There is a calendar in my office which still hangs at March 2020; an artifact of the confusion and rush to ‘lockdown’ and to find shelter from the upcoming storm. I keep it there because it seems strange to take it down after so long, but also as a reminder that time is not as straightforward as we like to believe. The solitude of lockdown taught me that, but that was my privilege, that I needed such an extreme event to experience this beyond the boredom of standing in a long line or the lightning flash of an enjoyable night with friends. People who have been incarcerated know the absurdity of time better than most perhaps. As distressing as the past two years has been for society, for incarcerated individuals locked away and largely forgotten, the burden is unthinkable. U.S. federal and state prisons have acted as miniature epicenters where infection rates have been three to four times higher than national averages or those for surrounding communities. In recent months, as the Omicron variant has spread, New York City’s Rikers Island jail reached an astonishing 17% positive infection rate (Ceron 2021). Watching this unfold, I wondered why we, as a society, have so complacently left prisoners to this fate, and as Foucault (2015:1-2) noted, what we can learn about ourselves according to the “fate [we] reserve for those of the living whom [we] wish to be rid of…”
Running the Numbers
Two years into the pandemic, and as the Omicron wave continued to sweep through the country, the Covid Prison Project reported 541,538 positive cases among individuals incarcerated within prisons. At least 2,780 people have died of COVID while incarcerated. An estimated 531,060 individuals in incarceration have received at least one dose of the vaccine (covidprisonproject.com), although institutions have slowly become less forthcoming with internal statistics over the course of the pandemic, and some have stopped offering regular reports altogether (Schwartzapfel and Blakinger 2021). While the number of positive cases both inside of prisons and within the US has continued to increase, what is most concerning is that the ratio of positive cases between incarcerated and non-incarcerated individuals in the US has remained steady since the beginning of the pandemic. For example, as of May 2020, the infection rate in New York city (the global epicenter at that time) jails (including Rikers Island) was at 9.56%, whereas the city itself reported a positive case rate at 2.10% (Griffard and Ciaccio 2020). For further perspective, the previous global epicenter, Lombardy, Italy, had a positive infection rate of 0.78%. Thus, the infection rate within NYC jails was 3-4 times higher than the surrounding community. Further data indicates that this was an early foreshadowing of what would be the national norm in the following years. As of April 2021, a comparison of incidence and mortality rates between prisons and the US population indicated that within prisons there were 30,780 cases (per 100,000) as compared to the US population which was 9,350 (per 100,000). This ratio continues to hold steady as I write this today nearly a year later (covidprisonproject.com). It also needs to be noted that there may be some hesitancy for incarcerated people to report symptoms, as a positive test would likely result in solitary confinement, rebranded by the CDC as ‘medical isolation’ (Blakinger 2020). Thus, the actual number of infections within prisons is likely even higher.
Bodies Commodified
Long before the word ‘coronavirus’ was a household name, Wacquant (2009) noted the correlation between US welfare reform, the criminalization of poverty, and the “War on Drugs”, which he astutely noted was nothing less than a ‘guerilla campaign’ waged against young men living in the inner city for whom “the retail trade of narcotics has provided the most accessible and reliable source of gainful employment” (2009:61). Two observations can be taken away from this; first there are two economies operating in the US (and globally), one is deemed illegitimate and therefore illegal, but it provides a necessary livelihood for its participants.
Image 1: Prisoners in a UNICOR (Federal Prison Industries) program producing military uniforms, photo by Federal Bureau of Prisons
The second is the correlation between the ballooning incarceration rate due to drug related arrests and the boom of private-run prisons which began in the 1980s (Pelaez 2014; Wacquant 2009). Private prisons contracted by the Federal and state governments receive a fixed sum of money per prisoner held in their custody, regardless of the cost of maintaining that prisoner. Thus, the bodies of the poor have become commodified. The construction of private prisons reached its height in the 1990s (alongside welfare reform) under President Clinton, when the Justice Department contracted private prisons to incarcerate undocumented workers (Pelaez 2014). Again, workers selling their labor outside the bounds of the legitimate capitalist system. This is a for-profit industry that exploded at the closing of the twentieth century (Wacquant 2009).
The Alienation of ‘Commodified Bodies’
The pandemic shuttered global economies and only businesses providing essential goods or services remained open. Meanwhile, within the penal system, incarcerated labor was deemed ‘essential.’ Perhaps predictably as labor has long been associated with the modern disciplinary apparatus. Quoting Brissot; “’One will not succeed by locking beggars up in filthy prisons that are more like cesspools’; they will have to be forced to work. ‘The best way of punishing them is to employ them’” (Brissot quoted in:Foucault 1977:106). Additionally, public works have often been the source of that labor since the prisoner became the “property of society” (Foucault 1977:109). Incarcerated labor was used in just this way throughout the pandemic. For instance, Lo Wu prison in Hong Kong reportedly had female inmates working shifts around the clock to produce face masks for wages significantly under Hong Kong’s minimum wage (Grant 2020). Additionally, former New York governor Cuomo announced that the state would be using prison labor to produce hand sanitizer for schools, transportation systems, etc. (Grant 2020).
Amidst the pandemic prison labor demonstrates one of the most extreme examples of the alienation from the product of one’s own labor (Marx 1990). For instance, although many prisons used the labor of incarcerated persons to produce hand sanitizer, most prisons ban products higher than 60% alcohol which includes most hand sanitizers (CDC 2020). Thus, the product which could have helped keep them healthy was taken to ship to the world outside the prison.
Time and a Social Death
Some useful parallels can be drawn between prisons and other sites of confinement which may help shed some light on the current plight or our incarcerated populations. For instance, on one hand, prisons and care homes are dramatically different environments. On the other hand, both effectively provide the same service to society: the removal of a particular class of individuals. The criminal has been disconnected from the public realm in response to a crime committed against society itself (Foucault 2015), whereas individuals in care homes have been removed from society to better ‘care’ for them. Thus, one has been confined to protect society – the other has been confined under the protection of society. Now, one parallel between these institutions is time. In prison, time is taken away as a punishment for an infraction, just as labor (which is nothing less than time-sold) is rewarded with wages (Foucault 2015:70). Thus, the criminal is detached from their social milieu, placed in confinement, and punished by the removal of “time to live” (Foucault 2015:72). The centrality of time within the penal system is apparent, but how is this relevant to care home facilities? I believe that it lies at the other end of this duality of time sold/time taken. In contrast, those living within care centers no longer, or never had, the ability to sell their time in the form of labor. The only greater affront to capitalism than the inability (care homes) to contribute to the production of accumulation is the refusal to contribute (penal systems). Thus, “any person hostile or opposed to the rule of the maximization of production” (Foucault 2015:52) is implicitly an ‘enemy of the state’. Of course, most people housed in care facilities are neither ‘opposed’ nor ‘hostile’ towards production directly, yet they are unable to contribute, which places them nearer on the spectrum to the ‘enemy of society’. Indeed, some of the earliest poor laws in the ‘West’ differentiated those who were able-bodied without work (vagabonds) against those who were physically unable to labor (beggars) (Marx 1990).
Incarcerated peoples, on the other hand, have been labelled as enemies of the state. The shift from the physical tortures of the Ancien Régime to the modern disciplinary apparatus included a change in who a crime was seen as perpetrated against. Instead of committing an offense against the sovereign, criminals were seen as committing crimes against society. Executions became fewer and confinement became nearly homogenous with the penal system. In order to rationalize long-term imprisonment and continued (if less occasional) executions, the ‘monstrosity’ of the criminal became a focal point (Foucault 1978:138). This has become a mantle worn by all criminals as ethnographic work has illustrated time and again (Conover 2001; Feldman 1991; Rhodes 2004). The inmate bears a stigma and somehow “we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human” (Goffman 1963:5). It is something Foucault witnessed during a tour of Attica, where he described living conditions as “a cage for wild animals” (Foucault and Simon 1991:29). It is no surprise that incarcerated lives are valued as ‘less than’ when society’s root metaphor for criminality is animalism (Turner 1975).
Lepers in Exile-Exclosure
Analysis of the societal response to COVID-19 has suggested that it reflects Foucault’s smallpox or quarantine model of power through the use of statistical analysis and empirical data (Sarasin 2020). This appears true; however, places of confinement seem to have regressed to a more primitive model of power. As the quarantine model served as the basis for the modern surveillance society, the ‘leper model’ was foundational to the formation of the quarantine model (Foucault 1977:198-199) and most closely reflects what is transpiring at sites of confinement. “The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-exclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate…” (Foucault 1977:198). Anecdotally, in discussions of the mass release of prisoners, opponents often essentialize all incarcerated people as ‘violent’. Yet, the data does not support this argument. Only 3.2% of inmates in the US federal prison system have been convicted of homicide, aggravated assault, or kidnapping (BOP 2020). Yet the stigma of crime has turned them into a mass of bodies which it is “useless to differentiate.”
This analysis has been somewhat more historical than anticipatory; however, history does tend to repeat itself. Incarcerated laborers have been exploited since the penal experiment of confinement began. As the pandemic has persisted, they continued to be disproportionately affected by sickness and death. For over two years, infections, and mortality rates inside of confinement exceeds what is occurring outside threefold. Unfortunately, I believe we can anticipate more of the same in post-COVID confinement. I would say that again, “capital [will continue to come] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx 1990:926).
Alexander W. Anthony is a doctoral student in anthropology at Syracuse University with a focus in historical archaeology. His primary research is on the influences of prison reform movements and ideology on the human and spatial/material dimensions and experiences of incarceration in late 18th– early 20th century Southern Italy.
References
Blakinger, Keri. 2020. As COVID-19 Measures Grow, Prison Oversight Falls. The Marshall Project 03/17/2020.
BOP. 2020. Federal Bureau of Prisons Statistics of Offenses, edited by Federal Bureau of Prisons, bop.gov.
CDC. 2020. Interim Guidance on Management of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Correctional and Detention Facililities, edited by Center for Disease Control. Center for Disease Control.
Ceron, Ella. 2021. NYC Sees Jail ‘Crisis’ on Positive-Test Rates over 17% at Rikers. Bloomberg Equality December 22, 2021. www.bloomberg.com.
Conover, Ted. 2001. New Jack. Vintage Books, New York.
Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2 ed. Random House, New York.
Foucault, Michel.1978 . The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Pantheon Books, New York.
Foucault, Michel. 2015. The Punitive Society: Lectures at the College de France 1972-1973. Translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Foucault, Michel, and John K. Simon. 1991. Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview. Social Justice 18(3):26-34.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Simon & Schuster Inc., New York.
Grant, Harriet. 2020. Vulnerable Prisoners ‘Exploited’ to Make Coronvirus Masks and Hand Gel. The Guardian. UK.
Schwartzapfel, Beth, and Keri Blakinger. 2021. Omicron has Arrived. Many Prisons and Jails are Not Ready. The Marshall Project, accessed January 29, 2022.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Politics, History, and Culture. Duke University Press, Durham.
Cite as: Anthony, Alexander W. 2022. “Covid in the confines of the US.” FocaalBlog, 1 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/01/alexander-w-anthony-covid-in-the-confines-of-the-us/
Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point – whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to shift toward a new militancy toward capitalism. Now, two years into the pandemic, they have suffered severe personal hardships due to Covid-related illness, hospitalizations and deaths, and sudden loss of employment. These traumas have occurred even as they have experienced an historically unprecedented hiatus of relative economic security, given the Covid-related payments and protections they received from the US state, while many have been praised as “essential workers.” This essay seeks to review what has happened to them over the last four decades that has made this into such a turning point.
Anthropologists speak of the period since the 1970s as one of neoliberalism. Instead, in this essay I adopt a different perspective by exploring the conditions prevailing under the transition from the liberal nation-state to the corporate-oligarchic state that has occurred widely with the integration of platform-surveillance capitalism into state administration and the use of massive databases by corporations and governments to govern populations (Kapferer and Gold 2018). Freedom and enslavement in the contemporary United States are linked to two now converging phenomena. One is digitalization; the other is the expansion of expropriation as a mechanism of capital accumulation beyond its historically racially marked boundaries to encompass the racially dominant white population. These changes have taken place with the rise to domination of finance capitalism in the world economy, a new period of economic decline and social crisis in the West.
Image 1: Payday Lender in Durham, North Carolina, photo by Don Nonini
First, as to digitalization. It has not only led to unprecedented levels of economic inequality among the population, but also to new mechanisms of accumulation organized around the generalized dispossession of working-class people made possible by their indebtedness combined with corporate and state deployment of digital technologies with large-scale predictive capabilities. The rise of surveillance capitalism and its integration into the corporate state has taken the form of a massive, commercialized apparatus of surveillance – “a single behemoth of a data market; a colossal marketplace for personal data” (Harcourt 2015, 198).
The ascendance of finance capital has come to operate in tandem with a racialized corporate state formation using an apparatus of analog surveillance and control of working people combined with digital surveillance over them. This apparatus has come to rationally extract and then realize large volumes of surplus value from them outside the capitalist workplace. This apparatus employs digital technologies (i.e., artificial intelligence) to increase the hyper-exploitation and expropriation of racially vulnerable groups, but also extends to the racially dominant white population. I focus my attention on the United States because its relentless attachment to new forms of financialized repression of working people through capitalizing (on) their debt repayment and petty income streams leads the way for capitalist regimes in other “advanced industrialized” countries undergoing economic decline.
Second, connected to the dominance of finance capital since the 1970s there has been the generalization of mechanisms of expropriation beyond racially marked vulnerable groups to the broader majority/plurality white population. In an important article, Nancy Fraser (2016) argues that capitalism throughout its history has always been accompanied by the racialization of the populations governed by the states that support it, and that this has continued up to the present. She distinguishes the industrial exploitation of a Euro-descended or white population within the cores and peripheries of the European (British, French, etc.) and United States empires that has been set apart from the expropriation of people of color within the cores and peripheries of these empires. By expropriation Fraser means, “distinct from Marxian exploitation, expropriation is accumulation by other means. Dispensing with the contractual relation through which capital purchases ‘labor power’ in exchange for wages, expropriation works by confiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into capital’s circuits of self-expansion” (Fraser 2016, 166). This is important: dispossession as such is only the loss of labor-power, reproductive capacity, land, money, or property by those dispossessed. Expropriation, however, goes beyond dispossession to confiscate these use-values and transform them into exchange-values incorporated into capital’s circuits of accumulation. Expropriation leads to accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004: 74-75).
Fraser goes further to assert that as an historical regularity until quite recently capitalism has survived at times of economic crisis only because the expropriation of people of color accelerates the rate of capital accumulation beyond that possible through sustained exploitation of white workers within industrial production. “Expropriation… covers a multitude of sins, most of which correlate strongly with racial oppression… such as territorial conquest, land annexation, enslavement, coerced labor, child labor, child abduction, and rape” but also “assumes more ‘modern’ forms – such as prison labor, transnational sex trafficking, corporate land grabs, and foreclosures on predatory debt, which are also linked with racial oppression” (Fraser 2016, 167).
Although Fraser has captured an historical regularity of capitalism in the United States, she points out that expropriations by corporations and the US state are increasingly imposed on the dominant racial group of whites as well as on racially subordinate groups. In her periodization of capitalism since the 17th century, she refers to the current period of “financialized capitalism” which she dates from the 1990s to the present as characterized by the emergence of “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker, formally free but acutely vulnerable” (Fraser 2016, 176). To be more accurate, they are also exploitable and expropriable when they own petty property (e.g., low-end real estate), or are not “legal” U.S. citizens (e.g., “non-documented” Latinx immigrants among hyper-sweated workers in the meat processing industry). This figure refers to working people who racially may be of color or may be white.
Fraser’s (2016, 176) argument that “expropriation has become ubiquitous, afflicting not only its traditional [racial] subjects but also those who were previously shielded by their status as citizen-workers” has much support. This can be identified in the events leading up to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 when subprime mortgage lenders in 2000-2001 shifted their target demographic for peddling these mortgages away from African-American elderly couples and women toward “a white, blue-collar construction worker who drinks beer,’” in the words of Roland Arnall, the CEO of Ameriquest, one of the largest and most fraudulent subprime mortgage lenders (Hudson 2010, 148). Other subprime mortgage lenders followed suit. In consequence, 3.8 million families from 2007-2010 lost their homes due to foreclosures. Is the racialized class hierarchy within US capitalism being reordered by redefining the white/non-white boundary? Are déclassé whites becoming less “white” or even “non-white”?
How do generalized expropriation and digitalization now combine to characterize capitalist society in the United States? Expropriation made more precise and discriminating in its objectives by artificial intelligence is often but not always centered on taking advantage of working people through indebtedness (from subprime mortgages, payday lending, student loans, etc.). It allows for the rationalized and sustained extraction of working peoples’ income streams, thus allowing such extraction to be scaled up and “securitized.” Under these conditions, expropriation enhanced by digitalization directed at working people has become a major mode of realizing (surplus) value from working people, outside the “normal” profit-making by corporations through consumer markets.
The New Digital Scores and the Corporations’/States’ Management of Life
Consider persons’ awareness in the U.S. of their FICO credit score when applying for a loan. Most soon learn of their FICO Score and its importance but they may not know of other less-regulated consumer scores that evaluate their potential to incur, manage and repay debt, and tap on their income streams for money – scores like “ChoiceScore,” “Risk IQ”, the geographically defined “Median Equivalency Score,” and the “Consumer View Profitability Score” (Dixon and Gelman 2014, 43-44). Similarly, persons in the US may not know about many other aspects of their lives that are being quantified and analyzed through AI-based algorithms to create scores for them that predict and shape their lives.
These scores are commercially available to any corporate or state buyer that can afford to purchase them. They assess the individuals forming the US population as debtors, potential job occupants, rent or utility payers, real estate buyers, hospital patients, disease sufferers, consumers of specific commodities, securitized air travelers, student borrowers, political dissidents, “street people,” defaulting child supporters, perpetrators of domestic violence, or criminals, among many other possibilities. My analysis of the data in Dixon and Gelman (2014) discovered more than 50 such common scores, and eight years later there undoubtedly are dozens more that have been invented and applied to the US population.
The Dynamics of Dual Enslavement: Analog and Digital
In addition to extracting super-profits from debtors (e.g., via “foreclosures”), there are other ways in which expropriation and digitalization appropriate value from working people. The Behemoth’s algorithms – the FICO credit scores, the legally unregulated “consumer scores” that profile individuals’ work, consumption, and credit histories, the predictive policing scores, the digitalized background checks for prospective job applicants and apartment renters, and much more – dynamically reinforce and cement the connections between the surveillance by digital technologies and the “on the ground” analog expropriations that once only targeted racial groups like African Americans for special treatment, but now extend to the working class as a whole.
The defining characteristic of the putative “middle class” individual is the job. African-Americans are known to have lower average and median credit ratings than whites (Garcia Perez, Gaither and Darity 2020). One survey found that the 60% of employers surveyed ran credit checks of job applicants as part of the job application and review process (Wang 2018: 129). These could involve the applicant’s official FICO score, but more likely include one of the financial consumer scores referred to above (e.g., “Consumer Profitability Score”). In one study, one out of ten respondents who were unemployed were informed that they would not be hired for a job because of their credit report, while one in seven applicants with “blemished” credit histories were told they were not being hired because of their credit record. Those not even aware of the use of their electronic scores against them constitute many more who have been discriminated against. There is evidence that employers concerned about curbing their future health insurance costs due to unhealthy employees use health scores, scores from personality tests, and reputation scores to exclude persons with medical conditions when they apply for jobs (O’Neil 2017:213).
Credit scores are now used routinely by landlords who require these from prospective renters before agreeing to rent to them. These credit scores are increasingly derived from massive digital databases of prior renters as well as applicants without prior rental histories, are increasingly refined by electronic vetting corporations, and are resorted to by the large-scale absentee corporate landlords that took over distressed apartment housing after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. TransUnion advertises its SmartMove ResidentScore as estimating “the reliability and level of risk” an individual rental applicant brings, draws on the prior credit, rental/eviction and criminal histories of the applicant, and brags that landlords will “get a 15% better prediction score than a typical credit score.” The codification of discrimination through these new scores that draw on underlying databases as one might expect leads disproportionate numbers of African-American applicants for rental housing to be rejected, but large numbers of whites and Latinx applicants are also excluded.
In the cases of job hires and rental applications, expropriations brought on by digital and analog surveillance not only deny applicants access to specific kinds of jobs and housing, but also drive them into more insecure hyper-exploitative labor and predatory rental markets – where their labor power and incomes can be confiscated and put to work for accumulation by employers and landlords.
Even those who are too impoverished to be creditworthy have use-values that can be capitalized by capitalists. This illustrates another connection between expropriation, digitalization, and value extraction. If the presence of “street people” in the way of gentrification jeopardizes the realization of the market value of real estate, they must be separated by force from its spaces. This leads to police harassment and arrests of young men and women, disproportionately African-Americans and Latinx, but also including many whites.
Criminalization and imprisonment of poor people are not only inscribed in the official hardcopy records of City Hall, but also in the digital data on “justice-involved” African-Americans and others collected, analyzed with algorithms, and commercially disseminated as scores by data brokers. Their electronic “criminal records”, even just arrests without convictions, follow them into the digital world and are used against them in job interviews and rental applications. Algorithms for predictive policing software (e.g., PREDPOL, COMPAS) pull the impoverished urban defendant down more tightly under the yoke of electronic prediction and control. PREDPOL concentrates police “stop and frisk” in specific urban areas with “high crime” and reinforces previous discrimination and leads to more arrests, injuries, and deaths among the urban poor. COMPAS scores the degree of “risk” of those convicted of “crime” to help judges determine whether they should be allowed free on probation or conversely sentenced for longer periods of time.
Employers, realtors, bankers, speculators, et al. profit from the expropriation of use values from poor people when such confiscations yield the values these economic elites realize (e.g., lower wages paid, higher rents extracted, houses foreclosed on and resold, higher payday loan and student debt interest payments, court fines and fees assessed, bails posted). Allies of these economic elites also profit from such expropriations. Judges set high court fees and impose steep fines on arrested and convicted poor people to raise revenues for local governments (Wang 2018, 155-161). Police confiscate the cash, houses, and cars of arrestees suspected of committing a crime through “civil forfeiture,” and use the plunder to benefit the local police force. Local Chambers of Commerce attract new capital to invest in gentrifying urban neighborhoods by supporting the evictions of poor residents from their rental units.
The Age of Covid: “Essential Workers,” Ironic Respite, Labor Militancy
Since March 2020, working-class people in the United States, especially African-Americans and other people of color, have suffered disproportionately from Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. They have witnessed one of the largest direct transfer of wealth from the state to corporations and the 1% in US history – more than $2 trillion alone in one year in payments and tax breaks to corporations from the Covid-relief CARES Act. At the same time, they have also experienced the temporary economic security provided them by Covid-related transfer payments from the US state (CARES Act and American Rescue Plan), while a CDC-imposed eviction moratorium has only recently come to an end. Historically, this is the first time that the US state has intervened to provide basic income support for most of the working-class population over a protracted period of time, irrespective of whether they were employed. Finally, many have been rhetorically elevated in their status to “essential workers,” that is the idealized national sacrifice – most at risk of contracting and dying from Covid yet deemed most indispensable to “the economy.”
It is therefore not surprising that nurses, hospital orderlies, oil rig workers, Amazon warehouse laborers, and workers in cereals and agricultural equipment manufacturing are showing a profound unwillingness to rejoin “the economy” on capitalism’s terms – including persisting risks to their health from Covid imposed by employers – through workers’ militancy. In increasing numbers, for the first time since the emergence of the corporate state and the domination of finance capital, they are organizing themselves to confront the abuses of capital. Hopefully, these militants will soon be joined in larger numbers by low-end service and gig workers, as is already occurring in the fast foods industry.
Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published extensively on Chinese trans-nationalism, on class and ethnic relations among the Chinese diaspora of Malaysia and Australia, and on local politics and race relations in the US. He has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous books and reviewed journal articles on these topics.
References
Dixon, P., and R. Gelman. (2014). “The Scoring of America: How secret consumer scores threaten your privacy and your future.” World Privacy Forum, 1-89.
Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3(1), 163-178.
García-Pérez, M., S. Gaither, and W. Darity Jr. (2020). “Baltimore study: Credit scores.” Working Paper Series, Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Washington, DC.
Harcourt, B. E. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in The Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, D. (2004). “The New Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register 40, 63-87
Hudson, M. W. (2010). The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis. New York: Times books/Henry Holt and Company
Kapferer, B. and M. Gold (2018). A nail in the coffin. Arena Magazine 152, 37-43.
O’Neil, C. (2017). Weapons of Math Destruction. New York: Broadway Books.
Wang, J. (2018). Carceral Capitalism. Intervention Series, 21. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).
Cite as: Nonini, Don. 2022. “Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization.” FocaalBlog, 28 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/28/don-nonini-scoring-the-u-s-working-class-expropriation-and-digitalization
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?
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.
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One feature of both the economic recession of 2007/2008 and the present Covid-19-induced economic collapse is increased central bank bouts of quantitative easing. The U.S. Federal Reserve, after pumping about $500 billion in the economy in 2008 is adding $2.3 trillion as of April 2020, while the European Central Bank (ECB) launched a €750 billion asset purchase program in March. And the IMF estimates that global fiscal support to counter the economic effects of the pandemic is $9 trillion. The question is who gets it and what does it tell us about today’s political economy and what happens next (see also on this blog: Don Kalb 2020a)?
Don Nonini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Insa Koch’s recent (2020) FOCAAL blog, “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain,” reminds us that enslavement and the bodies of black people are profoundly interconnected, and the link to challenges to “the punitive turn” and police abuse in the UK by the Black Lives Matter movement protests are all but explicit in her piece. At the same time, other recent FOCAAL blogs have dealt with the connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and contemporary global capitalism.
Black enslavement and Covid-19 are intimately intertwined. The insurgency of Black Lives Matter during the months of May-June 2020 has its own dynamics. That said, the wide turning out of protests supporting Black Lives Matter in the streets of European cities and towns (London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Milan, Kraków, Dublin, Manchester, Munich…) demonstrates that the European left has strongly shown its ongoing antiracist solidarity with African-American struggles, seeking to come to terms with Europe’s own troubled imperial history of enslavements, and challenging its current neo-nationalist or fascist resurgence under declining neoliberal capitalism (Kalb 2020).
The links between black enslavement and Covid-19 start – and continue with – the formation of agro-industrial capitalism and its relations to transnational finance capital.
The Lash, Degraded Ecologies, Finance
There is a clear relationship between the emergence of modern enslavement and the history of a full-blown agro-industrial capitalism. The close connections between fully rationalized capitalist agrarian production, finance, and slavery are only recently becoming clear.
New research on the North American southern plantation economies shows just how advanced rationalized capitalist production was under the conditions of slavery (Baptist 2014). Beyond its monocropping ecology, “many of agribusinesses’ key innovations, in both technology and organization, originated in slavery” (Wallace 2016: 261). Slaveholders measured land only against the capacity of slave labor to transform it, setting the cotton production line in terms of “bales per hand,” with enslaved African men being “hands,” nursing mothers “half hands” and children “quarter hands.” The labor process of picking cotton was measured and held to a standard by another unit of measurement – the “lash.”
“Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck” (Baptist 2014: 130). As Baptist further points out, “on the nineteenth century cotton frontier… enslavers extracted more production from each enslaved person every year. . . the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip” (2014: 112). Planters managed a refined rationality based on the application of the whip measured out in lashes to the backs of a slave calculated relative to their infraction – how many pounds of cotton his basket fell short of making a bale, whether or not there were impurities in it, whether one slave helped another pick her quota – in which case the former received extra lashes. Under the circumstances, the rationality of increased “labor productivity” so vaunted by economists depended straightforwardly on graduated torture – with little contribution (the cotton gin aside) from “technological innovation.”
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 culminated the violent displacement of Indian nations from the Mississippi Gulf region and transformation of their territories into “new lands” of thousands of acres ready for slave-based production (Baptist 2014: 228-229). Cotton monoculture quickly exhausted the rich soils of the South, exposed the crops to rust, rot, and worms, while plowing rows of cotton aligned to the day’s sunlight to maximize yield eroded the land and exhausted aquifers within 10 to 15 years after clearing (Wallace 2016: 266).
Due to the lack of food self-sufficiency and the seasonality of cotton harvests, indebtedness by plantation owners to Northern financiers and cotton brokers became increasingly common. By the 1830s, the cotton plantations of Mississippi, Alabama and Eastern Louisiana had adopted new forms of finance and indebtedness, when the Consolidated Association of Planters of Louisiana was established to allow their member planters to mortgage their slaves as collateral for loans from international financiers, led by the Baring Brothers and the Bank of England, that pooled investments from Europe’s finest old and new upper classes to buy the lucrative bonds issued by the Association (Baptist 2014: 245-8).
Monocropping of plants and animals, the simplification and degradation of local and regional ecologies, rapid expansion of logistics over space, reliance on finance capital for loans to expand production, and the use of enslaved degraded labor – these design features of agro-industrial capitalism have remained in effect to the present.
Meat Markets, Neo-Slave Markets
The coerced use of black labor continued after the Civil War in the cotton sharecropping economy until its decline in the 1930s. At the same time, the new agro-industrial complex of livestock production in the U.S. South – again based on the hyper-exploitation of black labor – got underway. By the 1970s, the livestock industries of intensive hog, poultry, and beef production had become thoroughly institutionalized – through vertical integration (Heffernan and Constance 1994; Stiffler 2005), increases in slaughterhouse assembly-line tempos, and incorporation of meat eating as a universal practice within the diets of the U.S. population (Schlosser 2001, 2012; Stiffler 2005). Since the 1990s the meat industries have globalized to penetrate the BRICS economies, a process facilitated by the lubrication of capital provided by hedge funds and investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs’ deal-making in the sale of Smithfield Foods to Shuanghui in China (Wallace 2016: 269-271).
Subjugated and coerced black labor has anchored and offered up surplus value through U.S. agro-industrial cotton and meat production since the end of legal slavery. Since the 1960s, rural poor African-Americans, especially women, have worked in the meat processing plants of the Midwest, Mississippi delta and Carolinas regions experiencing intensified exploitation, sexual harassment and brutalized and unsafe working conditions. By the 1990s, they were joined by immigrant Mexican and Central American workers (Nonini 2003; Stiffler 2005; Stuesse 2016), with whom white plant managers sought to set them in competition.
The Great Migration of 6 million African-Americans from 1915-1970 from the South to cities in the northern and midwestern U.S. was a form of flight from re-legalized enslavement at the hands of Jim Crow whites. Migration to the Midwest and Northeast placed large numbers of blacks at the factory doors of the Fordist industries of the North. Relegated to secondary labor markets by discrimination from white industrial labor unions during the 1950s-1970s (Cowie 2010: 236-244), black industrial workers by the 1990s, like their white counterparts, were thrown out of work by the globalization of industrial production. The only exceptions were the neo-slavery of hyper-sweated meat processing and related industrial food labor.
“Broken Windows Policing” and the Expropriation of Black Lives
The grown children and grandchildren of these laid-off black industrial workers, with more recent Latinx immigrant workers, now form both the hyper-exploited workers in the food industries (meat processing, fast foods, farm work) and situated in the cities and small towns of the South, Midwest and the Northeast, and those who are chronically unemployed and underemployed, doubly discriminated against due to their poverty (forcing them to leave school before high school graduation), and their race. Those African-Americans who have more or less steady employment also show disproportionate levels of consumer debt – from credit cards, student loans, and medically -related debt. Whether steadily employed or not, a key insight is that by and large both groups draw on the same population of urban African-Americans.
The population of urban African-Americans has the profound misfortune of living in cities recurrently subject to gentrification at the new “urban scale” of globalized real estate and finance-rentier capital (Smith 2008: 239-266). Their residence in spaces made newly desirable by gentrification by the 2000s is the obverse of the fact that up to the 1990s whites fled inner cities in large numbers for segregated suburbs, while African-Americans found themselves only able to afford to live, and only allowed to live within, housing in these redlined inner-city districts.
By the 2000s, however, real estate in these districts had become “hot properties” for global finance capital seeking new sites for safe but extraordinarily profitable rent collection and property speculation in realizing value. This trend by the 1990s was both shaped by and reinforced through the “broken window policing” that targeted unemployed and underemployed African-Americans and Latinx populations (Camp et al. 2016).
What precisely is the role of broken windows policing in the gentrification process? Put non-too-subtly, even one broken window indicates the existence of a “criminal” – an undesirable element in a neighborhood. The role of such policing is the physical removal to jails or prison, or, if that is impossible, the destruction of African-Americans whose very presence threatens the “real estate values” that the finance industry and its local allies hold dear. This goes far to explain the more than 1000 people killed by local police every year in the US, of whom more than one fourth are African-American; the one third of African-American men between ages 19-35 who are “justice involved” – in jail awaiting trial, on bail, undergoing trial, in prison, on probation or parole; and their disproportionate representation in the US’s incarcerated population, the largest per capita in the world.
Nancy Fraser (2016) observes that there is an historical dialectic between the conditions that set out “normal” exploitation of the working force, and the conditions of expropriation of the lives, labor, and property of racialized and vulnerable (e.g. immigrant) populations — as two complementary means through which the accumulation of capital can and does take place under capitalism. Fraser argues that that the new being of neoliberal global capitalism is “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker,” and that “the racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits” (Fraser 2016:163).
Image 1: Black Lives Matters Protests in Durham, U.S. (Credit: Durham Workers Assembly Durham, North Carolina, with kind permission)
We can see these two modes of appropriation of surplus value in the tense interconnections between whites and the African-American population in the United States through the latter’s vexed history with respect to agro-industrial and finance capitalism. These interconnections are potentially the point of class differentiation between the increasingly precarious white “middle class” and urban African-Americans, who straddle a black employed working-class subjected to intensified exploitation on one hand, and a lumpen-proletariat subjected to police-impelled expropriation and dispossession, on the other.
Ongoing criminalization and the indebtedness of black people (the latter a tool of finance capital’s domination) are the instruments driving large numbers of urban black workers disproportionately employed in the agro-industrial food sector toward the toxic mix of indebtedness, unemployment (where employers often refuse to hire blacks holding consumer debt), bankruptcy, evictions from shelter, police “stop and frisk” harassment, enforced fines and fees levied (via police and private firms working for straitened municipalities), assault, imprisonment, and death (Wang 2018:99-192).
Don Nonini is Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent books are “Getting by”: Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell, 2015), and The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux, co-edited (Routledge, 2020). His most recent publication in FOCAAL is “Theorizing the Urban Housing Commons” (2017).
References
Baptist, E. E. (2014). The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism.
Camp, J. T. and C. Heatherton (2016). Policing the planet : why the policing crisis led to black lives matter.
Cowie, J. (2010). Stayin’ alive : the 1970s and the last days of the working class. New York, New Press : Distributed by Perseus Distribution.
Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies3(1): 163-178.
Harvey, D. (2018). Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York, Oxford University Press.
Heffernan, W. and D. H. Constance (1994). Transnational corporations and the globalization of the food system. From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food. A. Bonanno, L. Busch and e. al. Lawrence, KA, University Press of Kansas Press: 29-51.
Nonini, D. M. (2003). American neoliberalism, ‘globalization,’ and violence: Reflections from the United States and Southeast Asia. Globalization, The State, and Violence. J. Friedman. Walnut Creek, CA, Altamira Press (Rowman & Littlefield): 163-202.
Schlosser, E. ((2001), 2012). Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal, with a New Afterword. Boston, MA, Mariner books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Smith, N. and D. Harvey (2008). Uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. Athens, University of Georgia Press.
Striffler, S. (2005). Chicken : the dangerous transformation of America’s favorite food. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Stuesse, A. Scratching out a living : Latinos, race, and work in the Deep South.
Wallace, R. (2016). Big Farms Make Big Flue: Dispatches on infectious disease, agribusiness, and the nature of science. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Wang, J. (2018). Carceral capitalism. Semiotext(e) Interventions, 21. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e).
Sharryn Kasmir,HofstraUniversity & University of Bergen
Several weeks into the global pandemic, the gravity of the COVID-19-triggered economic crisis in the United States is coming into focus. As of this writing, some 22 million people were put out of work, one in four small businesses face permanent closure, and a third of renters were unable to pay rent in the month of April.
Unsettled by Donald Trump’s bigotry and xenophobia, liberal pundits have struggled to understand his improbable anointment as the nominee of the Republican party. Many have sought answers in the experience and behavior of the white-working class, the bedrock of Trump support. Why, asks the New Yorker’s James Surolecki, would any working class person support Trump. Surolecki believes that part of the answer lies in the appeal of Trump’s nativist rhetoric. For William Galston, writing in Newsweek, working class whites vote for Trump because they “seek protection against all the forces that they perceive as hostile to their way of life—foreign people, foreign goods, foreign ideas.” And wary of Trump backers and their potential for violence if the Republicans lose the presidency, Salon’s Michael Bourne locates white working class anger in “1960s-era legislation for promoting the interests of immigrants and minorities over their own, just as they blame free-trade policies of both parties for sending their jobs offshore.” According to Bourne, they are either the hapless “victims of American progress or a bunch of over privileged bigots.” Continue reading →
