Category Archives: imperialism

Columbus Is Coming: Don’t Blink

Posted on by

“Columbus? Euro trash!”

Jerry Seinfeld

Today in the United States, schoolchildren were given the day off, mail was not delivered and mattresses were discounted 20% to mark five hundred years of colonialism. In Venezuela, people marked Indigenous Resistance Day by re-electing Hugo Chavez, much to the annoyance of the Columbus Day types no doubt. Here in New York, we’re getting ready for a day of action in Columbus Circle on October 13. But see how the Venezuelans took care to pull down Columbus’s statue. These things are dangerous.

What danger did Columbus bring that has come full circle? In that brief instant of geological time since Columbus came in search of gold, it is now the Italians and Spanish who are perceived as the threat to continued world despoliation. It’s a familiar enough story how Europeans accidentally introduced disease and deliberately sent the indigenous population down their mines. Now it’s the Southern Europeans who are perceived as the threat of contagion that might finally kill the capitalist goose with its golden eggs. There’s a certain “native irony” there to use Stephen Turner’s phrase.

The monument to all this is at a key intersection in mid-town Manhattan. According to the Public Art Fund’s website, Columbus Circle is a relic of a past celebration of conquest:

Erected in 1892, this monument was designed by the Italian artist Gaetano Russo to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas. Atop the monument is a larger-than-life marble statue of explorer Christopher Columbus, …. He stands on a granite column featuring bronze ships’ prows and anchors that refer to his famous voyage with the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

 No sign of the indigenous here. The whole looks out at another monument to the USS Maine,which sank during the  Spanish-American War of 1898. Although it was assumed at the time that the fatal explosion was caused by Spanish aggression, later investigation showed that it resulted from:

spontaneous ignition of highly volatile bituminous coal (which the US Navy had recently adopted as fuel as opposed to slower, cleaner burning and far less volatile but more expensive anthracite coal)

That the heavy bitumenous coal is to anthracite what the tar sands “oil” is to standard crude. Perhaps the tarry explosion that launched the American Empire into its long century of global domination will also see it out.

New York’s Columbus monument is currently occupied. There’s a bizarre artwork by sculptor Tatzu Nishi, which creates a suburban living room around the statue. While Nishi may have intended this as a place for contemplation, what we have is a photo-op. It’s become a popular attraction and tickets are often sold out.

Photo: Tom Powell/Public Art Fund

The thirteen-foot statue towers over the tourists. Or are they all carefully looking at the statue, making sure never to look away for fear of what the statue might do?

Robert Musil, the novelist, once suggested that the invisible monuments of a city structure its attention by directing “unseeing”:

Like a drop of water on an oilskin, attention runs down them  without stopping for a moment

Always present, rarely noticed, these stone forms embody the authority that would first colonize and then have us move on because there’s nothing to see. In recent series of Dr Who, these stone angels turn out to be a petrifying force, sending people back in time. They do so when you’re not looking at them, so you can’t even blink. “Nothing to see here” turns out to be fatal.

It’s as if these imperial monuments are a solid mass of anti-progressive matter, pushing us back into a neo-colonial present.

We need to see Columbus, pull him off his pedestal and send him back like the Euro trash he was–but don’t blink!

Up the Plebs, Off With Their Heads!

Posted on by

The U. S. often has little to recommend it over social democratic Europe. It is at least a Republic, recent events have reminded us. Monarchs lording it over formerly colonized indigenous people, hunting endangered species and dismissing anyone who contradicts them as “plebs” have reminded us that behind the present obsession with sovereignty are sovereigns or aristocrats, and a sorry bunch they are. To quote Lewis Carroll, as one should: “Off with their heads!”

Sometimes you don’t really need to add much to a picture.

Here’s the idiot “Prince” William having himself carried around Tuvalu with reality star Kate Middleton close behind. It will be said that this is “traditional.” Like the monarchy itself, most such traditions were invented in the nineteenth century, in this case, most probably by missionaries. There’s some confusion online as to whether this happened in Tuvalu, one of the world’s most threatened nations by sea-level rise, or the Solomon Islands, ditto. In either case, farce pushed out tragedy, with discussion about La Middleton’s semi-naked photos dominating even this colonialist parody.

Juan Carlos hunting elephants in Botswana

Or this. In the middle of the Spanish crisis, King Juan Carlos, appointed in effect to the monarchy by fascist dictator Franco, managed to break his hip falling off a step.He was elephant hunting at the time. Yes. The “modern” monarch, not averse to enriching himself via Saudi patronage, is sufficiently traditional that he thinks shooting endangered species from a raised platform is a fun thing to do. And he couldn’t even walk up the steps straight. Oh, and did we mention that he is an honorary president of the World Wildlife Fund?

And what about us plebs? The word has gained new currency since public school upper class twit of the year Andrew Mitchell, chief whip for the UK Conservative Party, yelled at police who wouldn’t allow him to ride his bicycle through the security gate at 10 Downing Street:

You’re fucking plebs!

Normally Occupy 2012 is on the side of police critics. Here an extremely entitled man wants a door held open for him to save him a few seconds and reacts with an outburst of class hatred.

It’s Year Two of Occupy. In Year Two of the French Revolution, they abolished the monarchy. In his 1975 lectures on power, Foucault reflected

What we need… is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty….We need to cut off the head of the King: in political theory that has still to be done.

He was referring to the juridical power of the state as sovereign. But there’s a still older problem: the entitled feudal power of the soi-disant aristocrat over the plebs, the colonized and the non-human world. This work we had thought done. It seems we spoke too soon. Off with their heads!

Debt, Mining and the Global Reconquest

Posted on by

From the perspective of the global South, the primary extraction of raw materials like coal, the subjugation of popular autonomy, the implementation of debt as a form of social control and the continued expansion of climate change are clearly intertwined. The repression of the miners’ strike in South Africa is part and parcel of mineral policy in Australia, oriented as both are to the expanding Chinese market. The intended consequences include ruinous African debt and the inevitable by-product is constantly accelerating climate change.

This interface has been perfectly visible from the South for some considerable time. In 1987, Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso spoke to the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in Addis Ababa. Sankara called for the creation of a United Front Against Debt:

We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before. Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave.

Sakara was assassinated a few months after making this call. His policies had also included the nationalization of the country’s mineral wealth. If Sarkana’s warnings had been heeded two decades ago, perhaps Africa would not be in its present crisis, forced to generate materials to produce foreign exchange revenues to pay down its debt.

Speaking at the memorial service for the miners killed by South African police (above), Julius Malema reprised these themes on Thursday, calling again for nationalization of the mines:

The democratically elected government has turned on its people. This marquee we are gathered under, the Friends of the Youth League paid for this. The government did nothing for you, we are helping you. Government ministers are just here to pose for pictures. We are here with you, you must soldier on – never listen to cowards. We mustn’t stop until the whites agree to give us some of the money in these mines.

The crowd responded by storming the stage, causing the rapid exit of government ministers and politicians. Police were barred from attending. As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.

Here in Australia, mining companies are retrenching. Australia has done remarkably well out of the commodities boom, servicing the exploding Chinese economy. While officials continue to forecast a renewed peak in two years, hard-line mining executives have declared Australian coal “non-cash generative.” The blame is placed on the carbon tax introduced at enormous political cost by the current government. No credit is given in Australian media for the climate-positive aspects of the tax. The implication is clear: mining will relocate to countries with a less “burdensome” tax structure–like South Africa.

To understand this, you need to know that before 2005, coal sold for about A$30 a ton. At the height of the boom, it reached A$140. Paul Cleary, a journalist for the right-of-center Australian, writes:

Mining dominates our society, our economy, and even our political system.

Now it sells for “only” A$90, a 300% increase on the price seven years ago, which is apparently not enough. The business pages are awash with articles about the end of the mining boom.

Let’s be under no illusions as to who dominates the agenda in the U. S. The oil giant Shell has been reported to be determined to begin drilling in the Arctic this summer, even though its own safety procedures in case of a blowout are not finished. If this was a movie, you know what would happen: there’d be a blowout, only for the maverick hero to return and cap the well. There are no heroes any more. The drilling has to begin to make sure that, if Obama happens to be re-elected, he does not renege on his sell-out.

Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.

 

 

 

On Growth, Sugar and the Forest

Posted on by

Another day, another World Heritage Area. Today we headed through the Queensland sugar plantations to the rainforests of the Kuku Yalanji people. The experience was a direct clash between destructive but highly productive Western agriculture and indigenous no-growth stewardship of the land. For two centuries, this has been a history of the former defeating the latter. The Yalanji have been here for 40,000 years, though, so this little story is just a blip. What we saw was the contradiction between “globalization” and the planetary.

It was during the American Civil War that Queensland jumped into the business of sugar cane production to meet the fall in supply. Sugar cane was an immensely labor-intensive process and so indigenous labor from across the Pacific was brought in under compulsion.

Sugar planting in Queensland around 1870

Missionaries had no hesitation in calling it slavery (above). As a self-governing colony (until 1901), Queensland nonetheless had a free hand. The compeled labor was brought in from relatively close locations like ni-Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands and as far away as Polynesia. They were called “blackbirds,” and are still trying to get their story recognized.

In more recent times, the industry declined until the rise in demand for ethanol led to a massive revival. Although the cane growing is now highly mechanized, the square plantations of seven foot high plants, each as thick as a large finger, would be recognizable to any plantation owner or worker.

As ever, the grass (sugar cane is a grass) is visibly destructive. The crop rapidly denudes the soil because the indigenous tropical flora, although spectacular, are evolved to grow in the poor, sandy soil. Later we were shown a tree in the forest from whose seeds the Yalanji make bread. It’s eight hundred years old and only about twelve feet high. Sugar cane seedlings that I saw were therefore surrounded by black compost and white chemical powders. In between the fields, which are in all stages of production from planting to recently harvested, stand a few remnants of the forest.

Higher up, where the cane can’t grow, the rainforest and its people survive, protected now as a National Park and a UNESCO heritage site. Today the steep green slopes were shrouded in mist and cloud, looking more like Aotearoa New Zealand than the Sunshine State. The Kuku Yalanji people have recently begun to offer guided tours of their land and its culture.

Guides from the Kuku Yalanji people

Our walk, guided by Jenny, also known as Butterfly, was beautiful and informative. Apparently uninteresting plants were revealed to be means of cleaning, healing, or sources of food. Shelters were left for others to use, rather than being demolished. Few now live in this traditional way, but there’s a commitment to remembering and passing on the old ways. It’s easy to be naive and romanticize this way of life. But as Raymond (Kija/Moon) emphasized at the end of our tour, these people have survived in this place for millennia without rendering it unusable, as Europeans have managed in a couple of centuries.

Raymond performed the digeridoo for us, and showed the required technique of circular breathing, also used by some jazz players like Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Wynton Marsalis. Accompanying himself with clapsticks, he gave a virtuoso performance, imitating the sounds of numerous animals above the drone-like beat. He also insisted that the instrument was forbidden to women, although there are many known instances to the contrary. It seems to be another instance where a reaction against European culture is producing a more conservative form of indigenous culture. For example, art works that were formerly permitted by Elders to be seen in galleries have recently been reclassified as secret.

It’s hard to be censorious. The cassowary bird is a key link in the rainforest ecosystem.

Cassowary bird

It eats fruits that are poisonous to humans and disseminates the seeds in its scat. Humans have now taken to feeding the flightless bird. The cassowary becomes accustomed to being fed and sometimes attacks people for food. Human food has altered its digestive system, so we were told, with the result that it is less able to digest the fruits it normally eats. It’s at these small intersections that things go out of joint and violence results.

If it’s a direct choice between sugar culture and indigenous conservation, it’s seems clear where we should go. But it isn’t. The Kuku Yalanji are not proposing that kind of return to a lost beginning, in part because the land could no longer support the numbers of people that there are here, and in part because electricity, health care and other such modern conveniences are not worth revoking. There are some people living traditionally off the coast of the island of Kauai, part of the Hawai’ian archipelago, it should be said, and traditional navigation is making a return across the Pacific. By the same token, we can’t choose modern-style growth as a solution because there aren’t enough resources for everyone to live in the Anglo-US-Australian way. This is the sharpest edge between the myth of “globalization” and the actual experience of the planetary. All the choices are bad.

Foucault Tourism

Posted on by

Today to Cockatoo Island: penal colony within the convict colony, industrial reformatory, factory, shipyard, UNESCO World Heritage site and now a venue for the 18th Sydney Biennale. The extraordinary bricolage of colonial punishment, industrial production and knowledge economy cultural production makes for one of those slightly dizzying jet laggy experiences you have only while traveling.

My British forebears did know how and where to build prisons, you have to give them that. The island is isolated in the middle of Sydney harbor, with the prison itself located on top of a steep cliff. Recent excavations have uncovered minute solitary confinement cells, which have a distinctly contemporary look in this Abu Ghraib era. The officials built themselves sandstone residences with a Georgian feel but placed at the highest point to give them a panoptic viewpoint. Grain silos dug into the rock still have chain rings, to which the excavating prisoners were linked while working. The prison was created right at the end of the transportation era in 1849–convicts were not sent to New South Wales after 1850, although they went to Western Australia as late as 1868.

As has often been pointed out, these colonial punishments add a totally different complexion to the idea that European jurisprudence had moved from physical punishment to mental discipline by the early nineteenth century. My view has been that revolutionary action in Europe won workers there a certain (if limited) reprieve from punishment; but colonial punishment intensified in the later nineteenth century as imperialism abandoned all pretension of colonial self-government in favor of direct rule from the metropole. That did not preclude the disciplinary formation of colonized subjects, as the reformatories attest.

In 2000, a group of Aboriginal people occupied the island and claimed it as sovereign territory. You can still see their murals, using the Aboriginal flag as a motif. Using the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, Isabell Coe and others asserted that Britain had never formally claimed the island, a claim rejected by the courts as “inconceivable.” Really? A deserted island on the edge of the harbor? Regardless, Coe created a tent embassy on the island and asserted sovereignty. The occupation of occupied indigenous land and the counterclaim to sovereignty was a powerful performative act.

This, then, is no ordinary post-industrial site to hold an art exhibition. The artists whose work was shown here seemed to be aware of the challenges and many rose to the occasion. I liked Jonathan Jones’s simple approach:

Jones mixed typically British crockery with sea-shells that might be found in an Aboriginal midden in what is now New South Wales. The intermingling is simple but effective.

A more complex approach was taken by Lebanese artist Khaled Sabsabi in his installation “Nonabel.” You enter a darkened air-raid shelter and see the reflection of a young boy in water projected onto the circular walls. All of a sudden, the image changes dramatically and a montage of Arabic calligraphy and sound installation made me jump, although the phrase being used in the piece apparently means: “if you destroy the image of violence, it will disappear.”

Khaled Sabsabi “Nonabel”

Finally Alec Finlay brought the location of imperial domination up to date with his sound and sculpture installation. To quote his description:

Finlay takes the fluctuations of the stock market and represents them as the ‘buzz’ of Australian honey-bees (recorded by sound-artist Chris Watson), broadcast from 10 multi-storied wooden hives. Each hive stack bears the acronym of a major stock exchange – New York, Toronto, Sao Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sydney – and produces a stream of audio, a buzzing that varies in density and volume in accordance with economic activity.

It was a remarkable sound, rising and falling with the market activity.

Alec Finlay “Swarm ASX”

What made it all the more powerful–although I suspect unintentionally–was that I came upon this piece in the Convict Precinct, just after reading a sign placed by the Sydney Harbor Trust. It described how, when the prison was first established, the prisoners were confined in wooden boxes at night. Is this what the favorite corporate slogan “thinking outside the box” actually means? That if you don’t produce useful ideas, we’ll put you in a box? Bees are said to form colonies. Others describe them as democracies or societies. Finlay also makes nests for “unproductive” wild bees out of books about bees. It’s layered symbolism like this that does important imaginative work, as we would do well to remember in our messaging and imaging in directly political contexts.

Capitalism: “the horror, the horror”

Posted on by

It is said that Eisenstein hoped to make a movie out of Marx’s Capital. If anyone wanted to make a movie out of today’s capitalism, it would be a horror film. Like all horror films, this is a sequel. The convergence of financial crisis, environmental disaster and stalled imperialism that we see today has recurred across the modern period, beginning in the eighteenth century. It’s catchphrase is “the horror, the horror,” first coined by Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness concerning European imperialism, reapplied by Francis Ford Coppola to the Vietnam war. Today, as befits the third in a series, the crisis of capitalism, imperialism and the biosphere is planetary.

As the astonishing scandals unfolding at Barclay’s Bank indicate once more, if capital is the monster in this film, it is one that is now out of control. The particular issue concerns the fixing of interest rates by the bank to its own ends. Imagine that one month you want to pay credit card debt so you want interest rates low to keep the payment down. The next month you have some savings, so you want rates high so you can make a profit.  Of course, we have no choice. For banks, it’s different, as Reuters report:

Some 257 requests were made to rate submitters from at least 14 Barclays derivatives traders over four years. Traders at other banks also tried to influence Barclays’ rate, while Barclays’ traders put pressure on the rates offered by others. Most of the world’s biggest banks are under investigation…Barclays is the first to settle.

This is at one level another Bankster scandal, in which there’s one rule for them and another for us.

The traders making these fixes were nonetheless relatively low-level operatives. We tend to assume that behind them is some Dr. Evil figure manipulating the whole scheme, in the manner of Gordon Gekko. An oral history project on the financial crisis shows rather than no-one understood what was going on. The credit derivatives people relied on their computers to calculate what their trades had actually done. In 2008, they started to discover that they were losing more money than they could imagine every time they hit F9 to make the calculation. And these were the best informed people. One trader explained:

most in the bank didn’t understand our products. Even the risk and compliance people who were supposed to be our internal checks and balances …  I learned that the people high up know just enough for the role they’re in…

all major banks and corporations are doing this.

This is the horror–the machine you have created is out of control and you don’t know how to stop it. The trader developed night sweats, skin disease and has been diagnosed with PTSD. The interest rate fixes were sticking plaster over gaping wounds.

This does not get fixed by setting a new way to calculate LIBOR. As Christian Marazzi has put it, in his analysis of post-Fordist capitalism:

What is at stake is not only the understanding of our world, but our very being in this world.

Like Mr. Kurtz, we find ourselves in an existential crisis, in which the current ways of doing things are a horror, but so is the alternative: “the horror, the horror.” It is the apparent anonymity of the crisis that creates the horror–the very fact that the algorithms have done it. As Emmanuel Levinas put it in a different context:

In the night, when we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not “something.” But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence…The rustling of the there is…is horror.

As this suggests, for existentialism, the horror is in part the absence of God, or of rational purpose. Capitalism has claimed a spiritual dimension since Adam Smith’s fantasy of the “invisible Hand” and in modern America, capitalism is directly bonded with fundamentalism Christianity. So there is a reason that anti-capitalism is also anti-monotheism.

Imperialism sees itself as erasing nothingness, whether the terra nullius of supposedly empty space or the tabula rasa (clean slate) of the “heathen” mind, requiring conversion, the very “colonization of consciousness” (Jean and John Comaroff). When it looks at land it sees nothing but “wilderness as never having entered into any economic transaction” (Timothy Morton). What the missionary David Livingstone described as the Three Cs, “Christianity, Commerce and Civilization” were intimately linked. Perhaps there are in fact then three horrors.

Marlon Brando as Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" (1979)

In Conrad’s roughly contemporary novel, it is only after Kurtz has been retrieved from his inland ivory station that he gets a glimpse of what he has truly done–“the horror, the horror.” The death and destruction wielded by his company in pursuit of accumulation finally becomes apparent to him. The devastation of the rain forest described here is still just a backdrop but this was a period in which carbon emissions escalated dramatically and biosphere extinction moved closer. You can’t simply endorse Conrad because part of his story is about Kurtz “going native” and adopting indigenous religion. Religion is part of the horror, above all colonizing Christianity, the third horror.

In today’s Congo region, millions have died since the Rwanda genocide of 1994 opened an era of wide-scale instability. From time to time, there are newspaper articles and the liberals shake their heads but, as Zizek has consistently pointed out, paying attention to the horror of the Congo then and now means not reforming the system but abolishing it.

So how does this movie end? There are those market apologists who suggest that the 1890s financial panic turned out great with a decade of prosperity following it. Most with a degree of perspective see it as the precursor to World War 1. I’m not sure that capitalism can revive itself without a dose of war profits, but present-day counterinsurgency warfare has proved spectacularly unprofitable for the population at large.

I do think we should refuse existentialist despair. The solution to the Congo question of the 1890s was in the end fairly simple: stop colonizing it. But once the new automobiles wanted rubber tires that was not going to happen. It’s fascinating how clearly the fossil-fuel economy that was modern capitalism’s first intensifier is still its last support now that the machine has gone crazy.

Against craziness and religion, we can offer rational solutions: Stop burning fossil fuels. End derivative markets. End imperialism, and use the massively reduced military budget to fund education, health care and a living wage. Here’s the thing. In the first reel of the movie, it almost seems possible that the monster will win but in the end it never does.