On global capital not abiding limits and a history of pandemics

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Introduction

The outbreak of SARS Coronovirus 2 or Covid-19 proceeds an escalation of recent epidemics and proto-pandemics: notably, H5N1 or Avian influenza, SARS, MERS, Swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. We are not currently experiencing a pandemic, Mike Davis (2020) pronounces, we are living in an age of pandemics. Rob Wallace (2020) explains this trend as the consequence of interrelated changes in economic geography and ecological geographies: a widening circuit of agricultural production, consumption and exchange that is pushing deeper into forests and back out into cities; with subsequent changes in the ecologies of host species that historically would have been confined to deep forests, which are now transported to peri-urban regions with high concentrations of human bodies. Traversing a globally integrated air traffic network, pathogens previously not on the global stage are being brought to it.

Davis (2020), citing a study from Science magazine, illustrates the context of Ebola and other diseases emerging in and from West Africa (currently the fastest urbanizing area in the world). The population of West Africa has traditionally relied on fish protein, however, commencing in the 1980s, European, Russian and Japanese factory fleets have trawled and significantly reduced this biomass. Concurrently, multinational logging companies have increased their operations; to keep their costs down, they hire professional hunters to kill mammals in their path. With fish becoming too expensive for West African city dwellers, the population has turned to the consumption of bushmeat (originally just practiced in the logging camps) as the major source of protein. In sum, this widening commerce of bushmeat hunting alongside the destruction of rainforest have generated new viral exposures and pathways to humans of previously isolated pathogens.

In this essay, using the case studies of HIV/AIDS and SARS, I explore the nexus between capitalist political economy, nature, and emergent infectious diseases; concluding that, without radical change to how we organise and run our world, our future will be locked into this trajectory of escalating pandemics.

HIV/AIDS

HIV-1 and HIV-2 originate from the Simian Immune-deficiency Viruses (SIV) of chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys in Central and West Africa (Honigsbaum, 2019), with the probable zoonotic leap, from one chimpanzee to one human hunter of bushmeat (through a cut or wound), no later than 1908 (Quammen, 2013). From here, the virus travelled. At this moment, put in historical context, previous epidemiological dead ends were no longer so: the virus travelled because of changes in conditions of existence propelled by a capital-fuelled colonial age. Mark Honigsbaum (2019) points to the emergence of steamship transportation and road and railway construction during the colonial period of the Congo, and the relentless pursuit of profit by logging and timber companies, intersecting with social and cultural phenomenon (bushmeat hunting and consumption, and prostitution by the labour camps of railway and timber companies), as the central early drivers in the journey of HIV/AIDS.

While official Belgian colonial rule of the Congo ran from 1908 to 1960, the groundwork for colonial expansion began in the late nineteenth century. Given the need of capital to self-expand and thus the impetus for greater mobility of both capital and labour, the 1892 steamship service from Léopoldville (later renamed Kinshasa) to Stanleyville (later Kisangi) and 1898 Matadi-Kinshasa railway (linking the port of Matadi to Léopoldville) provided geographical connectivity and concentration of populations previously separated. With a consequent influx of labour migrants and Belgian administrators, a rapidly urbanizing Léopoldville became the capital of the Belgian Congo in 1923, running domestic flight services and by 1936 a direct international flight route to Brussels. Further geographical connectivity and concentration of capital and labour came under French colonial administration, notably, the construction of the Congo-Ocean railroad in the 1920s, which – cutting through forest – brought labourers into rural territories home to the Simian Immune-deficiency Viruses. Once built, this railroad provided a constant flow of Africans and Europeans between Brazzaville (the new capital of the French colonial federation) through Léopoldville to Pointe-Noire at the coast. What’s more, road construction through the Congo Basin by timber companies pushed bushmeat hunters deeper into the forest and encouraged the growth of prostitution near the labour camps (Honigsbaum, 2019). One way or another, through new viral pathways that were new transport pathways driven by capital accumulation, by the 1920s, Léopoldville was home to HIV.

Both Honigsbaum (2019) and Quammen (2013) draw on research by Jacques Pepin to explain how the virus amplifies from here into an eventual global pandemic: sex and medical technology – specifically, the reuse of ineffectively sterilized hypodermic needles and reusable syringes in public and humanitarian health campaigns in Africa, and blood banks and transfusion services – were the key amplifiers of HIV. By the 1920s Léopoldville had a large male labour force, with economic migrants discouraged by the Belgian colonial administration from bringing their families with them; consequently, men outnumbered women four to one and prostitution was widespread (Honigsbaum, 2019). The virus likely amplified through a campaign by the Congolese Red Cross which established a clinic in 1929 in Léopoldville to treat sexually transmitted diseases; this campaign ran throughout in the 1930s and 1940s and peaked, in terms of the number of administered injections, in 1953 (Quammen, 2013). Another possible amplification was during the 1930s though the vaccination campaigns along the railways against yaws and sleeping sickness, and against malaria in southern Cameroon (Honigsbaum, 2019).

HIV-1 group M subtype B, around 1966, travels from Léopoldville to Haiti and, in or around 1969, from Haiti to the United States. Honigsbaum (2019) and Quammen (2013) again draw on the work of Pepin for a plausible answer as to how. Congo’s independence in 1960, marred by civil war, led to an influx of refugees into Kinshasa and an expansion of prostitution (Honigsbaum, 2019). Another outcome was the exodus of a Belgian expatriate skilled middle class. This vacuum of labour supply was addressed by campaigns to bring in skilled labour from elsewhere. Overseen by the WHO and UNESCO, recruits came from Haiti in the early 1960s. By the late 1960s and early 1970s however, the political instability of the state ideological campaign known as Zairianisation or Authenticité – to rid the Democratic Republic of Congo (later renamed Zaire) of colonialism and Western influences – drove many of this labour force back to Haiti. It would have taken just one of these returnees to have carried HIV with them. In January 1972, The New York Times broke a story of the commodification and export of Haitian human blood plasma and a political economy involving both US based capital and the Haitian government. The article states:

“PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Jan 26 – An American‐owned company here is buying blood plasma from impoverished Haitians who need the money and exporting 5,000 to 6,000 liters of it every month to the United States. […] Hemo Caribbean is owned by Joseph B. Gorinstein, stockbroker with interests in New York and Miami. He has a 10‐year contract with the Haitian Government that was negotiated with President Francois Duvalier, who died last April. Werner H. Thill, the company’s technical director, said that the Haitian Government received no money from Hemo Caribbean. Reliable sources here say that the principal agent between the Government and Hemo Caribbean was Luckner Cambronne, the Minister of Interior and National Defense, who is said to be one of the most influential persons here. […] Mr. Thill says that applicants are rejected if they are known to have hepatitis, but he adds that he is not especially concerned about those who may slip through the screening process with venereal disease or malaria. The freezing process used on the plasma “kills those bacteria,” he says. The Haitians, many in rags and without shoes, crowd into Hemo Caribbean six days week from 6:30 A.M. to 10 P.M. They spend about an hour and a half to two hours in screening and actually giving blood. […] The plasma is frozen and shipped to the United States by Air Haiti, Mr. Cambronne’s airline.”

“Capital is dead labour”, which, Marx (1867) tells us, “vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. Luckner Cambronne, because of his central exploitative role in the selling of blood plasma of Haitian donors to the United States, was widely coined both in Haiti and overseas, “The Vampire of the Caribbean” (Davison, 2006). Via either one infected person or one infected container of blood plasma, around 1969, HIV travels from Haiti to the United States; from there, it later travels to Canada, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Estonia, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Australia; it also travels back into Africa (Quammen, 2013). Since the first cases of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome were officially reported in 1981 in the US, worldwide, 76 million people have been infected with HIV and 33 million people have died (World Health Organization, 2020).

A popular narrative (as represented through Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On) that either politically stigmatizes or reclaims the association of HIV/AIDS with queer sexuality is only one part of the historical story, specifically, how the virus amplified once it arrived in the United States. In the wider historical narrative I have relayed, capital is a leading actor. Marx (1857) observes in Grundrisse:

“Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.”

From possibly just one human exposure in southeastern Cameroon, HIV/AIDS made its way into and later out of Kinshasa through the new transportation routes of a colonial era and a globalizing era; because capital abides no geographical limits, former epidemiological dead ends were no more and new viral pathways were generated.

SARS

In the period since 1979 known as opening and reform, the Chinese Communist Party has overseen the entry of foreign capital into the country. Through the 1980s, especially the 1990s, and into the early millennium, China has experienced a staggering pace and degree of economic growth and urbanization. Guangdong, a coastal province in southern China, has been at the centre of this rapid capitalist transformation. Home to the earliest Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou, and to the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, Guangdong is now the largest provincial economy and population in China, with Guangzhou (its capital) and Shenzhen global megacities and the country’s top two cities for GDP output. This has driven two ecological effects: the development of industrial-scale poultry farms to supply Guangdong’s huge labour force, growing from an estimated 700 million chickens in 1997 to, by 2008, one billion so-called high quality broiler chickens annually; and the orientation of smaller livestock producers and rice farmers to fattening domestic chickens and ducks to sell in “wet markets” that exist on the edges of Guangdong’s urban areas (Honigsbaum, 2019). Wet markets are markets that, along with fruit and vegetables, stock live animals for slaughter as fresh meat and fish. Davis (2005) explains:

“Thanks especially to the prevalence of wet markets in the cities, the urbanization of Guangdong has probably intensified rather than decreased microbial traffic between humans and animals. As income has risen with industrial employment, the population is eating more meat and less rice and vegetables. […] An extraordinary concentration of poultry […] coexists with high human densities, large numbers of pigs, and ubiquitous wild birds. […] Moreover, as the urban footprint has expanded and farm acreage has contracted, a fractal pattern of garden plots next to dormitories and factories has brought urban population and livestock together in more intimate contact. […] Guangdong is also a huge market for wild meat.”

Quammen (2013), referencing Karl Taro Greenfeld, observes that the wild animal trade within the Pearl River Delta is less to do with limited resources, need, or ancient traditions, and more attributable to the capitalist boom and related rise in conspicuous consumption. The contemporary Era of Wild Flavour, most prevalent in southern China, draws from earlier traditions and goes beyond them; Wild Flavour (yewei) is regarded as a way of gaining “face”, prosperity, and good luck. To supply Guangdong’s wet markets to meet the demand of a burgeoning affluent class frequenting the Wild Flavour restaurants of the province’s cities, there has been an increase in the volume of wild animal trade, with greater cross-border commerce (both legal and illegal) from other South East Asia countries (Vietnam and Laos, for example) into southern China and a rise in captive bred animals on unregulated small farms (Honigsbaum, 2019; Quammen, 2013). This is what Mike Davis, in 2005, coined the monster at our door, and, in light of SARS Coronavirus 2, states as the entirely familiar monster that has now walked through our front door (Davis, 2020). He elaborates, super urbanizing animal populations by factory farming is artificially creating the optimal conditions for the emergence of newly infectious diseases, speeding up the evolution of new strains, and guaranteeing the advent of pandemics (Davis, 2020). Following the work of Rob Wallace, an article from the Chinese Chuǎng journal (2020) argues that emergent infectious diseases arising in and out of China are best understood through a wider economic geography innate to capitalism, specifically, “the evolutionary pressure cooker of capitalist agriculture and urbanization”, which:

“provides the ideal medium through which ever-more-devastating plagues are born, transformed, induced to zoonotic leaps, and then aggressively vectored through the human population. To this is added similarly intensive processes occurring at the economy’s fringes, where “wild” strains are encountered by people pushed to ever-more extensive agroeconomic incursions into local ecosystems. The most recent coronavirus, in its “wild” origins and its sudden spread through a heavily industrialized and urbanized core of the global economy, represents both dimensions of our new era of political-economic plagues.”

The exceptional coming together of multiple species, which would not have otherwise crossed paths in nature yet are now stacked up together in crowded conditions in dense urban environments, is, as Quammen (2013: 189) puts it, “zoological bedlam”. It should be of no surprise then that a wet market of Guangzhou was the source of the zoonotic leap of SARS in 2002, and a wet market in Wuhan, Hubei province in south central China, the source of the spillover of SARS Coronavirus 2 in 2019. The natural reservoirs of both SARS Coronaviruses are likely bats. While SARS had a higher mortality rate, a critical difference between SARS and SARS Coronavirus 2 is the latter’s higher viral load prior to the onset of symptoms, which makes the effort to contain its spread much more difficult.

Conclusions

In narrating two stories about HIV/AIDS and SARS, I want to warn against geographically limiting one’s attention to Africa and Asia when thinking about pandemic threat. Instead, a focus on the intersection of the local and the global is key: local conditions of existence and capitalist political economy shape viral evolution, thus have meaning in explaining and predicting emergent infectious diseases, but the local intimately intersects with the global networks and processes of capitalist political economy. Eskew and Carlson (2020: e216) note, “due to globalisation, industrial agriculture, and the ubiquity of viral biodiversity, a pandemic can emerge practically anywhere.” For instance, the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, which originated from a pig farm in the United States. At the same time, influenza is also emergent, as Wallace (2016: 29) states, “by way of a globalized network of corporate poultry production and trade, wherever specific strains first evolve”. Furthermore, in the context of the biosecurity of a globalized agribusiness, in which, for example, mass vaccination of poultry is itself generating, in reaction, more evolutionary virulent strains of influenza (Wallace, 2016), a myopic focus on Africa and Asia takes our attention away from the fact that richer countries “routinely outsource their biodiversity threats to other nations” (Eskew and Carlson, 2020: e215). Or, as David Harvey (2010: 3) remarks, “capitalism never solves its crisis problems, it moves them around geographically”. At all scales, states and capitals are involved in the covering up and downplaying of emergent infectious diseases because pathogens are “enmeshed” within “the political economy of the business of food” (Wallace, 2016:48). Moves by the World Health Organization to a new system of nomenclature, away from specifying geographic or animal origin, is precisely because of political pressure by powerful states and industries (Wallace, 2016).

There is a conceptual error that can be found in much work exploring ecological crises (both on pandemics and on climate change). The Anthropocene, for example, effectively presents humanity as a single homogenous bloc, outside of historical forms of society with distinct socio-economic relations, which, as Andreas Malm recognizes, re-naturalizes ecological crisis as an outcome of human disposition (see Kunkel, 2017). Marxist ecology applies a crucial insight and steer to the relationship between human socio-economic relations and nature, by understanding that capitalism “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself” (Marx, cited in Verdansky, 2019). The problem is capitalism, as such the solution is a global system change that has at its centre a “socialised humanity” that “govern[s] the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control, instead of being dominated by it as a blind power” (ibid). If we are to find ourselves out of a current trajectory of escalating pandemics, we need a socialist politics that is radical and visionary:

“The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature. […] It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable “that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.”” (Marx, 1844)

References

Chuǎng (2020) “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China”, http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/

Davis, Mike (2020) “Mike Davis on Coronavirus Politics”, The Dig podcast.

Davis, Mike (2005) The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. The New Press: London.

Davison, Phil (2006) “Obituary: Luckner Cambronne”. Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/luckner-cambronne-418865.html

Eskew, Evan A and Carlson, Colin J (2020) “Overselling wildlife trade bans will not bolster conservation or pandemic preparedness”. The Lanset, Volume 4, Issue 6, e215-e216, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30123-6/fulltext

Harvey, David (2010) “RSA: The Crisis of Capitalism”, https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/blogs/rsa-lecture-david-harvey-transcript.pdf

Honigsbaum, Mark (2019) The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris. Hurst & Company: London.

Kunkel, Benjamin (2017) “The Capitalocene”. London Review of Books, 39(5), 22-28.

Marx, Karl (1867) Capital: Volume One, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm

Marx, Karl (1857) Grundrisse, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htm

Marx, Karl (1844) On The Jewish Question, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

Quammen, David (2013) Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Vintage Books: London.

Severo, Richard (1972) “Impoverished Haitians Sell Plasma for Use in the U.S.” The New York Times, 28th January 1972, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/01/28/archives/impoverished-haitians-sell-plasma-for-use-in-the-us.html

Vernadsky, Paul (2019) “Marx and the environment”, Workers’ Liberty: Reason in Revolt, https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2019-10-09/marx-and-environment

Wallace, Rob (2020) “How Global Agriculture Grew a Pandemic”, Smarty Pants podcast.

Wallace, Rob (2016) Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science. Monthly Review Press: New York.

Why read Capital?

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Marx drinking coke by Medi Belortaja (2013), accessed from toonpool.com

The following is an edited version of Matthijs Krul’s “Why read Capital, 150 years later?”, originally published in 2017 on New Socialist.

  1. It is an indispensable guide to political economy.

[…] Marx was very keen that his book should be seen not simply as a polemic against capitalism, but as a serious and sober-minded analysis of how it actually works. This also explains the abstraction of the first three chapters: they are essentially Marx defining his terminology and the way he is going to use his concepts for the rest of the work […] In order to understand what the book is about and why it is still important, it is essential to know that it presents a pure theory of capitalism: […] stripped of any historical and geographical particulars, and so applicable to any capitalist society. […] Marx wanted to understand capitalist society as a historically specific way of life, a particular way of organizing labour and goods. […] he observes capitalism as it appears to us: based on the two major drives of competition and accumulation, showing constant technological changes and increases in labor productivity, an almost complete system of private ownership of all things, a regimented workforce that sells its labor for wages during a given working day (or week, or month), plus of course such everyday things as money, finance, and credit. Marx sees these things and describes them, but he goes further than that. He asks why they are the way they are. In that sense, Capital is the answer to a series of questions: why should it be that in this society, the vast majority of people work for someone else for a living? Why is it that not only (almost) all goods and all land, but also our own ability to work is exchanged in markets as private products, and what role does money play in making those markets possible? And if all these goods exchange at the price that they are ‘worth’, and everyone gets as wages what their work is ‘worth’, then where does profit come from? Why is it that while technology was relatively stagnant for most of history, under capitalism everything changes all the time, and there are constantly more things being produced in the same amount of time and work? Why does capitalism need there to be economic ‘growth’, or accumulation, or else it falls apart? […] Although the discussions of ‘value’ and ‘commodities’ may appear strange and difficult, […] the point of them is to answer these questions, and to show how the answers follow from the way capitalism works at its very core: a system in which accumulation takes place under private ownership of competing owners of means of production, and where everything is produced as commodities for the market by competing individuals who sell their labor-power for a wage. […]

  1. It is a great read.

[…] As soon as Marx is past the most abstract discussion […], he gets into a very lively narrative description of the various ways in which capitalism appears immediately at the surface, so to speak. First he discusses how money accumulates, how people sell their ability to work for a wage, and how this creates ‘the market’ in the abstract that is always the subject of economic discussions in the media. Then he describes in great detail, and with many critical comments, the fight over the length and intensity of work-time, the division of labour, the development of modern industry, the different ways in which workers are exploited, and the historical process of robbery, violence, force and extermination that brought capitalism about in the first place. Finally, he points out what all this leads to: endless accumulation that makes capital, and the owners of capital, seem productive, when in fact it is the people working for them that are productive and that make the existence of capital possible even as it exploits them and forces them to compete. In this way, he shows how people unwillingly and unwittingly produce the very system that oppresses them and how that system makes it seem as if it is a force of nature. All this is done in a very readable and vigorous way. Marx’s writings here are some of the best that 19th century polemical writing could produce […] he invokes Don Quixote in order to criticize the idea that the answer to capitalism’s problems is a return to a supposedly better and unproblematic past, or to ways of living that are no longer compatible with modern circumstances. […] He contrasts throughout the glorification of capitalism as a system of liberty, individual rights, and prosperity by the commentators of his day with the reality on the ground that is found in government and newspaper reports […] This reality was and is one of poverty, disease, drudgery, hopelessness, and death for working people, and all the while – then as now – being lectured to about your moral failings in the bargain. […]

  1. It is a political must.

[…] without Marx’s analysis, it is all too easy to blame unemployment, poverty, and economic crisis on other things: strangers in our midst, immigrants, moral failures, insufficient hard work, bad management, or conspiracies. Marx […] shows in this book where the weak points of capitalism are. […]  the chapters on the working day, on wage and piece work, and on co-operation are essential for understanding the labour process and resistance against it. Similarly, the indignant analysis of the forced expropriation, murder, and repression of people in pre-capitalist social relations, and the discussions of ongoing legislation and violence against the working class, jointly help to comprehend the class nature of laws, governments, and their enforcers. […] understanding the political significance of finance and credit systems is also indispensable […] Capital is about understanding the way that technology and technological change affect the way society is organized and the division of labour, and the impact this has on every aspect of social life. It is hard to think of a topic more politically relevant [in] the age of automation […]

  1. It makes you rethink the nature of our society.

[…] Marx’s preoccupation was with the idea that the social forces that determine the course of people’s lives in our society appear to us as if they were inescapable and unchangeable forces of nature, even though they are simply the product, the aggregate result, of our own actions and relationships. […] It is also meant to help the reader understand just how bizarre capitalist society actually is. Why should we survive by spending the vast majority of our lives working for someone else in someone else’s office or shopfloor? Why should the way to get the best out of people, and to create the most liveable and fruitful society, be having everyone compete against each other to produce objects (or services) that exchange for the smallest amount of pieces of paper that have a value printed on them? How come a few people own most things, in terms of the amount of work they can be exchanged for in the market, and most people only own their own ability to work? And most importantly, how come that technology that should make our lives easier never seems to make the workload less, or mean we can stop accumulating and competing? […] he shows […] [capitalist social relations] has come about in a particular historical way, and that it took – and still takes – an enormous amount of both ideological and real violence to make it seem natural. […]

Strike as an act of critical resuscitation

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Screenshot 2020-02-24 at 13.44.49

There is a particular freedom in strike action. The humanistic Marxist philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm reminds us that Marx’s critique of capitalist social relations is based on more than simply the conflict between those who have nothing to sell but their labour-power in order to survive and those who live off the profits. The biggest industrial dispute in UK higher education history pushes to the foreground the contradictory tension between the conditions of existence for academic workers – workload intensification and unpaid labour time, vast casualisation and precarity, a crisis in mental health and wellbeing – and a senior managerial glut personified by those who “drive their Bentleys and sail their yachts through the new wild west” of a sector ravaged by marketisation (Erickson, Hanna, and Walker, 2020). Fromm (1956: 95) identifies a further dimension of Marx’s critique, the “conflict between two principles of value: that between the world of things, and their amassment, and the world of life and its productivity.” Here, by productivity, Marx envisions a productivity beyond capital’s restless drive to self-expand through the exploitation of labour-power, specifically, an autonomous productivity of self and others to holistically develop: a freedom to grow intellectually, emotionally, creatively, and spiritually. On the picket line, one glimpses that freedom; in strike action, one tastes that independence. It is in stark contrast to a marketisation that has alienated academics and students from the university.

The UK university sector has come to embody what Fromm (1956: 6) calls “the pathology of normalcy”: imposing upon us, as academics and students, a social character that “internalizes external necessities” and exploits “human energy for the task” of capitalist relations (Fromm, 1985: 29). Elucidated in The Seven Deadly Sins of Marketisation in British Higher Education (Jones, 2019), the commodification of degrees has turned the academic and student relationship into one of opposition between producer and consumer while degrading the product itself. Competition between universities – based on deeply flawed quantifiable ‘quality’ and associated metrics and league tables – has driven vanity building projects hand-in-hand with a growing managerial bureaucracy fixated with maximising surpluses (along with private finance) to pay for such unstable developments (Jones, 2019). Maximisation of surplus has meant a reduction in the proportion of overall expenditure spent on academic staff (down from 57% to 54% from 2008 to 2018), employment of more and more academic staff on casualised, precarious contracts (currently representing 53% of teaching and research contracts), working academics harder and longer, and sweating the assets – buildings that might look glossy on the outside but are packed full to overflowing on the inside (Jones, 2019). All of this is in the context of a sector “now awash with cash” – higher education income increased 63% from 2008 to 2018 (Jones, 2019).

Students tragically incorporate the marketisation of higher education through the internalisation of its external necessities. The burden of the fee-paying student translates into an expectation that their time at university will provide them with ‘added value’. The pressure on students to gain a high classification in their chosen package of university, degree and modules is an exploitation of their human energy to transform themselves “into an instrument of use and exploitation for others” (Fromm, 1956: 73):

“the aim of learning is to gather as much information as possible that is mainly useful for the purposes of the market. Students are supposed to learn so many things that they have hardly time and energy left to think. Not the interest in the subjects taught or in knowledge and insight as such, but the enhanced exchange value knowledge gives is the main incentive for wanting more and better education.” (Fromm, 1985b: 44)

The effect of this on students’ sense of self is devastating: if they are “successful” in their degree classification, they are “valuable”, if they are not, they are “worthless” (Fromm, 1985b: 42). This marketisation has had a destructive pathological effect on the mental health and wellbeing of academics too. We are trapped in a treadmill to be ‘outstanding’ lecturers, researchers, and administrators, where outstanding is quantified and abstracted in a parallel universe that bears no resemblance to reality and quality, while we work amid ever-worsening conditions of existence. Take, notably, the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) which ranks ‘the product’ (the commodity of the degree and the service provider of the university) by a metricised ranking of so-called teaching quality, which is quantitatively scored through the abstract measures of graduate employment outcomes and student satisfaction results, not through the quality of the real social relationship between the educator and the educated. This is alienation writ large.

Marx understands alienation as estrangement; in Fromm’s (1961: 44) words, alienation “is essentially experiencing the world and oneself passively, receptively”. Alienation in higher education, for the academic and the student, fuels a sense of loneliness and powerlessness: the “students and the content of the lectures remain strangers to each other” (Fromm, 1979: 37). The idea of the university which expands knowledge and understanding through critical frameworks and human connection – as a meaningful process in and of itself – has been lost. And in the process we have lost our freedom to independently express ourselves and grapple with the world. This loss and denial, Fromm (1961: 30) insists, is the prevention of living itself: for if we are passive and receptive, then we are “nothing”, we are effectively “dead”. This UCU strike is an act of critical resuscitation. Through the space of the picket lines and beyond, in our conversations and solidarity with striking colleagues, students and members of the public, we are strangers no more, we experience a negation of alienation: what “Marx calls “productive life”, that is, “… life creating life …”” (Fromm, 1961: 34). For those of us old enough to remember the university prior to its full exposure to destructive market forces, this space reminds us of why we originally fell in love with the university, because it gave us the imaginings of a freedom to – a freedom to be total human beings able to affirm our individuality in all of our relations to the world: “… seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, willing, [and] loving …” (Marx cited in Fromm, 1961: 38). In strike action, we hope and we love once more.

See also:

Bassi, C. (2019) “On the Death Throes of Education: Erich Fromm’s Marxist Rallying Cry for a Healthy University.” In Juergensmeyer, E, Nocella II, A J., and Seis, M (Eds.) Neoliberalism and Academic Repression (pp.31-42). Leiden: Brill Publishers.

References:

Erickson, M., Hanna, P. and Walker, C. (2020) “The Senior Management Survey: auditing the toxic university.” LSE Blogs. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/02/17/the-senior-management-survey-auditing-the-toxic-university/

Fromm, E. (1956) The sane society. London: Routledge.

Fromm, E. (1961) Marx’s concept of man. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing.

Fromm, E. (1979) To have or to be? London: Abacus.

Fromm, E. (1985a) “The Social Character and Its Functions.” In R. Funk (Ed.), The Erich Fromm Reader (pp. 25-30). New Jersey: Humanities Press International.

Fromm, E. (1985b) “The marketing orientation.” In R. Funk (Ed.), The Erich Fromm Reader (pp. 39-45). New Jersey: Humanities Press International.

Jones, L. (2019) “The Seven Deadly Sins of Marketisation in British Higher Education.” Medium. https://medium.com/@drleejones/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-marketisation-in-british-higher-education-c91102a04a8f

A story of tea, the Opium Wars, and early globalisation

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The BBC In Our Times podcasts “Tea” (2004) and “The Opium Wars” (2007) are a fascinating insight into the interrelated historical journeys of tea and opium and the early development of global capitalism. Originating in and solely sourced from China, European contact with tea in the early sixteenth century paved the way for it later becoming Britain’s first mass commodity and a core component of its national identity. From 1660 onwards, the British East India Company’s dealings with local merchants in the port of Canton provided a foothold into trade with China and its produce of tea. Tea became one of numerous exotic and luxury commodities introduced into Britain from around the world in the expectation that some would appeal to consumers and generate a profit. Tea, coffee, sugar, and tobacco all grew in demand – promoted, in a partnership between commerce and medicine, as medicinal products. While at the end of the seventeenth century, tea drinking in Britain was the preserve of the aristocratic elite, by 1750 there had been a huge increase in the importation and consumption of tea. The mass success of the tea commodity was in conjunction with that of the sugar commodity: Chinese black tea became domesticated as British with the addition of milk and sugar. Sweet hot milky tea satisfied a demand for a non-alcoholic energising beverage that was easy to prepare. Two interconnected trading triangles and systems accordingly developed, signifying the emergence of a global economy by 1750: one, trading in tea, connecting Britain to India to China back to Britain; the other, trading in sugar, connecting Britain to the continent of Africa to the West Indies back to Britain; both plugged into one another.

“… you have Africans imported in their millions by the British … to produce sugar which you mix with Chinese tea to slate the natural thirst of even the lowest income people of this country …” (BBC In Our Times: Tea, 2004)

The problem for British traders in the eighteenth century was paying for tea. China wanted and needed very little from Britain in exchange, so an unbalanced tea trade was paid for with a depleting stock of silver. Silver represented a further global movement: originating in the silver mines of Central and South America and transported via the trading triangles of the colonial empires into China; China being known at this time as “the silver grave of the world” (BBC In Our Times: The Opium Wars, 2007). A crucial development in paying for tea was the British control of the territory and revenue of Bengal in the 1760s, which generated a considerable surplus revenue; between 1750 and 1780, British investment in Indian textiles (namely, cotton) were exported to Canton, providing proceeds to pay for tea. It is at this point in the story of tea that opium enters the picture.

The Portuguese Empire first discovered and shipped opium to China; it also introduced the practice of smoking from the New World, turning opium consumption from a medicinal to a pleasure product. By the 1770s and 1780s opium was in great demand in the country, despite being banned by the Qing Dynasty for reasons of social control. Opium was desirable both as a consumable good and, for traders, as a portable currency, preferable to heavy copper and a shortage of silver. The British East India Company not only had a monopoly on the production of opium in India, its Patna opium was highly demanded because of its known superior quality. The Company, whilst publicly stating its adherence to the Qing Dynasty’s opium ban, oversaw private British traders dealing opium into China; the receipt of which was paid into its treasury.

Manufacture of opium in India (Wikimedia Commons)

This late eighteenth century rise in the trade of (Indian) opium offset the trade deficit between Britain and China and paid for the British addiction to (Chinese) tea.

The 1839 burning of opium at Humen (part of an organised crackdown endorsed by the Qing Dynasty) actually benefited private British traders, since, before this event, the country was inundated with opium driving down its price, while after, its price soared. What followed was the First Opium War (1839-1842): a spectacular military response by the British that used the latest technology of the time, armour-plated steamers, which led to Chinese defeat, the Nanking Treaty (opening port cities, or treaty ports, to foreign trade) and the territorial concession of Hong Kong. The Second Opium War (1856-1860) was both a further defeat for China and a further opening of treaty ports to foreign imperial powers. The rise of Chinese nationalism following the Opium Wars turned an anti-opium failure into a discourse of anti-opium hero; a narrative that remains a key part of Chinese national identity against the West.

Second Opium War (Wikimedia Commons)

Other national identities were bound up with this story of early globalisation. The export of tea from Britain to North America in the early eighteenth century, and its demand and consumption, was part of how American colonial elites defined themselves. However, when the British government imposed taxes on this tea trade in the 1760s, the response was non-importation of tea and throwing tea into Boston harbour, known as the Boston Tea Party. This anti-tax protest was also an anti-British protest. In the early years of the Republic, America was self-consciously on a course to becoming a coffee drinking, not a tea drinking, nation.

Boston Tea Party (Wikimedia Commons)

The problem of only being able to supply tea from China was eventually resolved by turning to India. Although the British East India Company was involved in early trials to grow tea elsewhere, the loss of its monopoly in India in 1813 explains its reluctance to heavily invest in tea production there, since it would be undercut by private tea growers. What’s more, the Company maintained its monopoly in China until 1833. Once the monopolies in both India and China ceased, tea production in India (notably, Assam) significantly developed.

Reflecting on the BBC In On Times podcasts, the historical and interwoven journeys of tea and opium provide a story on the construction of national identities during a period of early globalisation, in which such national identities are themselves the distinct products of globalisation. This story is also an insight into the emergence of a genuinely global economy: its centre and peripheries, and its peculiarities and forced economic and social resolutions. The story of the Opium Wars is actually the story of tea, and the story of tea is in fact the story of capital relentlessly pushing geographical boundaries and abiding no limits.

 

References:

BBC (2004). In Our Times: Tea, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y24y

BBC (2007). In Our Times: The Opium Wars, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00776k9

On the Great Derangement and yearning for original fullness

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Amitav Ghosh’s (2016) book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, is a commendable thesis on how the climate crisis is not simply a manifestation of physical geographical quantities but also a qualitative crisis in human geographical imagination. In other words, the climate crisis reveals an inability of the cultural imagination to face up to this reality and to envisage alternative possibilities and ways out. Ghosh is a highly accomplished Indian novelist whose catalogue of fiction is distinguished by its interweaving of global and historical political economy with personal narrative. He is thus well positioned in his criticism of the literary profession:

“That climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena is not hard to establish. […] When the subject of climate change occurs in these publications, it is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon. Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the grave of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.” (Ghosh, 2016: 7)

(Wikimedia Commons)

Ghosh (2016: 22) contextualises this myopia of literary imagination as born out of nineteenth century discourse on modernity as orderly and progressive; a discourse which also shaped the discipline of geology:

“The victory of gradualist views in science was similarly won by characterizing catastrophism as un-modern. In geology, the triumph of gradualist thinking was so complete that Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, which posited upheavals of sudden and unimaginable violence, was for decades discounted and derided.”

Narratives from fiction and nonfiction accordingly came to chime with the new regularity of bourgeois-dominated life, and yet the unpredictability of global warming now defies this conventional lens.

Ghosh (2016: 58-59) explains how the modern novel unfolds through a ‘setting’ – the construction of a ‘sense of place’ (as humanistic geography would understand it):

“settings become the vessel for the exploration of that ultimate instance of discontinuity: the nation-state. In novels discontinuities of space are accompanied also by discontinuities of time: a setting usually requires a “period”; it is actualized within a certain time horizon. […] It is through the imposition of these boundaries, in time and space, that the world of a novel is created.”

This fictive geographical imagining, a bounded and discontinuous spatial-temporal terrain, is contrasted with the holistic and fluid space and time of the Anthropocene:

“it was in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human. Inasmuch as the nonhuman was written about at all, it was not within the mansion of serious fiction but rather in the outhouses to which science fiction and fantasy had been banished.” (Ghosh, 2016: 66)

The setting of the novel, Ghosh (2016: 131-133) contends, mirrors a dominant culture of politics, economics and literature that has exiled the idea of the collective in the search for personal authenticity and (at best) a career in personal political virtue – impeding effective resistance to, and reimagining of, the climate crisis:

“the public sphere, where politics is performed, has been largely emptied of content in terms of the exercise of power: as with fiction, it has become a forum of secular testimony, a baring-of-the-soul in the world-as-church. Politics as thus practiced is primarily an exercise in personal expressiveness. […] Of late, many activists and concerned people have begun to frame climate change as a “moral issue” […] When framed in this way, authenticity and sacrifice become central to the issue […] To think in those terms is to accept neo-liberal premises.”

Ghosh (2016: 129) continues, “the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction” in imagining alternative futures has been lost in its orientation towards the self and away from the human collective and the nonhuman; he astutely asks:

“Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, “Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?” or “where were you on 9/11” Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, “Where were you at 400 ppm [parts per million]?” or “Where were you when the Larson B ice shelf broke up?””

Echoing the title of the book, Ghosh (2016: 11) proclaims:

“Quite possibly then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.”

Ghosh is keen to distinguish himself from those who attribute the climate crisis to capitalism alone, since, he claims, this underplays the central role of empire and imperialism. He argues:

“To look at the climate crisis through the prism of empire is to recognize […] that the continent of Asia is conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming: its causes, its philosophical and historical implications, and the possibility of a global response to it.” (Ghosh, 2016: 87)

He elaborates:

“The factor that gave the carbon economy its decisive shape was not the provenance of the machines that ushered in the Industrial Revolution: these could have been used and imitated just as easily in other parts of the world as they were in continental Europe. What determined the shape of the global carbon economy was that the major European powers had already established a strong (but by no means hegemonic) military and political presence in much of Asia and Africa at the time when the technology of steam was in its nascency, that is to say, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From that point on, carbon-intensive technologies were to have the effect of continually reinforcing Western power with the result that other variants of modernity came to be suppressed, incorporated, and appropriated into what is now a single, dominant model. The boost that fossil fuels provided to Western power is nowhere more clearly evident than in the First Opium War, where armoured steamships, led by the aptly named Nemesis, played a decisive role. In other words, carbon emissions were, from very early on, closely co-related to power in all its aspects: this continues to be a major, although unacknowledged, factor in the politics of contemporary global warming.” (Ghosh, 2016: 108-109)

Whilst Ghosh recognises that both capitalism and imperialism are interconnected, he states that “even if capitalism were to be magically transformed tomorrow, the imperatives of political and military dominance would remain a significant obstacle to progress on mitigatory action” (Ghosh, 2016: 146). And yet if a movement successfully overthrew capitalist social relations tomorrow – and it would have to be a mass, labour-based movement that could achieve this – such a movement would also (in its nature of being successful) represent a profound democratic shift to the grassroots that has radically altered the political and cultural sphere. Ghosh does not indicate who crudely separates capitalism from imperialism. In the “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”, Marx (1999: 376) in Capital makes no such separation:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China”

On a movement for radical social resistance and alternatives to the climate crisis, it is not an organised mass labour movement that Ghosh (2016: 111) sees as the lever for change, despite at times recognising the fundamental role of labour’s antithesis, capital:

““Money flows toward short term gain,” writes the geologist David Archer, “and toward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom.” This is indeed the essence of humanity’s present derangement.”

Instead, Ghosh’s (2016: 159) desire for future alternative imaginings is actually a turn to past imaginings – a rediscovered sacred, community and kinship – that the forces of religion offer:

“Bleak though the terrain of climate change may be, there are a few features in it that stand out in relief as signs of hope […] the most promising development, in my view, is the increasing involvement of religious groups and leaders in the politics of climate change.”

Religion represents, for Ghosh, transnational mass mobilisations of people capable of intergenerational, nonlinear and non-economistic thinking; but so too do capital’s gravediggers possess such potential imagination. Both the commonality and critical difference between the two can be explained by Marx (1977: 64) in Towards a Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”:

“Religious suffering is at the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion.”

Ghosh’s hope in religion to move us beyond the present impasse reminds me of the words of Marx (1973: 162) from Grundrisse:

“It is ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint”

Rather than fixating in a nostalgia with the past, one must recognise the radical possibilities thrown up by the globalisation of capital (a global working class, a world literature, social intercourse in every direction, to paraphrase The Communist Manifesto) and sublate such potentiality out of capital’s heartbeat of profit-making from human and nonhuman resources.

Israel-Palestine: Two Nations, Two States 101

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What do we mean by, and what’s the case for, a two states settlement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? On the academic and public Left, the history of this conflict is actually one of competing historical narratives, which differ in their selection and emphasis of key events and players. These historical narratives offer different perspectives on the nature of this conflict at present and on its potential resolution in the future.

Two highly significant dates in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are 1948 and 1967.

1948 is known by the Palestinian-Arabs as the al-Nakba, the catastrophe. Why? Because in 1948, Israeli-Jews took up their right to national self-determination. In one and the same moment, on one and the same land, the original occupants, Palestinian-Arabs, saw their right to national self-determination banish.

What do I mean by ‘right’ here? I am coming from the tradition and perspective of consistent democracy, which recognises that, as much as I am politically opposed to nationalism and strive for a world free of nation-states, all (without exception) self-defining national groups of people have a basic democratic right to fulfilling their wish for a nation-state.

The tragedy of 1948 is that one nationally self-defined group of people achieved their right at the expense of another nationally self-defined group of people.

In June 1967, the Israeli state came out of the Arab-Israeli 6-day war with more territory than its UN recognised nation-state borders of 1948. To date, that territory is the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Now, accepting the fait accompli of the nation-state of Israel on its 1948 borders, a further critical date then in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is 1967: that being the moment when the Israeli state occupation of Palestine, Palestine being Gaza and the West Back, commenced.

This is the historical understanding that then flows into the demand for a fully autonomous Palestinian nation-state of Gaza and the West Bank alongside the nation-state of Israel; meaning, notably, an end and reversal of the right-wing expansionist politics and actions of the Israeli state, that the Israeli-Jewish settlements of the West Bank must be reversed, and that the control of movement and space in, out, and through Gaza by the Israeli state and military must end.

A consistently democratic settlement to this conflict (and by this, I mean democratic for both working class people in Israel and in occupied Palestine) is that of a ‘two nations, two states’ settlement.

Conversely, the dominant historical narrative of the Left considers 1948 as the singular paramount date in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – this is when, it is argued, the colonial occupation of Palestine began and continues, with the territory gained by the Israeli state in 1967 merely an expansion of this occupation. The demand, ‘Free Palestine, End the Occupation’, means then the undoing (in some way) of the existence of the nation-state of Israel on 1948 borders. And after that, because we exist in a world in which the nation-state is the legal vehicle of political governance, some kind of one state settlement: be that under the guise of a binational state, a confederation, or so on.

What’s the right political answer here for the Left? Two states or a various configurations of one state. Certainly the answer for the Israeli political Right is one state.

In the run up to 1948, as stated by late scholar Maxime Rodinson, “the actual inhabitants of Palestine were ignored by practically everybody. The philosophy prevailing in the European world at the time was without any doubt responsible for this. Every territory situated outside that world was considered empty”. Zionism, Jewish nationalism, pursued its project in this climate and it gained reality because of the exodus of Jews from Europe escaping murderous anti-Semitism. A newly formed Israel existed in an era of decolonisation, which partly explains why Israel is uniquely singled out by the much of the Left.

Is it a just and realistic demand, seven decades on, to undo Israel? No. Is it morally bankrupt and unrealistic to demand a two nations, two states settlement on pre-1967 borders? No.

Again, Maxime Rodinson: “If the consequences of pressing a just claim are liable to be calamitous and unjust, and too fraught with practical difficulties, there may be grounds for suggesting that it be renounced. The wrong done to the Arabs by the Israelis is very real. However, it is only too common throughout history.” “Colonists and colonizers are not monsters with human faces whose behaviour defies rational explanation, as one might think from reading left-wing intellectuals … Who is innocent of this charge? … History is full of fait accomplis.”

There is no revolutionary solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but there is a consistently democratic one with the hope that the peaceful coexistence of two realised national groups of working class peoples might then transcend their national and religious identities for a cosmopolitan and egalitarian future.

Fetishizing Brexit’s working class rage

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“Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the ‘folklore’ of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is. At those times in history when a homogenous social group is brought into being, there comes into being also, in opposition to common sense, a homogenous – in other words coherent and systematic – philosophy.” (Gramsci 1971: 419)

 

“Many working class people believe in Brexit. Who can blame them?”, writes self-defined anarchist working class academic Lisa Mckenzie in her LSE blog post. Her narrative on working class support for Brexit is of a class long and systematically excluded from British cosmopolitan society fighting back. What is critically missing from Mckenzie’s narrative is a consideration of the politics which they are fighting back on. As such, she fetishizes the working class: they have been so downtrodden that their resistance is… well, what exactly?

“How depressing that now seems as chaos ensues in Parliament, the political system is at breaking point and rage is infectious. The only positive is that Brexit has at last broken the political and social hegemony that kept our population subdued and somewhat apathetic. They are no longer apathetic, and their rage has become unbearable to the Westminster political and media chattering classes.” (Mckenzie)

Is Mckenzie suggesting here, rage is good because it is working class rage?

The recent period has seen an ascendency of right-wing nationalist populist politics in Britain, the United States, and Europe: captivating significant sections of the sociologically working class through an anti-establishment discourse. “Take Back Control”, in retrospect, was a brilliant slogan because it had traction: it made common sense to people’s life experiences and conditions, to their reality of social and political exclusion. But, following Gramsci, common sense is not good sense. Mckenzie is right to emphasize that many who voted did so feeling politically empowered after years of disempowerment, but she fails to scrutinise the politics of “Take Back Control”. Worse still, she dismisses its racist current.

“I have written and argued in academic journals, and on panels at academic conferences, that for some working class people in the UK – those who had experienced political, economic and social exclusion – the question they saw on the ballot paper was not about leaving or remaining in the European Union, but was ‘Do you want things to stay the same, or do you want things to be different?’ Those people – whom the media has since named ‘the left behind’ – answered. They wanted things to change, they wanted things to be different. […] working class people had read, understood and heard the debates around the EU as exclusive, and elite, too often using language that diminished their own life experiences: ‘stupidity and racism’ has been the most common.” (Mckenzie)

The legacy of mainstream political parties in England and Wales long problematizing immigration meant that the EU referendum was a tinderbox-in-waiting: the spark to set off the nationalist populist Right and far Right. Enter UKIP, the English Defence League, and the rest. This is not to say that all people who voted Leave were racist; of course not. But it is to say that the common sense ideology of the right-wing Leave campaign was an exclusive and excluding racist nationalism – on this point, see Expounding racial hatred before and after the Brexit vote and Brexit’s inevitable racism.

Mckenzie deplores the disgraceful dismissal of her working class heroes as ‘stupid and racist’. Yes that’s a crude assertion, but the flipside of this notion isn’t analytically accurate either: that people voted Leave in a coherent and fully informed way and weren’t affected by its common sense ideology. What’s more, the working class – as perhaps distinct from Mckenzie’s working class heroes – are not a uniform group. The Lord Ashcroft Polls established that older people were more likely than their younger counterparts to vote Leave and black and Asian people were more likely to vote Remain. University educated people were also more likely to vote Remain. The working class who are classified sociologically lower middle class were fairly evenly split between Leave and Remain.

The nationalist populist Right succeeded in gaining a hegemony during and after the EU referendum.

The Left thus far has failed, either by pursuing Stalinist nationalist Lexit politics or by simply not winning the arguments wide and well enough. The progressive Left has failed in winning the idea that cosmopolitanism, the expansion of civil and political rights, feminism, environmental concern, globalisation, the internet, and immigration are not ‘the enemy’ of the working class. Further still, the progressive Left has failed to spell out that it’s in favour of globalisation as democratically controlled by international working class interests rather than the interests of big business, and in favour of freedom of movement of labour (in a world that allows freedom of movement of capital).

“Westminster, the media, and the academic world – all of which are solid bourgeois spaces devoid of working class people – are in full agreement: the past 40 years of deindustrialisation and aggressive policies of social mobility that marginalise working class life, pride and identity have no credence in the debate about the EU. […] Brexit has let those rational, liberal masks slip, and you are ugly.” (Mckenzie)

Mckenzie makes a false argument that the academic world is in full agreement that the past four decades of deindustrialisation and socio-economic and political exclusion of the poorest in our society had no bearing on the EU referendum. Of course it did. She is right that Westminster, the media, and the academic world generally ignored significant layers of the working class, yet she omits that the likes of UKIP readily stepped in and captured hearts and minds during the referendum. Again, the liberal and radical Left failed. Oswell (2006: 46), following Gramsci, reminds us that, “[in] order to change people’s mind and conduct, common sense must not be foregone in favour of an arid knowledge, rather it must be carried over, as it is that passion that forms the connection between the leaders and those who are led”:

“One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and the people-nation. In the absence of such a nexus the relations between the intellectual and the people-nation are, or are reduced to, relationships of a purely bureaucratic and formal order; the intellectuals become a caste, or a priesthood.” (Gramsci 1971: 418)

“Take Back Control” could have been the political slogan of the Left, successfully translated into the demand for a labour-led socialist united states of Europe.

Back to the fetishized rage of the working class. Is the demand not to be binded to a referendum decision made two and a half years ago political disenfranchisement of the working class? Is the demand to have a say on the actual political reality and options here and now undemocratic to the working class? No, it’s politics: the necessary on-going battle of ideas on how society is and how it could be. As Oswell (2006: 46) states, “common sense is not only the ground upon which ideological battles are fought, it is also that which needs to be contested and brought to bear under the weight of critical consciousness.”

 

Reference:
David Oswell (2006) Culture and Society: an Introduction to Cultural Studies. Sage Publications, London.

“The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood” by Belle Boggs

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“If someone had told me, “In five years you will have a baby,” I would have been fine to wait those five years; I would have been grateful to have them, in fact, and would have gotten busy with some of my other goals. But no one could tell me that – the problem with infertility is that it is not a patient, serene kind of waiting, not a simple delay in your plans; it happens for many of us in the context of consuming struggle, staggering expense, devastating loss. It’s five (or eight, or ten) years of trying and failing, which erodes any feelings of confidence or anticipation of a positive outcome.” (Boggs, pg. 19)

Belle Boggs (2016) “The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood”. Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The precarious journeys that a hidden population find themselves on to desired parenthood – caught between a swinging dialectic of willed-for fertility and corporeal infertility – is laden with fantasy, longing, loss, and grief. For some, that twilight grief ends with a successful pregnancy or adoption; for others, the challenge is to find growth beyond a black hole. Belle Boggs’ book, while reflecting on her own journey, which included IVF, is a contemplation of social, cultural, and political questions that inevitably come up (in some form or another) during such journeys, but whose answers are only afforded in retrospect.

“We count on literature to prepare us, to console us, but I am shocked by how little consolation there is for the infertile, or even for those who are childless by choice and trying to live in a world that is largely fertile and family driven. Old ideas and prejudices persist – a woman without a child is less feminine, less nurturing. She is defined by what she does not have, and she confronts, again and again, a culture that reinforces the wrongness of her circumstances, which may be biological or social, temporary or permanent, something she treats or something she accepts.” (Boggs, pg. 41)

What is especially commendable about The Art of Waiting is Boggs’ ability to critique and contextualise and to raise difficult ethical questions without passing prejudicial judgement on the circumstances and decision-making of individuals. Exploring the multifaceted terrains of international and domestic adoption, gestational surrogacy, and IVF, Boggs touches upon the moral tensions, inequities, and exploitation of a capitalist political economy that those in search of family-making navigate. Amidst this complexity, a basic point is spelt out: for all of those who fall into the ‘infertility camp’, Plan B family-making is very far from easy. For gay people, for example, facing specific opposition and obstacles to their family-making from socially conservative forces, the experience of domestic and international adoption, or IVF, or gestational surrogacy, cannot be crudely and cruelly reduced to an unnatural and flippant shopping experience. The global and local capitalist networks that lock corporeal fertility and infertility with corporeal inequality and exploitation is laid down at the door of society at large.

“It’s easy to see, even in [US] states that have attempted to provide infertility coverage, who gets left out: people who have complicated diagnoses or need expensive treatment […]; people who are older; LGBT couples, people in unmarried partnerships, or women who have decided to get pregnant on their own. […] More than any other factor – age, sperm count and quality, egg reserve as measured by hormonal tests – the resources we could allocate to treatment appeared to determine our outcomes. It was a numbers game, I began to believe […].” (Boggs, pg. 185-186)

Boggs cites the psychotherapist Dr. Marni Rosner to help explain the emotional impact of infertility: “The losses are hidden. But with reproductive trauma, the losses can happen over and over again”; what’s more, “There are no clear norms for grieving the loss of a dream” (pg.103). Referencing 2012 research into the advertising of fertility clinics conducted by Professor Jim Hawkins, it is noted that IVF clinics emphasize the emotional rather than the practical side of treatment: with, for example, baby photographs alongside the word “dream” and/or “miracle” (pg. 199). What’s downplayed is the price-tag.

“IVF is an elective procedure with a poor success rate and an arguably unnecessary goal. But it is also true that infertility is an emotionally punishing experience as well as a disability […]. It’s hard to imagine that the stress of infertility isn’t compounded by the question of how to pay for treatment, so much that, almost against our wills, it crowds out other thinking. […] Will I max out these credit cards? Liquidate this retirement plan? Take out a second mortgage?” (Boggs, pg. 193-194)

With both a critical eye and an appreciation of the realities individuals steer to be able to afford ‘a chance’ of a positive outcome, Boggs draws a parallel between IVF payment packages and financial derivatives and credit default swaps.

The UK-based Access Fertility came to my mind when Boggs reflected, with nuance, on IVF payment packages.

This is The Art of Waiting at its very best: capturing the everyday emotional struggles for fertility amidst infertility which are thoroughly entangled with local and global capitalist networks and relations of power. Boggs asks some hard questions of the society that we live in whilst remaining deeply sensitive and committed to those on their waiting journeys.

“The life an infertile person seeks comes to her not by accident and not by fate but by hard-fought choices. How to put together the portfolio of photographs. How to answer at the home study. What clinic or doctor or procedure. Donor egg or donor sperm or donor embryo. Open or closed adoption. What country, what boxes to check or uncheck. What questions to ask, and ask again. When to start and when to stop. What to say when her child says, ‘Tell me my story.’” (Boggs, pg. 98)

Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on black antisemitism: sagacity for the Left today

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“It is strange to see things for which Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty have long been despised and abused, among much of the left, the kitsch left, now being brandished as weapons against the Corbyn Labour Party by our political enemies. Certainly “left-wing” antisemitism, expressed as “anti-Zionism”, is a malignant and powerful force on the left. […] Those who want the destruction of Israel and advocate, or would support, an Arab or Islamic war of extermination against it should not be members of any working-class or socialist party. It is necessary to educate and re-educate the left and the labour movement, to get the movement to see, reject, and fight their “left-wing” antisemitism. […] Blatant and persistent antisemites should be expelled from the Labour Party. But more than that is needed. Jeremy Corbyn should take the lead in initiating an educational campaign in the Labour Party and in the broader labour movement on the complex of questions involved, including Israel-Palestine.” Anti-Semitism is a real issue: criticise the “left”, oppose the right (2018)

“I’m sure you know, millions more Africans were killed in the African Holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews… and many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean. So who are victims and what does it mean? We are victims and perpetrators to some extent through choice. And having been a victim does not give you a right to be a perpetrator.” Jackie Walker (2016)

““Anti-Semitism is a crime. Anti-Zionism is a duty” read the banner in front of the stage at Jackie Walker’s performance of her one-person show “The Lynching” at the Edinburgh Fringe in early August. […] She describes her play as “the one-woman show about a real-life witch-hunt: an attempt to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and an entire political movement.” According to the play’s publicity, the play tells you “what they wouldn’t let Jackie Walker tell you.” Who “they” are is not defined. Nor is there any explanation of why “they” are letting Walker tell you something in a play which “they” do not let her tell you in any other way. Or maybe that’s the power of the performing arts? The play is part of an ongoing campaign by Walker, according to which the allegations of anti-semitism raised against her are totally unfounded and are really an attempt (presumably by “them”) to silence critics of Israel (and destroy Jeremy Corbyn, and destroy Momentum). […] The banner draped in front of the stage on which Walker performed her play is the banner of the Scottish Palestine Campaign (SPSC), which also organised a speaking tour of Scotland for Walker in March. In the week preceding Walker’s performance the SPSC had been a news item in its own right, following the publication of “Jew Hate and Holocaust Denial in Scotland” by Jewish Human Rights Watch. The report’s author, David Collier, had researched the personal social media accounts of Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) members and activists. The bulk of the 160-page report consists of screengrabs of some of the antisemitic material which he encountered: Holocaust denial and Holocaust revisionism; the antisemitic trope of Israel as a behind-the-scenes global superpower; other traditional antisemitic tropes (rich Jews, greedy Jews, cunning Jews, etc.).” Jackie Walker’s questionable allies (2017)

Insightful context to the high-profile case of the twice suspended Labour Party member and former Vice-Chair of Momentum, Jackie Walker, is the book Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments edited by Paul Berman (published by Delta in 1994); in particular, two of its essays by Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Below are extracts from each essay.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Cornel West: On Black-Jewish Relations

“Without a sympathetic understanding of the deep historic sources of Jewish fears and anxieties about group survival, blacks will not grasp the visceral attachment of most Jews to Israel. Similarly, without a candid acknowledgment of blacks’ status as permanent underdogs in American society, Jews will not comprehend what the symbolic predicament and literal plight of Palestinians in Israel means to blacks. […] The ascendance of the conservative Likud party in Israel in 1977 and the visibility of narrow black nationalist voices in the eighties helped solidify this impasse. When mainstream American Jewish organizations supported the inhumane policies of Begin and Shamir, they tipped their hats toward cold-hearted interest-group calculations. When black nationalist spokesmen like Farrakhan and Jeffries excessively targeted Jewish power as subordinating black and brown peoples they played the same mean-spirited game. In turning their heads from the ugly truth of Palestinian subjugation, and in refusing to admit the falsity of the alleged Jewish conspiracies, both sides failed to define the moral character of their Jewish and black identities.”

“Black anti-Semitism rests on three basic pillars. First, it is a species of anti-whitism. Jewish complicity in American racism – even though it is less extensive than the complicity of other white Americans – reinforces black perceptions that Jews are identical to any other group benefiting from white-skin privileges in racist America. This view denies the actual history and treatment of Jews. And the particular interactions of Jews and black people in the hierarchies of business and education cast Jews as the public face of oppression for the black community, and thus lend evidence to this mistaken view of Jews as any other white folk.

Second, black anti-Semitism is a result of higher expectations some black folk have of Jews. This perspective holds Jews to a moral standard different from that extended to other white ethnic groups, principally owing to the ugly history of anti-Semitism in the world, especially in Europe and the Middle East. Such double standards assume that Jews and blacks are “natural” allies, since both groups have suffered chronic degradation and oppression at the hands of racial and ethnic majorities. So when Jewish neoconservatism gains a high public profile at a time when black peoples are more and more vulnerable, the charge of “betrayal” surfaces among black folk who feel let down. Such utterances resonate strongly in a black Protestant culture that has inherited many stock Christian anti-Semitic narratives of Jews as Christ-killers. These infamous narratives historically have had less weight in the black community, in stark contrast to the more obdurate white Christian varieties of anti-Semitism. Yet in moments of desperation in the black community, they tend to reemerge, charged with the rhetoric of Jewish betrayal.

Third, black anti-Semitism is a form of underdog resentment and envy, directed at another underdog who has “made it” in American society. The remarkable upward mobility of American Jews – rooted chiefly in a history and culture that places a premium on higher education and self-organization – easily lends itself to myths of Jewish unity and homogeneity that have gained currency among other groups, especially among relatively unorganised groups like black Americans. The high visibility of Jews in the upper reaches of the academy, journalism, the entertainment industry, and the professions – though less so percentagewise in corporate America and national political office – is viewed less as a result of hard work and success fairly won, and more as a matter of favouritism and nepotism among Jews. Ironically, calls for black solidarity and achievement are often modeled on myths of Jewish unity – as both groups respond to American xenophobia and racism. But in times such as these, some blacks view Jews as obstacles rather than allies in the struggle for racial justice.

These three elements of black anti-Semitism – which also characterize the outlooks of some other ethnic groups in America – have a long history among black people. Yet the recent upsurge of black anti-Semitism exploits two other prominent features of the political landscape identified with the American Jewish establishment: the military status of Israel in the Middle East (especially in its enforcement of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza); and the visible conservative Jewish opposition to what is perceived to be a major means of black progress, namely, affirmative action. Of course, principled critiques of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, of Israeli denigration of Palestinians, or attacks on affirmative action transcend anti-Semitic sensibilities. Yet vulgar critiques do not – and often are shot through with such sensibilities, in white and black America alike. These vulgar critiques – usually based on sheer ignorance and a misinformed thirst for vengeance – add an aggressive edge to black anti-Semitism. And in the rhetoric of a Louis Farrakhan or a Leonard Jeffries, whose audiences rightly hunger for black self-respect and oppose black degradation, these critiques misdirect progressive black energies arrayed against unaccountable corporate power and antiblack racism, steering them instead toward Jewish elites and antiblack conspiracies in Jewish America. This displacement is disturbing not only because it is analytically and morally wrong; it also discourages any effective alliances across races.”

(Wikimedia Commons)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: The Uses of Anti-Semitism

“As the African-American philosopher Cornel West has insisted, attention to black anti-Semitism is crucial, however discomforting, in no small part because the moral credibility of our struggle against racism hangs in the balance.”

“A book popular with some in the “Afrocentric” movement, The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man’s Racism, Sexism, and Aggression by Michael Bradley, argues that white people are so vicious because they, unlike the rest of mankind, are descended from the brutish Neanderthals. More to the point, it speculates that the Jews may have been the “‘purest’ and oldest Neanderthal-Caucasoids,” the iciest of the ice people: hence (he explains) the singularly odious character of ancient Jewish culture. Crackpot as it sounds, the book has lately been reissued with endorsements from two members of the Africana Studies department of City College, New York, as well as an introduction by a professor emeritus of Hunter College and paterfamilias of the Afrocentric movement.

College speakers and publications have also had a role to play in legitimating the new creed. Last year, UCLA’s black newspaper Nommo defended the importance of the notorious czarist canard, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (Those who took issue were rebuked with an article headlined: “Anti-Semitic? Ridiculous – Chill.”) Speaking at Harvard University earlier this year, Conrad L. Muhammad, national youth representative of the Nation of Islam, neatly annexed environmentalism to anti-Semitism when he blamed the Jews for despoiling the environment and destroying the ozone layer.

But the bible of the new anti-Semitism is The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, an official publication of the Nation of Islam that boasts 1,275 footnotes in the course of 334 pages. […] The book, one of the most sophisticated instances of hate literature yet compiled, was prepared by the historical research department of the Nation of Islam. It charges that the Jews were in fact “key operatives” in the historic crime of slavery, playing an “inordinate” and “disproportionate” role and “carv[ing] out for themselves a monumental culpability in slavery – and the black holocaust.” And among significant sectors of the black community, this brief has become a credo of a new philosophy of black self-affirmation.

To be sure, the book massively misrepresents the historical record, largely through a process of cunningly selective quotations of often reputable sources. But its authors could be confident that few of its readers would go to the trouble of actually hunting down the works cited. For if readers actually did so, they might discover a rather different picture. They might find out – from the book’s own vaunted authorities – that, for example, of all the African slaves imported into the New World, American Jewish merchants accounted for less than 2 percent, a finding sharply at odds with the Nation’s claim of Jewish “predominance” in this traffic. They might find out that, in the domestic trade, it appears that all of the Jewish slave traders combined bought and sold fewer slaves than the single gentile firm of Franklin and Armfield. In short, they might learn what the historian Harold Brackman has documented at length: that the book’s repeated insistence that the Jews dominated the slave trade depends on unscrupulous distortion of the historic record. But the most ominous words in the book are found on the cover: “volume one.” More have been promised, carrying on the saga of Jewish iniquity to the present day.

However shoddy the scholarship of works like The Secret Relationship, underlying it is something even more troubling: the tacit conviction that culpability is heritable. For it suggests a doctrine of racial continuity, in which the racial evil of a people is merely manifest (rather than constituted) by their historical misdeeds. The reported misdeeds are thus the signs of an essential nature that is evil.”

“These are times that try the spirit of liberal outreach. In fact, Minister Farrakhan himself explained the real agenda behind his campaign, speaking before an audience of fifteen thousand at the University of Illinois last fall. The purpose of The Secret Relationship, he said, was to “rearrange a relationship” that “has been detrimental to us.” “Rearrange” is a curiously elliptical term here: if a relation with another group has been detrimental, it only makes sense to sever it as quickly and unequivocally as possible. In short, by “rearrange,” he means to convert a relation of friendship, alliance, and uplift into one of enmity, distrust, and hatred. But why target the Jews? Using the same historical methodology, after all, the researchers of the book could have produced a damning treatise on the involvement of left-handers in the “black holocaust.” The answer requires us to go beyond the usual shibboleths about bigotry and view the matter, from the demagogue’s perspective, strategically: as the bid of one black elite to supplant another. It requires me, in short, to see anti-Semitism as a weapon in the raging battle of who will speak for black America: those who have sought common cause with others, or those who preach a barricaded withdrawal into racial authenticity. The strategy of the apostles of hate, I believe, is best understood as ethnic isolationism – they know that the more isolated black America becomes, the greater their power. And what’s the most efficient way to begin to sever black America from its allies? Bash the Jews, these demagogues apparently calculate, and you’re halfway there.”

“In short, for the tacticians of the new anti-Semitism, the original sin of American Jews was their involvement – truly “inordinate,” truly “disproportionate” – not in slavery, but in the front ranks of the civil rights struggle.”

“Cornel West aptly describes black anti-Semitism as “the bitter fruit of a profound self-destructive impulse, nurtured on the vines of hopelessness and concealed by empty gestures of black unity.””

“Still, why should we be so preoccupied by ethnic scapegoating among people who are themselves ethnic scapegoats and relatively disempowered? Whom does it really hurt? Fair question. The answer: first and foremost, it hurts black people, through the politics of distraction and distortion. Getting the sources of our problems wrong is an obstacle to solving them. Objectively speaking, black anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a Jewish problem, it’s a black problem. In the words of the formidable critic and activist Barbara Smith, “We don’t oppose anti-Semitism because we owe something to Jewish people, but because we owe something very basic to ourselves.””

See also my blog post: Demystifying left anti-Semitism