracies have not only had their activities outsourced to private companies but also have adopted managerial styles and a ruthlessness along the lines of business models. The corporatization of the state has aligned it much more closely with dominant economic interests in the private (now also public) sectors than before and enables a bypassing of state regulation, even that which once sustained capitalist interest, but which became an impediment to capitalist expansion.

These changes have wrought socio-economic and political disruption and distress globally and most especially in the Western hemisphere. This is not merely collateral damage. The revolution in science and technology has been a key instrument in effecting social and political changes via destruction, for the regenerative expansion of capital. It is central to the re-imagination of capital in the opening of the twenty-first century.

This is particularly so in the United States whose socio-political order is historically one of corporate state formation which accounts for its long-term global political economic domination. Some renewal in leftist thought (e.g. with Bernie Sanders) is an index of the depth of distress that is being experienced although the ideological and counteractive potency of the American Dream fuelled especially in fundamentalist Christianity suppresses such potential and contributes to the intensity and passion of the Trump phenomenon. The ideological distinction of the Trump event aside, its dynamic of populism is reflected throughout the globe (Kalb 2021)

One common feature of this is the rejection of the political systems associated with nation state orders and, to a marked extent the largely bipartite party systems vital in the discourses of control and policy in nation states. Trumpism and other populist movements (in Europe notably) complain of the alienation of the state and its proponents from interests of the mass. The expansion of corporatization and the further hollowing out of the state, the corruption of its public responsibilities by corporate interests, is effectively what Trump was furthering in his presidency. It is a potent dimension of the Trump paradox and a major irony of the Capitol invasion that, for all the apparent fascist tendencies, it was the spirit of reclaiming democracy (admittedly of the freebooting kind) in an already highly corporatized establishment (subject to great corporate capitalist interest) that Trump’s actions were directed to. An important figure in this respect is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The tech billionaire, early investor in Facebook and founder of PayPal, was an early Trump supporter and named a part of Trump’s transition team in 2016. His book, Zero to One, based on his lecture courses at Stanford University, argues for a corporate-technocratic governance beyond older systems of government. (Thiel 2014).

From Panopticon to Coronopticon

COVID-19 has highlighted the social devastation of the destructive/creative dynamic of capitalism’s transmutation (see also Kalb 2020). The class and associated ethnic inequities have everywhere been shown up and probably intensified by a pandemic that is starting to equal, if not surpass, the depressing and devastating effect of two world wars. Like them it is clearing ground for capitalist exploitative expansion – something like Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).

Under the shadow of the virus, labour demands are being rationalized, the cutting back of employment and its benefits legitimated, governments are pumping capital into the economies in a way that protects consumption in an environment where there is declining occupational opportunity and income. The idea of the universal basic income is seriously discussed. Its implementation would offset some of the contradictions in a transformation of capitalism that is reducing our dependence on labour and endangering consumption through automation and digitalization. While the poor are getting poorer the rich are getting richer; most notably those heading the revolutionary technologies of the digital age and biotechnology, with the competitive race to secure viable vaccines against the virus one example for the latter sector’s power.

There is a strange synchronicity linking the pandemic with the dynamic of capitalism’s transmutational corporatization of the state. The virus reproduces and spreads in a not dissimilar dynamic. Indeed, COVID 19 in some ecological understandings is the product of the acceleration of globalization effected in those processes of capitalism’s transmutation associated with corporate expansion and the corporatization of the nation state. As a crossover from animal to human bodies the virus is one manifestation of increased human population pressure on wild animal territory, the closer intermeshing of animal and human terrain. The scale of the pandemic is, of course, a direct consequence of the time space contraction and intensity of the networked interconnections of globalization.

State surveillance has intensified as a by-product of combatting COVID which is also its legitimation, with digitalization as the major surveillance instrument. The digital penetration into every nook and cranny of social life (see Zuboff2019, and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma), is interwoven with the commodification of the social and personal for profit – economizing individuals calculating the costs and benefits of their social ‘interactions’ (the YouTube or Kuaishou ‘influencer,’ the hype TED talker as Foucault’s entrepreneurial self, cut, pasted, uploaded and remixed).

The management of Covid-19, demanding social isolation and the disruption of ordinary social life, has exponentially increased the role of the digital as the primary mediator of the social and a commanding force in its very constitution. Covid-19 has been revealed as a kind of social particle accelerator. As such, and ever more exclusively so, the real of the social, is being re-imagined, re-engineered and re-mastered as a digital-social, a ‘Digisoc’ or ‘Minisoc,’ constrained and produced within algorithmically preset parameters. Here is Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show, radically updated. And, as with Truman, the space of freedom is also and at the same time experienced as a space of unfreedom.

This manifests in the deep ambivalence many feel about the new technologies they daily live with and through. The digitized social is often presented as a new agora, a liberating ‘space’ in which new, progressive ideas and directions are enabled, operationalized and indeed optimized. The internet has become a site of multiple struggles in which class forces and new potentials for social difference and proliferating identity-claims are continually emerging. The freedom of the internet has provided exciting opportunities for many. Such freedom also and at the same time contributes to conspiracy imaginations on all sides. As has been made clear in the two elections featuring Trump, the superpower of corporations like Google and Facebook threatens to install a domain of hyper-control. Digital walls and electronic fences are appearing everywhere in the age of the global ‘splinternet.’

The hegemonic and totalizing potential for the ruling bodies of the corporatizing state who control the digital is as never before. This is so not just in the global scale of the network reach but in the heightened degree to which controlling bodies can form the ground of the social, radically remodel, engineer and design reality in accordance with dominant interests, and where motivated shut out that which threatens their order. The awareness of this has driven the fury of censorship and self-censorship on all sides – Trump’s threatened TikTok ban becomes Twitter’s actual Trump ban.

Back in Some Form: From 1984 into a Brave New World

Trump and Trumpism are moments in the transitional, transmutational process of capitalism outlined above and of the formation of new social and political orders. Echoing the past, they express its transmutation (and its agonies) rather than repeat it. Trump and Trumpism manifest the contradictions of such processes, agents and agencies for the transmutations in the social and political circumstances of life that are in train, themselves forces in the bringing forth of a future that, in some aspects, is already being lived.

Trump himself can be described as an “in-betweener”, a bridge into the new realities, both a force in their realization and a victim. His manner and style, the brutal no holds barred amorality is familiar from the captains of industry and robber barons of an earlier age, who built capitalist America and crushed working-class resistance by all means, more foul than fair. Trump maintains the style but in reverse redemptive mode. In his shape-shift he presents as supporter of the working classes not their nemesis as did his forerunners.

However, his authoritarian business manner, of The Apprentice’s “you’re fired” fame, matches well the managerialism of the present. He is an exemplar of contemporary venture capitalism and most especially of profit from non-industrial production (often anti production) gained from real estate, property transfer, asset stripping, and the expanding gaming and gambling industries (their importance as symptoms of the crises of transformation in capital) from which some of Trump’s key supporters come.

Trump’s reactive anti-immigrant nationalism and “Make America Great Again” rhetoric not only appeals to the white right but is an engagement of past rhetoric to support new political and economic realities. Trump’s economic war with China stressed re-industrialization but it was also concerned with counteracting China’s technological ascendancy, especially in the realm of the digital, a major contradiction born of the current globalizing transmutation in capitalism involving transfers of innovatory knowledge.

Trump anticipated the risk to his presidential re-election. It manifested the dilemmas of his in-betweenness. His inaction with regard to the pandemic was consistent with the anti “Big Government” policies of many Republicans and the US-American right who cherish QAnon conspiracy theories as much as they want to reduce government interference and modify regulation in capitalist process, a strong emphasis in current transitions and transformations of the state and of capital.

Trump’s cry that the election was being stolen was excited in the circumstances of the pandemic. His attack on postal votes related to the fact that the pandemic gave the postal vote a hitherto unprecedented role in the election’s outcome by by-passing and neutralising the millenarian populist potency of his mass rallies already reduced in numbers by fear. Trump sensed that the COVID-inspired move to ‘working from home’ and ‘voting from home’ would challenge, fence in and fence out his base of support.

Trump has always taken advantage of the digital age, his use of Twitter and Facebook the marked feature of his style of rule. His practices looked forward to the politics of the future ever increasingly bounded and conditioned in societies of the image. Following the events at the Capitol, Trump’s own Custer’s Last Stand to allay his fate, his cyberspace and internet accounts were switched off. He has been cancelled by the new digitally authoritarian corporate powers (who arguably benefitted the most from the Trump era and profited greatly under pandemic conditions) who are behind the growing new society of the image, in which he was a past-master and within which he had in the main established his identity. (Kapferer R, 2016)

The overriding image of the Capitol invasion and carried across most networks is that of the occupation of the heart of American democracy by those who would threaten its ideals. The media have concentrated on what was the dominating presence of the extremist macho white US-American far right violently parading symbols of a racist past combined with clear references to the not-so-distant memories of fascism and Nazism. There were others there more moderate in opinion and representative of other class fractions, if still mostly white, whose presence does not reduce the fear of fascism, possibly as in Nazi Germany when what seemed to be small groups of extremists hijacked power (and the events of the Capitol evokes such memory) to unleash the horrors to follow. Something similar could be said for what happened in the Soviet Union leading to Stalinism. These were the worlds of George Orwell’s 1984, in which some of the major ideals of the time flipped in their tragic negation. Such events were very much emergent in realities of the nation-state, its imperialist wars and the class forces of that particular historical moment in the history of capitalism and the formations of its social and political orders. There is no statement here that this could not happen again.

What we are saying is this: a different authoritarian and oppressive possibility may be taking shape – not of the fascist past but of the future. This is a future that Trump was mediating but which may be coming into realization, despite the great hope to the contrary, in the accession of President Biden. Perhaps this prospect can be seen as more akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World born in the current transmutations of capital (and its agonies of class) and in the circumstances of the radical technological revolutions of the digital era, involving the apotheosis of the corporatisation of the state, the corporate state emerging out of the ruins of the nation state.

Aldous Huxley depicted a world centred on production and efficiency, a bio technologically conditioned global system of perfect rational, optimised order. The class conflicts of the past are overcome here; everyone accepts their predetermined place. It is a post-human reality in which the foundation of human beings in their biology and passions is transcended. It is a somatised, artificially intelligent world of the image and promiscuity. Indeed, the American Dream. Those who do not fit or who resist are fenced out. Time and space are being reconfigured, incurving around the individual and ‘personalised.’

Biden’s inauguration for all its upbeat ceremonial spirit had some intimation of such a future, taking into full account the security constraints of its moment: to protect against the murderous unchecked rampage of the virus and the threat of the attack of right-wing militias. The stress on this, it may be noted, had an ideological function to distance what was about to come into being from, for example, the definitely more visceral world of Trump and thoroughly evident in the invasion of the Capitol – what Biden in his inauguration speech called an “uncivil war.”

The scene of the perfectly scripted inauguration was virtually devoid of people. Apart from the dignitaries and all-important celebrities, the highly selected order of the society of the corporate-state. Where the general populace would normally crowd, was an emptiness filled with flags and protected by troops, more than currently are stationed in Afghanistan. Those who might disrupt, Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘resistant savages,’ were fenced out. It was a totalizing and constructed digital media image presenting a reality of control, harmony, and absolute surveillance.

We claim that something like Trump and the events surrounding him would have happened regardless of the specific phenomena we have focussed on here. The events Trump are a moment, perhaps among the most intense, in the transitional transmutation of the history of capitalism and the socio-economic and political orders which build and change around it. The apparent chaos indicates a major axial moment in world history – a chaos driven in the emergence of a cybernetic techno-capitalist apparatus on a global scale. What might be augured in the Biden accession is already taking vastly different shape in China and elsewhere around the globe. New and diverse formations of totalitarian authoritarianism are emerging. The Trump phenomenon is crucial for an understanding of some of the potentials of a future that we are all very much within and that an overconcentration on the parallels with the past may too easily obscure.

Bruce Kapferer is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor Emeritus at Bergen University, Professorial Fellow UCL, Fellow Cairns Institute, and the Director of the ERC Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen.

Roland Kapferer is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Deakin University, a filmmaker and a musician. He does research on cybertechnologies.

Cite as: Kapferer, Bruce, and Roland Kapferer. 2021. “The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities.” FocaalBlog, 2 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/02/bruce-kapferer-roland-kapferer-the-trump-saga-and-americas-uncivil-war-new-totalitarian-authoritarian-possibilities/

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Ida Susser: Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?

On May 31, 2020, the US exploded in protest to address the super-exploitation of racism, which has uniquely scarred its history. This was followed by international demonstrations, including massive demonstrations in Paris against police brutality, a common theme of the Gilets Jaunes, a protest starting in November 2018 that I was studying. However, this time the Paris protests included the Gilets Jaunes but focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. In these important new developments, we have seen an international mobilization which may now be breaking down, or breaking through, some of the fragmentations of the working class between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship and other forms of historical subordinations.

Here I consider long-term research among street protests in France in relation to the post-Covid outrage against police brutality. Austerity policies should be seen not simply as a consequence of the Great Recession in the wake of the financial crisis but rather as the latest most destructive stage of a neoliberal assault that began worldwide in the 1970s. My ongoing research in France suggests that the  mass demonstrations which began with the French Occupy movement Nuit Debout (see Susser  2016, 2017) in 2016 and continued through a variety of strikes among students, transportation workers and others until the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations of fall 2018, and finally the massive pension demonstrations of 2019/2020, represent an effort to rebalance the pendulum in the struggles against the ever more virulent neoliberal assault. These are, in the end, international processes. I suggest that the kinds of demonstrations which were emerging powerfully in France before Covid-19, are now beginning to take place in the US and elsewhere. The disastrous inequalities that were massively exposed in the unequal fatalities and economic distress caused by the pandemic (see Focaalblog: Kalb 2020, Nonini 2020) have precipitated protests that can be seen as part of an ongoing formative process.

Long-term neoliberal assault, international dimensions

Long-term neoliberal assault has precipitated the widespread destruction of a particular kind of state (Smith 2011) as well as the restructuring of global power and networks  (Nonini and Susser 2020). The industrial state underwrote the corporate world by subsidizing the education, health and stability of a large proportion of workers. Twentieth century workers’ struggles established the particular forms of social reproduction originally reified in the welfare state. The idea, for example, of ‘a fair day’s wage’ encompassed the costs of the patriarchal, heterosexual family for the reproduction of men with their wives and children. However, the stable working class emerged alongside and in interaction with lower and precarious standards of reproduction for minorities, migrants and other historically subordinate groups and women, as well as the uneven development of (post) colonialism. In other words, industrial capitalism included a super-exploited working class, marked by race and gender, citizenship rights and in many cases, indigeneity (Carrier and Kalb 2015; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Fraser and Jaeggi 2019, Steur 2015). These groups were the subjects of distinctive historically-defined processes of inequality and they were generally excluded, especially in the United States, from the benefits of the welfare state and the class compromise.

The massive assaults of neoliberalism of the past 50 years destroyed the lives of displaced industrial workers and further devastated minority, immigrant and native communities. Under Covid-19, both in France and more drastically the US, these losses, long manifested in differential mortality rates, among others, have become immediate life and death issues.

Image 1: French Riot Police at Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

A new working poor of displaced industrial workers compounding the super-exploitation of historically subordinated groups has been recognized in the United States and Europe since the 1990s (Susser 1996). In the shifting global power configurations, contemporary nation-states no longer protect the stability of the traditional working class. The emergence of different forms of social movements can be seen as an attempt to redress the assault on customary living conditions, life cycle security and aspirations. I would suggest that this is also an attempt to redefine workers to include the previously neglected minorities as well as new family and identity configurations. New forms of worker protection will have to consider new forms of relationships within families and new kinds of work/leisure routines to address issues that some categorize as identity politics (such as feminism and LBGT rights).  

From Nuit Debout to Gilets Jaunes

After Nuit Debout, 2016-17 in France, which was largely a big city, youth led, leftist Occupy movement, the next major mobilization was that of the Gilets Jaunes (2018-2019).  The Gilets Jaunes were recognized as a new phenomenon as they came from the urban peripheries of Paris and throughout the provinces. Not regarded as cosmopolitan they included many teachers, nurses, social workers as well as truck drivers, chefs, construction workers and service workers in general. Many Gilets Jaunes were middle aged and some were thought to be right wing.

Although perhaps not representative, it should be noted that the woman who sent out the first call to protest the new fuel tax implemented by President Emmanuel Macron was an educator of color from the urban periphery of Paris. In addition, contrary to stereotype and the government portrayal of the demonstrations, Gilets Jaunes insisted that they did not object to environmental concerns. They objected to a measure that targeted for extra tax the fuel that poor people in the urban peripheries were dependent on for their daily commutes. Protests were organized in collaboration with climate activists to demonstrate their common concerns and the support of the Gilets Jaunes for the environment. A frequent chant and sign stated; we care about “the end of the month and the end of the world”.

The first email call to protest the fuel tax was put out in September 2018 but by November, when the Gilets Jaunes began to block the highways and roundabouts and gather in thousands in the streets of Paris, they were objecting to much more than the fuel tax. They were concerned with the degradations of public services, the privatization of health care and their own daily challenges as well as what they saw as the decay of democracy. These protestersfrom the urban periphery frequently described the lack of investment in public transportation outside Paris and the declining support for provincial services as illustrating the “stealing of the state.” (Susser 2020). People regarded public services as a right and saw the services as belonging to the state as paid for by their tax money and therefore belonging to them. When the state privatized a service, it was seen as ‘stealing the public money.’ The destruction of the state is manifest not only in the privatization and dismantlement of public services, but also in the crisis of daily life, the family, education, health care, the aged, the handicapped (highly visible at protests on crutches and in wheelchairs) and the students, who feel they are “losing their futures,” as one protester said to me.

Continued Gilets Jaunes resistance

Until the pension strike, which began in September 2019, the Gilets Jaunes were the most powerful, and most supported of a variety of movements that had emerged in France since the austerity policies imposed in the wake of the financial crisis. They linked many of the uprisings and strikes from different sectors (such as railroads, teachers and health workers) and the smaller uprisings among hospital aides or the sans-papiers as well as the climate change activists and left-wing organizations. Not concentrated in the workplace although participating in many disparate strikes, the Gilets Jaunes invented new methods, such as the occupation of the ronds-points, the building of cabanas and the freeing of toll booths. In these ways, the Gilets Jaunes were attempting to forge a new set of resistances and generating the support of the public from the banlieues to the provinces. The movement was both enraged and resilient: Enraged at the loss of community and public and social services over time, and resilient in the commoning efforts to create a new community (Susser 2020). The Gilets Jaunes, made up of working-class people on the urban periphery, including many pensioners and families who could not make ends meet, were crafting an emerging oppositional bloc.

The pension protests began in September 2019, when strikers closed down the metro and the buses for a day. A few months later, different sectors from health care workers, legal professions, social services, educators and others, organized massive strikes and demonstrations in the streets that continued until they were shut down by the Covid 19 epidemic in March 2020.

Gilets Jaunes among the grassroots union members, in many ways, had forced the unions to take up more militant positions against the pension changes. As health workers, lawyers and transportation workers marched in massive protests through Paris, Gilets Jaunes could be seen populating the street protests of every profession in their distinctive yellow jackets, personal statements written in black marker on their backs. The signature song of all the pension protests was that of the Gilets Jaunes, as were many of the chants and banners. Until Paris was closed down for Covid-19 in March 2020, the Gilets Jaunes and the massive pension marches combined in different, often conflicted, ways across France, in some cities with more cooperation in time and place than others.

Image 2. Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

In France, Nuit Debout, the Gilets Jaunes, the pension strikers and many other movements represent transformative spaces where people in the current era of financialization and globalization are struggling to work out new strategies. Activists envision horizontalist movements as an effort to develop innovative forms of protest to counteract the increasing inequality, authoritarian tendencies and hardened boundaries of the new global regime. Such progressive representation strives for inclusivity and the breakdown and recognition of established hierarchies of gender, race, immigration and class, among others. Each of these groups has to be understood in the context of their own history and social movements. The participants in Nuit Debout were not the same as the Gilets Jaunes. However, in France and elsewhere, multiple subaltern groups may be beginning to recognize themselves as part of a larger political bloc in opposition to the destruction of the welfare state and degradation of democratic representation (Kalb and Mollona 2018). Such movements are contingent and contested, reflective of the same rage against the destruction of living standards and aspirations for a generation but offering hope for more inclusive solutions.

Image 3. Protests against police brutality in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

Before the Gilets Jaunes, in 2016/7 activists from Nuit Debout had protested the police violence often focused on young men of color in the streets. The Gilets Jaunes protested the violence of the police against their own street demonstrations for over a year. It is a crucial development that in June 2020 the Gilets Jaunes joined ranks with the protests against police brutality and racism that were rocking the world. At this conjuncture, after the shocking Covid-19 shutdown and the disproportionate deaths of people of color in France as elsewhere, the displaced workers of the urban periphery joined directly with the superexploited immigrants, refugees and previously colonized people of color from the banlieues in several unprecedented massive demonstrations.

Image 4. Gilets Jaunes protester with Black Lives Matter support message (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

As Polanyi knew, rage against the disastrous failures of (neo)liberalism could be expressed in brutal and fascist ways (see also Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2020, Kalb and Halmai 2011). However, the protests that we see today are a hopeful sign in their inclusive progressive moments bringing together many groups who are all at risk in different ways and at different levels or aspects of exploitation. They are demanding a rebalancing of the destructive neoliberal assault of the past 50 years. They are constructing an inclusive but uneven critical community which may serve as an antidote against the growing fury which is fueling nationalism and exclusivism (see also Kalb and Mollona 2018).

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.

References

Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi. 2018. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Medford, MA: Polity

Carrier, James and Don Kalb (eds.) 2015. Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kalb, Don and G Halmai (eds.) 2011. Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. Vol. 15. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Kalb, Don and Massimilliano Mollona (eds.) 2018. Worldwide Mobilizations. New York: Berghahn Books.

Kasmir, Sharryn and August Carbonella (eds.) 2014. Blood and Fire. New York: Berghahn Books

Kalb, Don 2020. Covid, Crisis and the Coming Contestations. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/

Maskovsky, Jeff and S. Bjork-James (eds.) 2020. Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press

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

Nonini, D. and I. Susser (2020). The Tumultuous Politics of Scale. New York: Routledge.

Smith, Gavin (2011). Selective Hegemonies, Identities, 18(1): 2-38.

Steur, Luisa (2015). Class trajectories and indigenism among agricultural workers in Kerala. In: Carrier J and Kalb D (eds) Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: CUP, pp.118-130.

Poperl, Kevin and Ida Susser (1996). “The Construction of Poverty and Homelessness in US Cities.”Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1): 411–35.

Susser, Ida (2018) Inventing a Technological Commons: Confronting the Engine of Macron, http://www.focaalblog.com/2018/04/19/kevin-poperl-and-ida-susser-inventing-a-technological-commons-confronting-the-engine-of-macron/

Susser, Ida (2017). Introduction: For or Against the Commons?, Focaal 79:1-5.

Susser, Ida (2017). Commoning in New York City, Barcelona and Paris: Notes and observations from the field. Focaal 79: 6-22.

Susser, Ida (2020, forthcoming). “They are stealing the state”: Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In: Urban Ethics Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). New York: Routledge.

Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2020. “Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?” FocaalBlog, 3 December. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser:-covid,-police-brutality-and-race:-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries?/

Urban Struggles

Anne-Christine Trémon: Variegated Valuation: Governance and Circuits of Value in Shenzhen

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

Over the past two decades, the central authorities in the People’s Republic of China have shown an increasing concern about the inequalities between urban dwellers and predominantly rural hukou (residence registration) holders that have migrated to the cities. In 2016 a new policy on urban planning coined the concept of ‘livable cities’ and stated that migrants from the countryside have the same rights as urban residents to basic public goods and services such as healthcare and education (Xinhua News Agency 2016). Migrant workers often account for 30 per cent of the population in China’s major cities, but they comprise 80 per cent or more of the total population in urban villages or ‘villages-in-the-city’, rural villages converted into urban communities (shequ) (Chung 2010). The former village of Pine Mansion (the pseudonym of my main field site) is in a transitory state, awaiting the completion of the three phases of urban redevelopment (2010–2018, 2018–2026 and 2026-2034). During this transition, natives and migrants are subject to variegated governance, ‘diverse modes of government – disciplinary, regulatory, pastoral – that administer populations in terms of their relevance to global capital’ (Ong 2006: 78). While Ong shows how variegated governance rests on zoning technologies and results in ‘graduated sovereignty’, here this variegation occurs within the same microspatial unit.  

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