Organizing Equality: Dispatches from a Global Struggle 9780228012894

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o r g a n i z i n g e q ua l i t y

mcgill-queen’s studies in protest, power, and resistance Series editor: Sarah Marsden Protest, civil resistance, and political violence have rarely been more

visible. Nor have they ever involved such a complex web of identities, geographies, and ideologies. This series expands the theoretical and empirical boundaries of research on political conflict to examine the origins, cultures, and practices of resistance. From grassroots activists and those engaged in everyday forms of resistance to social movements to violent militant networks, it considers the full range of actors and the strategies they use to provoke change. The series provides a forum for interdisciplinary work that engages with politics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, religious studies, and philosophy. Its ambition is to deepen understanding of the systems of power people encounter and the creative, violent, peaceful, extraordinary, and everyday ways they try to resist, subvert, and overthrow them.

1 New Media and Revolution

Resistance and Dissent in Pre-uprising Syria Billie Jeanne Brownlee 2 Games of Discontent Protests, Boycotts, and Politics at the 1968 Mexico Olympics

Harry Blutstein 3 Organizing Equality

Dispatches from a Global Struggle Edited by Alison Hearn, James Compton, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Amanda F. Grzyb

Organizing Equality Dispatches from a Global Struggle

e d i t e d b y a l i s o n h e a r n , ja m e s c o m p t o n , n i c k dy e r- w i t h e f o r d , a n d a m a n da f. g r z y b

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISB N ISB N ISB N ISB N

978-0-2280-1195-8 978-0-2280-1196-5 978-0-2280-1289-4 978-0-2280-1290-0

(cloth) (paper) (eP df) (eP UB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Organizing equality : dispatches from a global struggle / edited by Alison Hearn, James Compton, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Amanda F. Grzyb. Names: Hearn, Alison, editor. | Compton, James Robert, 1963– editor. | Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 1951– editor. | Grzyb, Amanda F., 1970– editor. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in protest, power, and resistance ; 3. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in protest, power, and resistance ; 3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220234124 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220234175 | ISB N 9780228011965 (paper) | IS BN 9780228011958 (cloth) | I SB N 9780228012894 (eP DF ) | IS BN 9780228012900 (eP u b ) Subjects: lc s h: Equality—Case studies. | l cs h: Social movements—Case studies. | lc gft: Case studies. Classification: l cc hm 821. o74 2022 | ddc 305—dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Organizing Equality: Crises, Contexts, and Possibilities 3 Alison Hearn, James Compton, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Amanda Grzyb

part one | global forces and national traditions 1 How Do We Create a People? Rethinking Resistance, Solidarity, and Transformation in the European South 29 Panagiotis Sotiris

2 Class versus Caste: The Conundrum of Dalit Politics and the Communist Movement in India (1926–2016) 54 Debayudh Chatterjee

3 Community Resistance to Mining in the Lower Aguán Valley: The Struggle for Land and the Roots of Inequality, Violence, and Repression in Honduras 72 Bernie Hammond, Michael Berghoef, Giada Ferrucci, Amanda Grzyb, Dimitri Lascaris, and Ainhoa Montoya

part two | resisting work and debt 4 Against Debt’s Digital Empire: Exploring the Connections between Race, Technology, and Global Financial Regimes 99 Max Haiven, Enda Brophy, and Benjamin Anderson

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5 Into the Weeds: Political Organizing as Theory 126 Ann Larson

6 Organizing Dark Matter: W.A.G.E. as Alternative Worker Organization 139 Greig de Peuter

part three | affective strategies and healing justice 7 Rising from Survival to Social Justice: Converging Media and Social Movements in India 171 Kiran Prasad

8 Beyond the Pavement

191

Lynx Sainte-Marie

9 The Immaterial Commons: Sustaining Intersectional Horizontalism through Affective Digital Labour 198 Sandra Jeppesen, Jaina Kelly, and the Media Action Research Group (marg )

10 Indigenization: Carrying Indigenous Knowledge into the Academy 218 David Newhouse

part four | reason and passion – final reflections 11 Reducing Inequality: An Essential Step for Development and Well-Being 233 Kate Pickett

Dear Fetid Mass (On Diversity) 241 David James Hudson and Lisa Baird

Contributors Index 251

245

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to the Office of the Provost and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario for providing financial and administrative support for the Organizing Equality conference and the development of this volume. Thanks, also, to all of the Organizing Equality conference participants and volunteers, the members of the Organizing Equality Student Coalition, and especially the members of the conference planning committee, particularly Josh Lambier and Datejie Green. Josh is an exceptionally skilled conference organizer and he continued to work closely with our editorial team throughout the early stage of the planning process for this book; we are very grateful for his thoughtful, patient, and creative work. Amy Freier and Madeleine McMillan have been extremely effective in their roles as editorial assistants, assisting us through various stages of manuscript preparation. Warren Steele and Jaime Brenes Reynes provided us with excellent editorial help as well. Finally, we would like to thank our two anonymous peer reviewers who helped make this a stronger volume and Khadija Coxon, our editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, for her keen eye and enthusiastic support. Thank you all.

o r g a n i z i n g e q ua l i t y

i ntro duc t i o n

Organizing Equality: Crises, Contexts, and Possibilities Alison Hearn, James Compton, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Amanda Grzyb

Income inequality deepens around the globe; unemployment and low-waged precarious jobs are on the rise as traditional factory jobs shutter or relocate to the Global South and the new gig economy solidifies; extractive industries proliferate in the face of imminent climate disaster; and government funding for public goods, such as health care and education, are hitting record lows in Western nations as austerity logics prevail. In response, Indigenous-rights movements and the Black Lives Matter movement emerge and strengthen, and pro-democracy and anti-austerity movements spread from Tahir Square to Ghezi Park, from Athens to London, from Montreal to Wall Street. In 2017, these intensifying and intersecting sets of global, national, and local challenges inspired our desire to convene a conference, entitled Organizing Equality, which would tackle the pressing need to mobilize across identities, social location, abilities, and politics to address issues of economic and social inequality. Sponsored by the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University and held in London, Ontario, Canada, we hoped the conference would facilitate meaningful connections between the many disparate global struggles for social, economic, and environmental justice, and would give voice to our own personal and professional frustrations with the neoliberal austerity stranglehold on our federal and local governments, media, and universities. Our goal was modest when we began, but interest in the conference far exceeded our expectations. We received proposals from a wide variety of activists, artists, and

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scholars from every continent, and, thanks to money received from our university after our own brand of internal activism (described in more detail below), we were able to provide funding for participants from North America, Europe, Central America, Africa, and Asia, which, in turn, facilitated political and personal connections and affinities that continue to this day. This volume draws from the work presented at the Organizing Equality conference in 2017, although a few pieces in the spirit of the conference have been added. In the tradition of reporting from the field, it includes a wide range of perspectives on struggles for equality across class, gender, race, sexuality, caste, disability, and geopolitics, in different scales and in different registers. It also brings together a variety of methods and genres of writing, attempting to forge a link between more scholarly studies of struggles for equality with journalistic, impressionistic, and artistic work that offer more personal and hands-on perspectives on these struggles. We endeavour to bridge the traditional divide between scholarship, activists, and artists to underscore the urgent fact that we must build strong affinities and support networks across our differences if we are to build a more just world. In this introduction, we tell the story of the contexts and genesis of the Organizing Equality conference in more detail, highlighting our own positionality within a corporatized neoliberal university in a small rust-belt Canadian city as a starting point. We then review the content of the volume, highlighting each essay’s distinct contribution and the common themes that connect them, including the different challenges that can come from organizing across different national contexts and forms of identity, the importance of care work within social movements, and the need to re-examine the very meaning of the term equality itself – to seek a reparative mode of social change, a form of healing justice. It is our hope that this volume might capture the inspiring range of issues, activisms, analyses, and expressions of commonality and solidarity that we all experienced together in March 2017 and inspire others to organize for equality across theoretical, economic, and social differences.

contex ts : fro m glo bal to l o c a l c r i se s The conference was precipitated by a profound legitimation crisis sweeping Western governments and civil-society institutions following the 2008 financial collapse – known as the Great Recession. Nine

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years later, many of the conference presentations reflected upon this still-unfolding hegemonic crisis. The immediate state response, particularly in North America, was to bail out financialized capital – most prominently banks deemed too big to fail along with the automotive industry, which itself had become financialized through the development of in-house lending.1 The overall impact of the recession was lopsided and dire for labour and poor people around the world. Wages and the labour share of income fell, unemployment increased, as did inequality and poverty. Unions also lost bargaining power. In America “the proportion of workers earning wages below poverty-level increased from 23.3 per cent in 2006 to 28 per cent by 2011.”2 In the first few months following the collapse, close to eight million people lost their jobs in the United States alone. The pain was widespread but unevenly distributed by race and ethnicity. Median net worth among American families dropped 39.4 per cent from 2007 to 2010, according to a Pew Research survey.3 Lower-income white families experienced greater losses during the recession than lower-income Black families. Prior to the recession, low-income white families had ten times the median wealth as Black families while lower-income Latino families lagged behind white families by a ratio of five-to-one. During this period the median income of low-income white families was halved while the losses for low-income Black and Latino families were 3 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. Pew speculates that the disparities may have resulted from different exposure to the housing market collapse. Low-income white families were much more likely to be homeowners in 2007. The story changes for middle-income Black and Latino families whose median income dropped 47 per cent and 55 per cent respectively from 2007 to 2013. Middle-income white families were relatively better off, experiencing a loss of 31 per cent during the same period.4 The situation was much rosier on the opposite end of the social ladder. While the labour share of income as a percentage of gdp declined, after-tax profits rose, and by 2014 were at their highest level in decades.5 The banking sector experienced a significant redistribution of wealth. Those banks deemed too big to fail “increased their size and market shares through acquisitions and other means,” leading to “a strong recovery in the profitability of the banking sector.”6 Following the massive government bailout of the financial sector, which stretched into a total commitment of close to $17 trillion,7 financialized capital expanded and thrived.

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In the immediate wake of this massive redistribution of wealth, public faith in government and civic institutions was tested, plunging capitalism into a broader social and political crisis. As Wolfgang Streeck argues, the bailout of the banks was part of a much broader financialization of capitalist society. Public and private debt increased, while broader social provisions were clawed back as austerity budgets took hold among federal and provincial governments around the globe, leaving individuals – now saddled with increased personal debt – struggling to makes ends meet after decades of wage suppression and job shedding due to automation.8 “At the root of this crisis of political legitimacy,” argues Manuel Castells, “is the financial crisis, which went on to become an economic and employment crisis … . In reality it was the crisis of a form of capitalism, global financial capitalism, a model based on the interdependence of world markets and on the use of digital technologies to create virtual speculative capital that imposed its dynamic of artificial value creation onto the productive capacity of goods and services.”9 For Streeck, the “interregnum” was further characterized by crises at the macro system level and micro social level. Social policy, even prior to the crisis, had become oriented towards “public provision for private ‘competitiveness’” – labour was recommodified, taxes lowered, regulations on capital relaxed, all in order to enhance the flexibility of labour and capital markets. Meritocracy replaced the entitlements of citizenship.10 With social supports weakened, and economic precarity on the rise, individuals were left to struggle on their own, or rely, according to Streeck, on four broad types of behaviours to mollify their entropic social life: “identified as coping, hoping, doping and shopping.”11 This was the context in which Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York, and soon after in cities around the world, demanded justice for the 99 per cent. It was the moment when anti-austerity activists took to the streets in Turkey, Greece, Spain, and other eu countries demanding an alternative to the endless waves of austerity imposed by global financialized capital. It was also the moment when the tools of social media were seized by Indigenous-rights activists in Canada and Black Lives Matter activists across North America to mobilize support under the respective hashtags #idlenomore and #blacklivesmatter. These became perhaps the most visible signs of resistance to what Nancy Fraser has called “progressive

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neoliberalism” – a hegemonic program that reduced equality to meritocracy and quite pointedly “did not aim to abolish social hierarchy but to ‘diversify’ it.” It was a class specific ideal “geared to ensuring that ‘deserving’ individuals from ‘under-represented groups’ can attain positions and pay on par with the straight white men of their own class.”12 The new social movements were demanding more than representation or a chance to “lean in” and break the glass ceiling. In addition to representation, these movements were demanding redistributive justice. Their success would eventually meet a vicious backlash with the 2016 election victory of Donald Trump and his version of reactionary populism.13

co ntex ts : lo nd o n , o n ta r i o ’ s rust-b elt i neq ua l i t i e s Our decision to hold a conference on inequality arose not only from these global pressures, but also from the city context in which our university is set. London, Ontario, despite the invidious comparisons its name invites, has its own distinctive history of urban inequalities, a history at once specific yet also reflective of more general Canadian, and global, trends. Unsurprisingly, it is a town that, from the moment of white settler displacement of the Indigenous inhabitants of what would become South Western Ontario, including the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lu¯naapéewak, and Attawandaron peoples, has always been bifurcated between rich and poor, and between those included in and excluded from its limits. In the early twentieth century, the rich city was constituted by the offices, residences, and shopping sites of the owners and managers of financial capital (specifically, the large Canadian insurance company, London Life), industrial capital (Empire Brass) and carbon capital (Imperial Oil), alongside lesser elites, such as the professors and administrators of the University of Western Ontario, the doctors and medical professionals of several hospitals, and well-to-do farmers of the rich crop lands surrounding the city. Adelaide Street, a classic east-west, city-dividing thoroughfare, marked the boundary of a more proletarian city, largely industrial – increasingly a branchplant extension of the US auto-manufacturing belt and food processing complex thrusting north from Detroit – anchoring an array of smaller local machine shops and foundries. Treaty arrangements

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assigned Indigenous peoples to settlements outside the city, largely along the river settlers had named the Thames on whose banks First Nations communities live to this day under boil-water advisories caused by inadequate water systems.14 If the working-class city was poorer than the wealthy downtown, it was, however, also a site of trades union organizing, labour struggles and, eventually, after the galvanizing effects of Canada’s social mobilization for the Second World War, of the Fordist wage compact that, by tying wage raises to growing productivity, eventually gave some workers (predominantly white and male) and their families a hitherto unknown affluence. These gains were of course uneven; even late in the twentieth century, London was amongst the most intensely income-polarized cities in Canada.15 And, as Bryan Palmer recollects in his reflections on life in mid-twentieth- century London, Ontario, it was a “very white place” that “proved a fertile environment for the politics of the right-wing fringe in the late 20th century.” The University of Western Ontario was implicated in this environment, most notably through the activities of Dr Philip Rushton, a notorious proponent of racist  biological theories, but also, as Palmer documents, by those of other professors aligned with white supremacism.16 Nevertheless, this segmented economic growth still made London both a relatively prosperous and – as the largest city between Toronto and Detroit – culturally distinct town, with a lively arts scene sustained by both low studio (or attic) rents and local purchasing power, well provided with medical and educational facilities, and surrounded by a network of small but viable rural townships. In recent decades however, this situation changed. London’s industrial working class was eroded by the decline of a North American manufacturing sector bleeding jobs to both automation and offshoring, and by neoliberal attacks on labour rights and welfare state institutions. A long, slow decline was accelerated to crisis levels by the Wall Street crash of 2008 and its aftermath of recession and austerity. The city saw major automotive sector and food processing closures, with the shuttering of Ford, Caterpillar, Kellogg, McCormick, and Freightliner plants and the elimination of hundreds of unionized jobs. Today, a Toyota assembly plant continues to operate some fifty-six kilometres away, but in London itself the main residue of Fordist industry is a factory of the US military industrial giant, General Dynamics, producing light armoured vehicles, first for the US army

Introduction

9

in Iraq, and then for Saudi Arabia’s internal security operations and, probably, for the battlefields of Yemen; its supply chains directly connect the city to some of the ghastliest sites of global immiseration. Even this plant, and its penumbra of parts manufacturers and associated industries arrayed around it have, however, been insufficient to shelter the city from the effects of deindustrialization. Few other cities in Canada were hit as hard as London by the 2008 recession; the official unemployment rate was over 10 per cent in 2009. Recovery has been slow and uneven: even by 2017, the date of our conference, overall unemployment rates were just beginning to return to preslump levels. It is very questionable, however, whether the new jobs, strongly oriented towards sectors such as sales, service, and construction work, are as secure or well paid as those that have vanished. Moreover, low labour market participation rates – probably the result of older, laid off industrial workers near retirement age rejecting unattractive prospects of retraining and job search – continue to dog the city; while London’s population grew over the decade between 2008 and 2018, fewer people were actually working for a wage. At the same time, other forces were reshaping London’s patterns of inequality. A major factor was the growing gravitational pull of nearby Toronto, a massive attractor of work and wealth, exemplary of the centralizing power of today’s giant metropoles. Since the early 2000s Ontario has been a “two speed economy,” with less than 12 per cent of all net new jobs created outside Toronto (the business centre of Canada) and Ottawa (its governmental capital).17 This reflects the ascendancy within postindustrial capital of high technology and finance, sectors that tend to agglomerate around urban hubs, providing access to concentrated yet globally networked pools of know-how and influence. Within Toronto, such growth created vertiginous inequalities of income and wealth, most fiercely manifest in skyrocketing house and rental prices. In a reflux dynamic, young families and retirees – colloquially, “the newly wed and the nearly dead” – priced out of Toronto’s residential hothouse, began to seek housing in peripheral centres such as London. Meanwhile other, very different kinds of migration were also transforming the city. From the 1990s on, London had become a destination for several groups of migrants and refugees from countries such as El Salvador, Colombia, Afghanistan, and most recently, Syria. These arrivals have diversified

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and challenged the city’s apparently inveterate racist manifestations. But this internationalization of the urban fabric also introduced new geographical segregations – largely on a north and south, rather than east and west axes – forged from both ethnicity and income. These shifting patterns of employment and demographics have converged in a context typical of neoliberal urbanism, in which government, at all levels, withdraw from the provision of affordable social housing; where property developers buy up buildings in decaying urban centres and leave them as vacant ghost properties awaiting a rise in rent rates or demolition permits to enable new development; and where welfare rates and other social benefits remain stagnant yet are evermore-stringently policed. By the time the Organizing Equality conference was held in 2017, the trajectory of an urban crisis which subsequently only intensified were becoming apparent on London’s downtown streets. This crisis combined the issues of unemployment and job precarity, homelessness, racism (with London’s growing urban Indigenous population especially vulnerable), and waves of drug dependence that passed through phases of heroin, oxycontin, methamphetamine, and fentanyl use. Some of those who attended the conference suffered this crisis firsthand. Many of the community activists who participated were involved in programs that attempted to cope with it. Several scholars who organized or presented at the event were connected to agencies of homeless shelters and health care provision, or to trades unions engaged both in workplace struggles and social policy issues. But as an institution, the University of Western Ontario had been notably sealed off from the decomposition of the city it inhabited, lodged in its pleasant, leafy, and enclosed collegial-Gothic citadel campus, flanked by its student residence complexes (and by nearby residential streets periodically shaken by drunken, and often sexist and racist, student street parties) at the north end of town. It was this insulation we hoped to challenge by the Organizing Equality conference, holding it at a downtown site at Museum London. Since that time, the dimensions of London have shifted somewhat, but in contradictory directions. International migration and flight from Toronto continue to propel the city’s population growth, while the US economic recovery has produced a modest uptick in manufacturing employment and a rash of high-tech start-ups. Yet these

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processes only sharpen the problems of unaffordable housing and high rents; in London Ontario the sidewalk camps of people experiencing homelessness continue to locally index capital’s global crisis of inequality.

th e genesi s o f o rga n i z i n g e q ua l i t y: creati ng o ppo rtuni ty o u t o f c r i si s i n t h e neo li b eral un i v e rsi t y In line with these global and local trends, workers at our own university (the University of Western Ontario, one of the largest employers in London), had been suffering under the threat of financial crisis and perpetual austerity for years; contract faculty and staff were losing their jobs, stable tenure track hiring was at a standstill, class sizes were increasing, and research and teaching resources were drying up. In addition, the senior administration sidelined or simply ignored existing collegial governance processes as they pursued a series of opaque and generally disastrous top-down initiatives, apparently intended to consolidate administrative power. Of course, we were far from alone in suffering under these conditions; by 2017, most Canadian universities had been thoroughly infected by the logics of austerity implemented through forms of New Public Management (npm ) and Responsibility Center Management (rcm ). Developed in the US and UK in 1980s, npm is the product of neoliberal political ideology intent on privatizing, significantly reducing in size, or ostensibly modernizing public sector institutions on the model of the private sector. It assumes that public services – universities, schools, health care systems – are no different from any private business and are all essentially the same and operate the same way. Under npm , citizens become customers, and politicians or public servants become technocrats whose job is simply to measure and control operations so as to make them as efficient and profitable as possible.18 A similar sentiment underscores Responsibility Center Management (rcm ), (now often referred to as “activitybased budgeting” or “incentive-based budgeting”). First introduced at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, rcm ’s goal was to make faculty members responsible for the financial repercussions of their academic and pedagogical decisions. Under rcm , individual academic units, like departments or schools, must cover “the

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total costs of their programs … from the revenues generated by their teaching, research, or business service activities.”19 If a department’s or “responsibility center’s” enrollment and revenue go up, they can hire and add new courses and if their numbers and revenue go down, they must make cuts and increase class sizes. rcm is intended to encourage revenue maximization by incentivizing academic units to be more competitive, entrepreneurial, and cost-effective.20 The logics of npm and rcm have produced a cascade of troubling effects in Canadian universities, including rising tuition fees, a growing reliance on cheaper-to-hire contract faculty, and an emphasis on monetizable research. Faculties are pitted against each other in competition for scarce resources, resulting in a race to the bottom in terms of academic requirements and grade inflation.21 As units battle for their own survival, collegial governance bodies like university senates become less relevant. But perhaps the most insidious impact has been the way university administrators have embraced their role as supposedly ideologically neutral managers and change agents focused primarily on the university’s bottom line. npm and rcm have pushed all nonmonetary values, such as collegiality, academic freedom, or enhancing the public good outside of discourse. While they promise that university management will become more transparent and less ideological, these models have not reduced centralized control at all. In fact, the numbers of administrative middle managers have only increased,22 along with intensified forms of university brand discipline, opaque capital spending initiatives, and centrally determined research investments. At Western, one of the most flagrant top-down, centralized initiatives was the establishment in 2013 of a new Western Clusters of Research Excellence Program, a scheme that was conceived by senior administrators behind closed doors, with little to no consultation.23 At a time when the university had imposed extreme austerity budget cuts to Western’s core academic units like Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences, the research cluster program promised significant monetary investment ($5 million and up) in “areas of strategic importance to the University”24 to be determined by three unaccountable university senior administrators who would invite proposals from hand-picked applicants. Although the research cluster program was clearly targeted at stem -side research initiatives, a group of faculty members organized an alternative research cluster proposal, Building Stronger Societies: Equality and Inequality, Global and Local. This

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initiative brought together more than seventy Western University researchers from eight different faculties with a common goal of addressing the challenges of wealth and poverty, social exclusion, Indigenous struggles, mobility and migration, and health inequities in an integrated and holistic manner. The Building Stronger Societies proposal did not fit the university’s vision for stem -focused research cluster projects, and, not surprisingly, in spite of excellent external reviews, it was eventually rejected. After demands for transparency around the adjudication process however, the administration finally agreed to fund an international conference on these themes, and thus the Organizing Equality conference, and this edited volume, were born. The glaring contradictions of the research cluster initiative and the senior administration’s divisive managerial tactics led to widespread discontent on campus and prompted the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty Association (uwofa ) to challenge the agents of austerity by publishing its own analysis of Western’s books, called “Every Budget is a Choice.”25 The analysis showed that the university was repeatedly creating operating surpluses, approximately forty million a year to a total of 202 million, and then transferring these surpluses to restricted sub-funds, or spending the surplus money on buildings and other capital projects. This analysis proved that Western’s board of governors and senior leaders were repeatedly putting the accumulation of assets ahead of investing in teaching and research. It became obvious that our supposedly ideologically neutral fiscal managers were running the university according to a very clear political agenda. And then, on the heels of these budgetary revelations, in March 2015, the Ontario provincial government’s annual sunshine list of all public sector employee earnings over $100,000 a year revealed that Western’s president, Amit Chakma, had earned close to a million dollars in 2014. Chakma had taken two salaries in one year due to a clause in his contract that allowed him to take pay in lieu of administrative leave. With this revelation, the board and senior leaders’ real priorities were laid bare for everyone to see. The hypocrisy, disconnectedness, and stark self-interest were undeniable, the contradictions of austerity-based management too obvious to ignore, and every corner of the university erupted in rage. Inexplicably, the administration was caught off guard by the reaction. Apparently, they had thought the double salary could be easily

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justified; they claimed that Dr Chakma chose to forgo his administrative leave because the university needed his invaluable skill sets. In the wake of the “double dip” revelations, chair of the board, Chirag Shah, gave a press interview where he stated that faculty could also take pay in lieu of forgoing their sabbaticals – a gaffe that further illustrated the lack of understanding about the university’s day-today operations at the board level. In spite of this, the administration dug in, remaining entirely silent for the first week of the crisis. In the meantime, opposition was gathering speed on the ground. A motion came from the floor of a general meeting of uwofa to hold a no-confidence vote, and Western’s faculty members subsequently voted 94 per cent in favour of no confidence in the president and chair of the board. A Change.org petition expressing no confidence in Chakma and the board chair started by a faculty collective called “Noah Confidenze” gathered 5,800 signatures in just three days. Local ndp mpp Peggy Sattler introduced a private members’ bill in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to prevent these forms of executive buyouts in the future. London Free Press reporter Jonathan Sher wrote a series of articles exposing the fact that Chakma had taken pay in lieu of leave from his previous university as well, as had a series of other out-going university presidents, including former governor general of Canada, David Johnston.26 By the end of the first week, the board of governors finally issued a press release saying that Dr Chakma would give the money back, hoping this would stop the crisis in its tracks. It didn’t. A Western University Senate meeting was scheduled for 10 April, and a group of twenty-two senators requested a special meeting to consider two separate motions of nonconfidence in the president and chair of the board to be held on 17 April. This prompted Western administration to call in a crisis management firm, Navigator, to take over its communications.27 At the 10 April meeting, Chakma delivered an abject apology, agreeing with his critics that he had been “out of touch” with the university’s priorities.28 In the packed auditorium, many members of the Western community turned their backs on Chakma as he spoke. Colleagues wore their academic regalia to make a statement about the ways the administration had neglected Western’s core academic mission. The administration hired extra security guards for the event, bags were confiscated at the door, and graduate students were told they were not allowed to protest inside the building. Many observers carried small paper protest signs only to have them ripped away by security personnel.

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The special meeting of Western’s Senate to consider the nonconfidence motions held on 17 April was met with similar protests and heavy-handed security. By this time, efforts to suppress dissent had intensified; a day before the meeting, a large advertisement appeared in the Western News and the London Free Press signed by a group of wealthy alumni and donors demanding that the protests stop and that the discussion about Chakma’s salary and poor performance be resolved “behind closed doors.” After hours of heated debate, the motion of nonconfidence against the president was defeated thirty to forty-nine, and, after members of the board got up to claim that the current chair had no control over Chakma’s contract, the nonconfidence vote in the board chair was defeated as well. It was not until an independent review of Dr Chakma’s salary, conducted by Justice Stephen Goudge, was released in the summer of 2015 that we learned Dr Chakma had asked for the extra money to pad his pension, and that the board chair, Chirag Shah, had unilaterally activated the clause in Dr Chakma’s contract without notifying anyone else on the board. Chief Justice Goudge characterized Chirag Shah’s actions as a “mistake,” but offered that the mistake had been “unintentional” and that he had “acted in good faith.”29 uwofa ’s budget analysis and the events of the salary scandal revealed the truth that the administration’s cries of perpetual crisis and austerity were self-interested and manufactured, intended to advance the interests of a very small group of people. The administrations’ actions were evidence of what Chris Lorenz has called “bullshit managerialism.”30 Following the work of Harry Frankfurt, Lorenz points out that, as opposed to lying, “bullshit” is neither based on a belief that what is being claimed is true nor, as in a lie, that it is untrue; “(i)t is … a lack of connection to a concern with truth,” an “indifference to how things really are … the npm bullshitter is simply playing an entirely different game from that played by faculty.”31 Western’s board and senior leaders’ indifference to how things “really” were, however, ended up hoisting them by their own petards. The crisis of what came to be known as “Chakmagate” allowed us to pull away the mask called “austerity” and reveal the naked self-interest and political motivations that lay beneath it. It also allowed us to find like-minded allies and colleagues across the university where we had never found them before. The manufactured state of perpetual crises propagated in and through npm and rcm inadvertently laid the groundwork for a very real crisis, which,

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in turn, provided leverage to begin reclaiming collegial governance and restoring a focus on the university’s core mission of accessible, high quality teaching and research. The two opportunities provided by Chakmagate and the “research clusterf*$k” provided both the funds and the determination for us to move forward with Organizing Equality. But, most importantly, they inspired us to understand our own context within the university as a privileged site for building coalitions and affinity groups with others organizing for equality – on campus, in the London community, and beyond.

o rga ni zi ng equa l i t y: from th e co nfer enc e to t h i s p u b l i c at i o n The articles collected in this volume are snapshots of the kinds of thinking and activisms about equality that continue to occur on the ground and around the world. They run the gamut from wide-ranging theoretical reflections to more detailed, issue-specific narratives and case studies, and include a variety of intellectual approaches and writing styles, from political and cultural theory to social science, ethnography, and epidemiology, from more traditional scholarly essays, to journalistic accounts, personal meditations, and poetry. We have divided the volume into sections to draw out thematic commonalities, including the challenges and possibilities for organizing a pro-people politics within and across different national contexts, the importance of innovative forms of debt resistance and labour organizing against neoliberal digital finance capitalism, and the urgent need for care work and healing justice in our social movements and our societies at large. It is our hope that the multiple views and approaches provided here can contribute to new ways of seeing, learning, and being that can organize equality. The volume begins with a section entitled “Global Forces and National Traditions.” Each of these chapters tells a distinct story about the tensions and challenges that arise within specific propeople struggles in very different national contexts – Greece, India, and Honduras – drawing important connections between these local struggles and more global struggles for social and economic justice. The section begins with an essay by one of the conference’s keynote speakers, Panagiotis Sotiris, a scholar and journalist who teaches social and political philosophy at several Greek universities. “How Do We Create a People? Rethinking Resistance, Solidarity, and

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Transformation in the European South” draws on the specific experiences of Greece in the wake of the 2008 economic crash and goes on to rethink left politics and the very concept of the people more generally. Sotiris argues that any movement for the people must be seen as an ongoing constitutive process “based upon the condition of subalternity in the context of contemporary capitalist accumulation,” and proposes the concept of “the front” as a way to describe the kind of ever-evolving, open-ended, deeply inclusive collection of movements needed to confront neoliberal capitalism, climate change, racism, and sexism. In order to make a common cause, he argues, we must resist rigid hierarchies, but not avoid politics or differences from within; we must show that “we can create forms of organization that are more democratic, egalitarian and anti-sexist than the society surrounding them.” Debayudh Chatterjee also argues for more inclusive forms of political organizing beyond the boundaries of state or electoral politics in his chapter, “Class Versus Caste: The Conundrum of Dalit Politics and the Communist Movement in India (1926–2016).” Chatterjee examines socio-economic inequality in India, specifically the caste system and the position of the Dalit (the lowest caste or “untouchables”) in their intersections with left parties and movements. He provides an in-depth history of the ways the Communist Party of India has attempted, and mostly failed, to deal with the position of the Dalit both in theory and in practice, arguing that the fight against Dalit oppression is a form of class struggle and must be acknowledged as such. Chatterjee concludes by emphasizing the urgent need to bridge differences on the Left in order to counter the Hindu Right in India, insisting that now “is not the time to promulgate the ‘us vs. them’ differences that run the risk of fracturing the unity of socialist, secular, and democratic parties, but the time to write a new history of consolidating and carrying forward a new idiom of pro-people politics.” Based on a report by a fact-finding mission sent to Honduras in 2019, “Community Resistance to Mining in the Lower Aguán Valley: The Struggle for Land and the Roots of Inequality, Violence, and Repression in Honduras” explores an important example of propeople politics and the dire costs that can come with it. Hammond, Berghoef, Ferrucci, Grzyb, Lascaris, and Montoya describe the land struggles and resistances to mining initiatives and repressive state violence undertaken by the small community of Guapinol in the

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Lower Aguán Valley of Honduras. Tracing Honduras’ abandonment of collective land ownership precipitated by the World Bank in the 1970s and 1980s, and its move toward neoliberal policies of rampant land privatization and accumulation in the 1990s, the chapter examines the widespread state repression that followed the coup against left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Since then, Honduras has committed 30 per cent of its territory to extractive corporations and has become a global epicentre for state repression, corruption, and human-rights violations. The example of the Guapinol Camp in Defense of Water and Life blockade includes stories of eviction, intimidation, criminalization, persecution, and assassination; it exposes the extreme risks these land protectors are willing to take and provides a heartbreaking and compelling illustration of the “criminalization suffered by all human rights and environmental defenders when they organize for greater equality and oppose corporate megaprojects.” The next section of the volume, “Resisting Work and Debt” focuses on the ravages of debt and dispossession brought about by neoliberal finance capitalism and the creative forms of resistance and worker organization that have emerged to organize equality from below. “Against Debt’s Digital Empire: Exploring the Connections between Race, Technology, and Global Financial Regimes” by Max Haiven, Enda Brophy, and Benjamin Anderson provides a comprehensive reading of digital capitalism’s myriad inequalities. Debunking the myth that contemporary forms of digital capitalism work to mitigate structural inequalities, Haiven, Brophy, and Anderson show that debt bondage has always been central to colonial and racist projects and continues to this day in the racially encoded digital algorithms that determine “creditworthiness” and the kinds of predatory lending that produced the economic crash of 2008. Like Sotiris, the authors acknowledge that gig work, digital dependency, perpetual indebtedness and precarity, forced migration, environmental degradation, and growing forms of racism, sexism, and nationalism are all deeply interconnected, as digital finance capitalism cannibalizes and monetizes the sociality and suffering of vulnerable and subaltern populations around the globe. The current power paradigm of digital capitalism, debt, and racism, has not gone unchallenged, however, and Haiven, Brophy, and Anderson conclude their article by reviewing a series of encouraging movements against debt bondage that have emerged in recent years. One of these efforts is

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the subject of the next article in this section, Ann Larson’s “Into the Weeds: Political Organizing as Theory.” In her article, Larson, co-founder of the Debt Collective, a militant activist group that works for debt forgiveness in the United States, describes the efforts she and others undertook to support a “debt strike” by students who had been defrauded by for-profit Corinthian College. Larson argues that the two-year struggle by these students to achieve debt cancellation from the federal government starkly reveals the governing tactics of liberalism; by sympathizing, delaying, individualizing the problem, and intensifying bureaucracy, and through the simple arrogance of those in power, student debtors were repeatedly marginalized. Luckily, they were not deterred from pursuing their collective demands for restitution. While many Corinthian students are still waiting to see their debt cancelled, their struggle for economic justice and the organizing work of the Debt Collective has succeeded in changing the very discourses associated with personal debt by acclimatizing the public to the idea that some (if not most) debt can and should be forgiven. Greig de Peuter explores another important example of emergent forms of collective power from below in “Organizing Dark Matter: w.a.g.e. as Alternative Worker Organization.” This chapter provides a specific case study of media and cultural workers fighting to reform their working conditions and address inequalities in the art field through the establishment of the Working Artists and the Greater Economy (w.a.g.e.) in New York City. De Peuter argues that the experience of artists “parallels that of freelancers, independent contractors, gig workers, and other workers who are not in a ‘standard employment relationship,’ the fraying normative arrangement around which many social protections and rights have been designed.” w.a.g.e. exposes the contradiction between art institutions who embrace labour justice as a theme in the work they exhibit but eschew it as a practice in their treatment of artists. w.a.g.e. has developed new creative modes of labour organizing, but, more importantly, has worked to de-exceptionalize artists, positioning them as workers among a plurality of others; de Peuter concludes that “it is difficult to imagine realizing greater economic equality within and beyond the arts without such a shift in collective ways of seeing.” The next section of the volume, “Affective Strategies and Healing Justice” focuses on the pressing need to develop robust forms of mutual aid and support, care work, and healing justice within and

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beyond our movements for equality – the kinds of care work and face-to-face solidarity building most often taken up by women. In “Rising from Survival to Social Justice: Converging Media and Social Movements in India,” Kiran Prasad explores the central role that women and marginalized groups have played “in spearheading social movements that aim at a more equitable distribution of resources, the conservation of natural resources, and the right to information and sustainable development.” Much of this organizing has involved the development of alternative community-based media. Prasad concludes that these media innovations give voice to marginalized people, promote dialogue, create networks for knowledge sharing across movements, and build the capacity for social change. While Prasad highlights the positive effects of this gendered, grassroots, communicative care work and organizing, in “Beyond the Pavement,” Lynx Sainte-Marie explores the ways organizing and activist work – even when it is successful – can take a physical and emotional toll on those engaged in the struggle. As an artist and community organizer who identifies as Black, queer, nonbinary and a disabled person, Sainte-Marie reflects on the processes of activism and self-care through a deeply personal, intersectional lens, recounting their experiences facilitating workshops in self-care for movement organizers across Canada. They question how poor, racialized, and disabled people can access healing or act as healers in a context of constant oppression. Saint-Marie advocates for forms of “healing justice” in the collaborative work of social movements that focuses on caring for our bodies, other people’s bodies, and the communities we create together. Sandra Jeppesen, Jaina Kelly, and the Media Action Research Group (marg ) address similar concerns about the emotional and psychological costs and benefits of organizing for equality in their contribution, “The Immaterial Commons: Sustaining Intersectional Horizontalism through Affective Digital Labour.” Reporting on their extensive research project undertaken with feminist, lgbtq +, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial media activists in eleven countries around the globe, the authors propose the concept of the “immaterial commons” to describe the “shared set of intangible inputs, processes or outcomes collectively held for the common good and available to local and global communities.” The authors use an intersectional lens to identify the different kinds of affective digital labour – transformative community empathy, holding space, and

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healing justice – employed and generated by media- activist groups. Their findings suggest that these forms of collective self care can mitigate burnout and inspire “improvements in confidence, strength, energy levels, belonging, collective cohesiveness, and mutual support” in social movements more generally. In the last chapter of this section, David Newhouse underscores the insistence by Prasad, Sainte-Marie, and Jeppesen and her coauthors that the personal is always political and posits that we are in need of a new understanding of equality and healing justice entirely – one that brings alternative ways of seeing and knowing to the foreground. In “Indigenization: Carrying Indigenous Knowledge into the Academy,” Newhouse argues that we must push past established boundaries of knowledge and activism in the name of broader political and cultural healing. Defining Indigenous knowledge (ik ) as ways of knowing and understanding the world that have been honed and passed on by Indigenous communities for centuries, Newhouse recounts how Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, has worked to implement Indigenous knowledge, scholars, and programs within its traditional liberal Western university structure. For Newhouse, indigenizing the academy requires accepting the interrelatedness of reason and passion, demands the “creation of an atmosphere that supports a broad definition of ‘inquiry,’” and, above all, believes that Indigenous people have something to offer beyond “opportunities for research into social problems.” As an important part of advancing the work of decolonization and reconciliation in Canada, the introduction of ik and Indigenous scholars and programs into Canadian universities can help to develop a more diverse and emotionally and environmentally aware generation of activists. Inspired by Newhouse’s argument, we conclude Organizing Equality: Dispatches from a Global Struggle with a section entitled “Reason and Passion.” This section contains two very different chapters in style and format – one a short piece by renowned epidemiologist Kate Pickett and the other a poem by activists and spoken word artists, David Hudson and Lisa Baird. We juxtapose these very different pieces to underscore the importance of bringing the scholarly into conversation with the artistic, rationality into dialogue with aesthetics and passion. In “Reducing Inequality: An Essential Step for Development and Well-Being,” Kate Pickett demonstrates that countries with high levels of inequality suffer from far higher numbers of health and social issues, such as infant mortality, life expectancy, and

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personal debt. This crisis is due to the erosion of government provisioning and social care and the increasing emphasis on the power and importance of those in higher social and economic classes. Pickett stresses the urgent need to move beyond platitudes and performative gestures and toward more equitable forms of social community, robust redistributive tax systems, and enhanced levels of “economic democracy, such as employee ownership, employee representation on boards … mutuals and cooperatives.” Building on Pickett’s plea, Hudson and Baird skewer mainstream bromides about diversity and social inclusion in their poem, “Dear Fetid Mass (On Diversity).” A stinging indictment of a neoliberal system addicted to superficial gestures of self-promotion and structurally unable to tackle the root causes of its own inequalities and exclusions, Hudson and Baird’s satire is even more relevant today than it was five years ago, as protests against racism and police brutality, and public support for Black and Indigenous lives, expand and intensify in the West.

c o nclus i o n As we write this, the Covid-19 pandemic has closed borders, shuttered businesses, and forced millions of people out of work as governments impose lockdown and physical distancing measures to combat the spread of the deadly disease. And while some governments have responded with much needed financial support, preexisting social inequalities based on class, race, gender, and ethnicity have meant that the pandemic threat is experienced very differently. As one Toronto public health official put it: “Physical distancing is a privilege by postal code.”32 Reporting and public health data consistently show that people of colour, the elderly, and the poor are much more likely to be afflicted by the disease. Meanwhile, during the first two months of the crisis the world’s twenty-five richest billionaires gained nearly $255 billion.33 For a few days in 2017, the Organizing Equality conference successfully brought together like-minded academics, activists, and artists for lectures, panel discussions, and presentations. The diversity of the participants was remarkable, hailing as they did from Asia, Europe, North and Central America. More inspiring still was what united them – a sincere desire not only to document social inequality, but to work collectively to find solutions. The multiple crises of 2020 and 2021 have only deepened the urgent need to organize

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across issues, identities, politics, and social location toward real and lasting social, political, and economic transformation. Without a doubt, we need solidarity, collective action, equality, and social justice now more than ever. It is our hope that this volume of dispatches from the front lines of the global struggle for equality might inspire and encourage like-minded scholars, activists, and artists to forge new connections and strengthen the fight. not e s 1 Marcelo do Carmo, Mario Sacomano Neto, and Julio Cesar Donadone, “Financialization in the Automotive Industry: Shareholders, Managers, and Salaries,” Journal of Economic Issues 53, no. 3 (2019): 841–62. 2 Mathieu Dufour and Özgür Orhangazi, “Capitalism, Crisis, and Class: The United States Economy after the 2008 Financial Crisis,” Review of Radical Political Economics 46, no. 4 (2014): 461–72. 3 Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry, “Wealth Inequality Has Widened along Racial, Ethnic Lines since End of Great Recession,” Pew Research Center, 12 December 2014, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/ racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/. 4 Rakesh Kochhar and Anthony Cilluffo, “How Wealth Inequality Has Changed in the US since the Great Recession, by Race, Ethnicity, and Income,” Pew Research Center, 12 November 2017, https://www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/01/how-wealth-inequality-haschanged-in-the-u-s-since-the-great-recession-by-race-ethnicity-andincome/. 5 Dufour and Orhangazi, “Capitalism, Crisis, and Class: The United States Economy after the 2008 Financial Crisis,” 464. 6 Ibid. 7 Mike Collins, “The Big Bank Bailout,” Forbes, 14 July 2015, https:// www.forbes.com/sites/mikecollins/2015/07/14/the-big-bank-bailout/ #4a6467642d83. 8 Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso, 2016). 9 Manuel Castells, Rupture: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy (London: Polity 2019). 10 Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?, 22. 11 Ibid., 41. 12 Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born (London: Verso 2019).

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13 Nancy Fraser, “Progressive Neoliberalism Versus Reactionary Populism A Hobson’s Choice,” in The Great Regression, ed. by Heinrich Geiselberger (London: Polity 2017). 14 Jessica Lebel, “Oneida Nation of the Thames Should Have Been on Boil Water Advisory since 2006: Chief Jessica Hill,” Global News, 1 Oct 2019, https://globalnews.ca/news/5970093/oneida-nation-thames-boil-wateradvisory/. 15 Alan Walks, “Income Inequality and Polarization in Canada’s Cities: An Examination and New Form of Measurement,” Research Paper 227, Cities Centre (University of Toronto, 2013). 16 Bryan Palmer, “The Far Right, Racism, and the Universities,” Bullet, 1 June 2020, https://socialistproject.ca/2020/06/far-right-racism-anduniversities. 17 Mike Moffatt, “How Ontario’s Two-Speed Economy Is Making Inequality Worse,” TV Ontario, 4 June 2018, https://www.tvo.org/article/how-ontariostwo-speed-economy-is-making-inequality-worse. 18 Chris Lorenz, “If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 601–2. 19 Jon Strauss and John Curry, Responsibility Center Management: 25 Years of Lessons Learned (Washington, dc : National Association of College and University Business Officers, 2002), 3. 20 Douglas Priest and Rachel Dykstra Boon, “Incentive-Based Budgeting Systems in the Emerging Environment,” in Privatization and Public Universities, ed. by D. M. Priest and E. St John (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 21 James Hearn, Darrell Lewis, Lincoln Kallsen, Janet Holdsworth, and Lisa Jones. “‘Incentives for Managed Growth’: A Case Study of IncentivesBased Planning and Budgeting in a Large Public Research University,” The Journal of Higher Education 77, no. 2 (2006): 29. 22 Alex Usher. “Financing Canadian Universities: Are Administrators to Blame? (Part 4),” Higher Education Strategy Associates, 12 September 2013, http://higheredstrategy.com/ financing-canadian-universities-are-administrators-to-blame-part-4/. 23 The Western University of London, Ontario, Achieving Excellence on the World Stage (London: Western University, 2014), strategic plan, January 2014, https://president.uwo.ca/pdf/strategic-plan/WesternU_Full_ StratPlan_2014.pdf. Accessed 26 February 2020. 24 The Western University of London, Ontario, “Western Clusters of Research Excellence Program” (London: Western University, 2013),

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26

27

28

29

30 31 32

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Western University program, March 2013, https://provost.uwo.ca/pdf/ Clusters-Research-Excellence-Program.pdf University of Western Ontario Faculty Association, “Every Budget is a Choice: A Look inside Western’s Financial Decisions and Resulting Priorities,” (University of Western Ontario Faculty Association, 2014): https://www.uwofa.ca/system/files/News/Every%20Budget%20is%20 a%20Choice.pdf See Jonathan Sher, “Governor General Paved the Way for Chakma’s Double Dip,” London Free Press, 20 April 2015: https://lfpress. com/2015/04/20/governor-general-paved-the-way-for-chakmas-doubledip; Jonathan Sher, “ndp Want Pay Limited for Top Public Sector Executives in Wake of Report on Western University Payout,” London Free Press, 29 September 2015, http://www.lfpress.com/2015/09/29/ndpwant-pay-limited-for-top-public-sector-executives-in-wake-of-report-onwestern-university-payout; Jonathan Sher, “Sunshine List Shows London Schools and Hospitals Have Top Public Salaries,” London Free Press, 27 March 2015, http://www.lfpress.com/2015/03/27/sunshine-list-showslondon-schools-and-hospitals-have-top-public-salaries Jonathan Sher, “Amit Chakma Double Pay Crisis Cost Western University $96k ,” London Free Press, 17 July 2015, http://www.lfpress.com/2015/07/ 17/pr-experts-cost-100k Jonathan Sher, “Western University President Amit Chakma Asks for Second Chance,” London Free Press, 10 April 2015, http://www.lfpress. com/2015/04/10/western-university-president-amit-chakma-speaks-atsenate-meeting Hon. Stephen Goudge, Report: Review of Presidential Compensation Practices at the University of Western Ontario, 2015, https://www.uwo.ca/ univsec/pdf/Western_University_Compensation_Report.pdf Lorenz, “If You’re So Smart.” Ibid, 627. Bascaramurty, Dakshana, Carly Weeks, and Eric Andrew-Gee (2020), “New Data Show that Immigrants and Low-Income Earners Are More Susceptible to covid -19,” Globe and Mail, 23 May 2020, https://www. theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-how-covid-19-is-exposing-canadassocioeconomic-inequalities Jonathan Ponciano, “Despite Market Plunge, These 10 Billionaires Gained $23 Billion This Week,” Forbes, 13 June 2020, https://www.forbes.com/ sites/jonathanponciano/2020/06/13/billionaires-market-plunge-elonmusk/#632529d1ed35

pa r t o n e

Global Forces and National Traditions

1 How Do We Create a People? Rethinking Resistance, Solidarity, and Transformation in the European South Panagiotis Sotiris

i ntro duc t i o n For years the European South has had to confront the combination of austerity and erosion of democracy resulting from the embedded European integration process in the context of the policies adopted after the 2007–08 global capitalist crisis.1 At the same time we have had important struggles, movements, and solidarity practices that despite their defeat have left a deep mark. Although over generalizations of particular experiences are to be avoided, there are aspects of this experience that can be shared and lessons to be drawn regarding the politics of equality and emancipation against the various forms of contemporary capitalism.

1. gr eec e: th e movement ag a i n st au st e r i t y, fro m i nsur r ecti o n to d e f e at In Greece, the combination of the structural inequalities across Europe, as a result of the introduction of a single currency in an area marked by important divergences in productivity and competitiveness, took the form of a debt crisis without precedent during a global recession.2 This was also the result of the structural contradictions of Greek capitalism, which included a debt-driven growth since the mid-1990s, the constant stimulus of state spending, construction, in most cases useless (e.g., the infrastructure associated with the 2004 Olympic Games), a fragmented labour market and relatively cheap immigrant labour, privatizations and a certain version of consumerist hedonism (also to a large extent financed by debt).3 At the same

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time, the participation of Greece in the entire European integration process (common market and single currency and forced privatizations) led to constant transformations of the Greek economy, which also included a certain erosion of the industrial base, a turn towards services, and new constraints upon agriculture. Consequently, the Greek crisis was a combination of the crisis of the Eurozone, the global economic crisis, and a crisis of the hegemonic narrative of Greek capital, namely capitalist modernization by means of attachment to the European project. Greece’s appeal to the European Union (and the European Central Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (imf ), for assistance, led to bailout programs that combined the social aggression of the imf structural adjustment programs with the logic of “limited sovereignty” inherent in the eu institutional framework. A combination of fear that Greece could pose some form of moral danger for the European economy with a certain desire to set an example led to austerity programs that were like violent counter-revolutions from above in the sense of trying to profoundly change the social and institutional fabric of an entire society. Slashed budgets, real wage reductions, pension reductions, reduction of the public workforce, forced privatizations, insulation of the institutions servicing the debt from popular intervention, and extreme deregulation of the labour market were the new conditions. The imposition of a constant evaluation process, with bailout funding being conditional upon a positive evaluation of the implementation of austerity and neoliberal reforms, has since been the practical manifestation of reduced sovereignty.4 Even after the official end of the bailout program in August 2018, Greece remained under a regime of enhanced surveillance from eu institutions. This situation created a social and political crisis without precedent. In the first phase this led to a protest and contestation sequence of almost insurrectionary character in 2010–12. Of particular importance was the Movement of the Squares in 2011 which coincided with a global cycle of protest. In Greece it had the particular significance of being a moment of convergence between those persons who had already been active in protest (such as militants of the Left, trade unions, student unions) with persons with no prior political engagement. This created a new form of collective identity in struggle, a new image of the people in struggle, new public spheres and a new interest in radical politics and alternatives. The result

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was a political crisis, with elements of a crisis of hegemony,5 exemplified in and accentuated by the formation of government led by a former central banker. This led to tectonic shifts in relations of political representation in the 2012 elections. pasok , a very stable social democratic party devolved, the centre-right New Democracy party suffered losses, and syriza , a relatively small left-wing party had a meteoric rise, while, at the same time, there was also an impressive increase in votes for the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn. Despite the tremendous energy expressed by the protest movement in the 2010–12 period, it was obvious that without a political rupture there could be no exit from austerity. The traditional mechanism of protest and social mobilization forcing a government to seek compromise was not functioning in a postdemocratic condition where the eu troika (composed of the European Commission, European Central Bank, and the imf ) was constantly blackmailing for more austerity and neoliberal reforms. Hence, the turn towards syriza in the hope of an anti-austerity government that would represent this political rupture. The two-and-a-half years separating the 2012 elections and the January 2015 election were marked by reduced social mobilization and a certain anticipation of a syriza government. When the new government was elected in January 2015, it faced a very aggressive stance from the eu . Since syriza had already ruled out exiting the Eurozone and the stoppage of debt payments, considering its disastrous eventuality, it opted for negotiation with the troika. The aggressive demands on the part of Greece’s creditors led the negotiation to an impasse during the summer of 2015. The Greek government called for a swift referendum on the troika proposals. The Greek electorate, in a tremendous expression of defiance, voted against the proposals en masse. This was the oxi (No) vote, one of the biggest collective expressions of determination from the subaltern classes in recent Greek history, in one of the most class-polarized electoral confrontations. However, soon afterwards the Greek government capitulated and accepted a new Memorandum with the troika, that is, a new austerity package even more aggressive than the previous ones.6 After winning the September 2015 election, syriza started implementing austerity policies and neoliberal reforms. The current social and political situation in Greece bears the signs of this defeat, although there are important resistances exemplified in the continuous movement of solidarity to refugees, the battles regarding housing debt, antifascist movements, and attempts to

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revitalize the labour movement, although from a more difficult starting point. Politically this is expressed in a certain disillusionment with the organized Left, in all its forms, and with the return of various forms of sectarianism. Although Greece has been relatively unique regarding this particular sequence of events, there have also been other examples of political crisis and transformation in the European South. In Spain a similar wave of social discontent against austerity and the political system7 fuelled the emergence of a new left political formation, Podemos, which is now dealing with its own internal contradictions, oscillating between movement radicalism and political “realism.”8

2. th e no ti o n o f th e p e o p l e r e v i si t e d A series of questions arise out of this conjuncture: was a defeat like the one in Greece something unavoidable? Did the problem have to do with the strength of the people? Did it have to do with the government? It is in this context that I will attempt to answer the question “how do we create a people?” The formation of the people as the collective subject of emancipation, as the unity in struggle of the subaltern classes, as the collective process of making possible an alternative future, is not something spontaneous or autopoetic, but is, rather, the contingent result of political interventions and projects. The very notion of the people is of course something that has returned in the public sphere and public debate. On the one hand, it has been reclaimed as collective identity in many new movements, especially those that tended to insist on representing society or the social majority or the “99%.” We have seen it in Greece, in Spain, in Occupy movements, and in Turkey during the Gezi Park protests. Moreover, we also have seen it being recuperated by the Right, in various forms of discursive tropes, in many cases associated with the notion of the nation, from far-right “populism in Europe,” to the rhetoric of Donald Trump, especially during the 2016 campaign when he insisted that he represented the “American People” against the establishment. One way to deal with these questions is to turn towards a theory of populism. There is an important current in contemporary radical theory that has used populism not as a pejorative term but as an analytical concept. I am, of course, referring to the work of Ernesto

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Laclau.9 It is interesting that Laclausian theory has been used to analyse what has happened in Greece,10 but also has been very important in the theoretical formation of Podemos in Spain, with many of the leading cadres of Podemos, who also tend to be radical scholars, explicitly basing their particular discourses on Laclausian themes, exemplified in the opposition between the people and the casta.11 However, I do not think that this approach can help us. I think that the very idea of the centrality of discourse in Laclau tends to dissociate politics from antagonistic social relations of oppression and exploitation. Laclau himself went to great lengths to suggest that his idiosyncratic conception of discourse is not limited to the symbolic but refers to the way social practices are articulated, and to the fact that societies are always open to processes of resignification, re-articulation, and reform. However, I still think that there is a problem here. His insistence that politics is about the contested terrain of “free-floating signifiers” such as “people,” “democracy,” “freedom,” and “equality” turns the observation into explanation. It is true that the politics of the bourgeois epoch involve contrasting discursive conceptions of such signifiers, but these conceptions are directly related to the evolution of class struggles, the particular demands of the working classes to be recognised as part of the collective body politic, the emergence of modern democratic forms, and the fact that subalternity is interiorized in the collective body of the nation. In sum, it is a historical epoch when, exactly as a result of the demands and aspirations of the working classes and subaltern social forces in general, the political public sphere includes invoking “the people.” One can turn to the work of Étienne Balibar on equaliberty12 in order to see the emergence of this actively contradictory discourse or, in more abstract terms, to Jacques Rancière and his conception of democratic politics as the politics or the demands of those who are not counted in a certain political and social configuration.13 Such views link the notion of the people to class position and experience. In this sense, the emergence of the people as a collective identity, antagonistic to governments or the “1%,” has to be seen in the context of the developments in class antagonisms. I think that Jodi Dean is right to try to re-inscribe the notion of the people in such a context, bringing back a Marxist class-analytic perspective.14

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3. th e two mo ments o f t h e p e o p l e I would like to suggest that we must read between two moments of the people. One is the people as it emerges in the struggle, the moment of the mass rally, the reclaiming of public space. Let us call it the moment of the crowd or the riot. The other is the moment of the people as a process of collective transformation. We are all familiar with the fear of the crowd, and we have a long history of negative descriptions of it in political history and also political philosophy. From the negative connotations of the Latin word vulgus, to the Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules, we can see many examples.15 In all cases, the crowd is presented as something inherently irrational and open to manipulation. Of course, we know that this fear of the crowd was part of what we can call, following Balibar’s reading of Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, a particular expression of the “fear of the masses.”16 Apart from the negative references, there have also been many forms of celebration of the crowd in contemporary radical theory. From the entire conceptualization of the multitude in the work of Negri and Hardt,17 to the celebrations of the mass riot by Alain Badiou,18 there are many examples. One can also see it in the more anarchist-oriented tendencies emerging from the Occupy movement. What is particular about this approach is its emphasis on horizontality, or to put it in different terms, an emphasis on people coming together in nonhierarchical structures, creating forms of social cooperation but without politics or the organizational forms that we associate with politics.19 I think that this is an indispensable aspect of radical politics, but we need to approach it in a more critical way. Or to put it in different terms, we need politics from below, but we need politics. Recently, a very interesting polemic against horizontality has emerged in a philosophical context. I am referring to the Frederic Lordon’s Imperium.20 In it, Lordon returns to Spinoza, a turn also made by Hardt and Negri, Balibar, and other radical thinkers. He reminds us of an important point by Spinoza in the Political Treatise, where, in a fascinating and dialectical move, the latter links the Imperium, what we can translate as sovereignty or the state, with potentia multitudinis, the potential of the multitude: hoc ius, quod multitudinis potential definitur, imperium apellari solet – “this right, which is defined by the power of the multitude, is usually called the

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imperium.”21 Now this should not be read only in a positive or optimistic sense, as is the case in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, but also in a negative one. It is exactly the negative potential that can explain how people enable oppressive or exploitative situations, something that offers the possibility of a nonidealist theory of alienation. It is also interesting that Lordon opposes horizontality on principle. If the potentia multitudinis is the determination of imperium, there is no way to think of this potentia cut off from its political forms. It is expressed or materialized in social and political configurations, in different forms of sovereignty exercised negatively or positively. So, in this sense, the question of politics cannot be avoided, namely the question of political forms, of different imperia. This means that a politics of emancipation cannot simply be based upon the spontaneous coming together of people, it must be translated into a political project, forms of organization, and forms of sovereignty (although not of domination). In Spinozist terms, emancipation and equality should also take the form of an imperium, albeit one determined by the positive passions and affects of the multitude, the collective determination and creativity of a people in struggle. And this cannot be simply horizontal. Now the usual move here would be to move (or jump) to the question of organization as the step that marks the passage from the moment of the crowd to the moment of the party, namely the moment when social dynamics are transformed into an autonomous political subject. I will avoid making this jump right now. I think that it is important to begin by thinking of the people as a collective process of emancipation and transformation. To this end I would like to refer to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the “historical bloc,” and how it can help us deal with these questions. As with many other notions in the vocabulary of Gramsci, it is an experimental notion of a work in progress. The following quotation from Gramsci summarizes the dynamic of the notion of the historical bloc: “If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and hence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force with the creation of the ‘historical bloc.’”22

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The historical bloc is a strategic concept, not a descriptive or analytical concept. It does not define a social alliance, but a social and political condition, namely the condition when hegemony has been achieved. It refers to a strategy of hegemony. A potential hegemony of the forces of labour, namely their ability to lead a broader front, would make possible a process of social transformation, creating the conditions for a new historical bloc. This means a new articulation between social forces, alternative economic forms in rupture with capitalist social relations of production, new forms of political organization and participatory democratic decision-making. The historical bloc includes a particular relation between the broad masses of the subaltern classes and new intellectual practices, along with the emergence of new forms of organization and of mass critical political intellectuality. The extent to which we can see the actual emergence of a historical bloc is also a way to guage the different degrees of effectivity of different experiments in radical left politics. In such a perspective, the endurance and radicalism of the experiments in Venezuela and Bolivia, despite their contradictions, reflect the tentative and uneven emergence of a potential historical bloc, whereas the defeat of syriza points exactly to the absence of an emerging historical bloc despite the tectonic shifts in Greek society. When Gramsci refers to a historical bloc, he is not thinking in terms of a grand historical narrative or teleology, rather an ontology of singularities. Broad historical tendencies represent the complex interplay of singular interactions, practices, and strategies. The emergence of bourgeois hegemony was the outcome of a complex, uneven combination of economic forms, political struggles, discursive tropes, and public and private hegemonic apparatuses, from state education to newspapers and football clubs. In this sense, I would like to suggest that the “ontological base” of a strategy to “create a people,” or a new historical bloc out of plurality of struggles and experiences, is in fact closer to Deleuze and Guattari, or the later work of Louis Althusser, which centres upon the notion of the encounter. This background can also be read in Spinozist terms as the emphasis on individuals or singular things being themselves, not eternal essences, but rather encounters of singularities, the encounter itself being dependent upon the conditions that make or unmake it.23 Hegemony in this sense is the set of political practices and hegemonic apparatuses and worldviews that actually make such encounters last.

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In this sense, the process that makes possible (and yet contingent) hegemony and a new historical bloc (or a new imperium in the Spinozist sense) is indeed a series of lines of flight, formation of war machines, and engagement in minority politics, with minority in my reading being something very close to the notion of the subaltern in Gramsci; a process that can or cannot last, to lasting encounters and the formation and establishment of new hegemonic apparatus and ways to organize collective life. It is also a process of collective experimentation based upon the emergence of new social forms within the context of resistances and struggles. That is why, in contrast to the insistence of the impossibility of a Deleuzian politics,24 I think that we can find a rather useful guideline in the Deleuzian notion of organizing good encounters, which presents a way to think of a politics of equality and emancipation that can be read along with Althusser’s antiteleological turn from the 1970s onwards: “So it appears that the common notions are practical Ideas, in relation with our power; unlike their order of exposition, which only concerns ideas, their order of formation concerns affects, showing how the mind ‘can order its affects and connect them together.’ The common notions are an Art, the art of the Ethics itself: organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting.”25 I think that organizing good encounters encapsulates the challenge. A good encounter is something that we are all aware of. A successful meeting, an appeal for mass mobilization that ends up in massive presence, a confluence of struggles, a seizure of the moment as it was with the decision of the Bolsheviks to take power, the formation of a new political party that actually changes the political landscape, all these are examples of good encounters, combinations of fortuna and virtu to use Machiavelli’s phrase. The question is how this is organized, prepared (even though not predetermined), and also as Althusser might have put it, how can this encounter last? How can this dynamic, for example, the referendum in Greece (the oxi vote), last, and not be just another passing moment? It was obvious that in the case of Greece we lacked the art of organizing good encounters and the moment was lost. In this sense the emergence of a new historical bloc can be thought of as the outcome of a series of good and lasting encounters.

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4. r ecla i mi ng po pula r sov e r e i g n t y I would like to suggest that we think of this process as an attempt to reclaim popular sovereignty. In the European context this brings forward the centrality of the rupture with the embedded neoliberalism and the imposition of a condition of limited sovereignty inside the European Union and the euro, but I think that it has a broader significance.26 We are talking, as Peter Hallward has suggested, about the moment of the “will of the people” defined as a “deliberate, emancipatory and inclusive process of collective self-determination.”27 Reclaiming popular sovereignty is not simply about a defence of democratic choice and democratic process; it acquires a content only when articulated with a transition program, or the set of demands and measures that actually marks an alternative narrative for a particular society and thus a rupture with the imperatives of capital. However, to deal with this we must avoid both a conception of the program as the artificial construction of blueprints for “another society,” and the conception of the program as a simple sum of grievances or a sum of anti-austerity demands. It must point in the direction of concentrating efforts at the nodal points of social production and reproduction in order to actually change the balance of forces and unleash crucial social potentials for change. If we talk about Greece and a potential politics of equality and emancipation, we cannot avoid the question of the rupture with European integration and of exiting the Eurozone and the eu . You cannot talk about abolishing capitalism and exploitation in Greece without at the same time working towards a break with what has been the dominant hegemonic project of Greek capital, namely Greece’s participation in the European integration process. At the same time, the program cannot be conceived simply as a political (and theoretical) construction, but also as the liberation of social experimentation. In this sense, the most important changes are those that unleash this potential, that enable people to experiment, and that help the collective ingenuity of struggling people. It is here that taking crucial aspects of social life off (or out of) the market becomes instrumental. In such a perspective, public ownership, workers’ control and self-management become crucial elements, along with the liberation of alternative nonmarket networks. Especially when public ownership is involved, new forms of participation, control from below, openness to movements and the

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broader society, new practices of answerability, but also exchange and dialogue, become imperative if new social forms are to emerge. This also includes thinking not only in terms of macro-economic conditions for growth, however important reversing economic recession and increasing employment are, but also in terms of radical alternative developmental paradigms, both socially emancipatory and ecological.

5 . po pular sover eig n t y as a n e w prac ti ce o f p o l i t i c s But how is this sovereignty going to be exercised? I would suggest that it would require a novel form of permanent dual power. I am not using dual power in the traditional rather narrow definition of a relatively short period, during a revolutionary upheaval, when there is an antagonistic coexistence of state institutions and forms of insurrectionary popular power from below, where coexistence ends with the prevalence of one pole over the other. I am using it as a constant permanent feature of any process of social change that would imply the coexistence of forms of power from above with autonomous movements from below and also autonomous forms of popular power. For me this is the only way to think of the possibility of “left governance.” There are rather long debates on this, such as the debates in the 1970s or more recently in Bolivia.28 This is necessary because if the actually existing state apparatuses, even with a radical left government, always also represent the material condensation of an excess of state power in favour of the dominant social relations (especially when this is combined with the effects of a process such as European integration upon the functioning of state apparatuses), then we need another form of excess power to counter it, and this can only come from below. As Althusser stressed in the 1970s: “The relatively stable resultant (reproduced in its stability by the state) of this confrontation of forces (balance of forces is an accountant’s notion, because it is static) is that what counts is the dynamic excess of force maintained by the dominant class in the class struggle. It is this excess of conflictual force, real or potential, which constitutes energy A, which subsequently transformed into power by the state-machine: transformed into right, laws and norms.”29 As Balibar stressed in the 1970s, this requires a new practice of politics, based on the emergence of new forms of mass political organizing

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exterior to the State. It involves the penetration of political practice into the sphere of “work,” of production. In other words, it is the end of the absolute separation, which was developed by capitalism itself, between “politics” and “economics.”30 This suggests an emancipatory political practice that does not simply “construct” but also experiments by liberating movement dynamics. The terrain of autonomous movements provides exactly the learning process we need, the process of collective ingenuity that is instrumental in any project of emancipation. Referring to ingenuity, it is again Spinoza’s concept of ingenium that comes to mind. Generally used to refer to the particular laws and customs arising out of the singular history of a nation, the notion of ingenium offers a rather open conception of society and the ability to change and invent collectively new ways of living together. As Filippo de Lucchese has suggested: “The distinguishing traits of a particular society can be identified through the ingenium of its people, which is determined, in its turn, through the people’s history. Neither individuals nor peoples are born with a determinate ingenium, Spinoza maintains; rather, they acquire it over the course of their unique history. The notion of ingenium is used to shift the inquiry to other topics that are fundamental to politics: for one, the concept of nation; and secondly, that of a nation’s laws and customs. So it is not nature that assigns a specific ingenium to each people, but rather the laws and customs that gradually give shape to it.”31 This notion of collective ingenuity as collective ability to change by means of collective experimentation is also echoed, in my opinion, in Althusser’s insistence on the traces of communism in contemporary capitalist societies, a leitmotiv of his work in the 1970s. For Althusser, “the increased collectivisation of capitalist production, the initiatives of the popular masses, and, why not?, certain bold initiatives by artists, writers and researchers, are from today the outlines and traces of communism.”32 During this period, Althusser also makes a reference to communism as material tendency emerging from the contradictions of capitalism and to the virtual forms of communism existing in the interstices of capitalist social forms: “Marx thinks of communism as a tendency of capitalist society. This tendency is not an abstract result. It already exists, in a concrete form in the ‘interstices of capitalist society’ (a little bit like commodity relations existing ‘in the interstices’ of slave or feudal society), virtual forms of communism, in the associations that manage […] to avoid commodity relations.”33

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However, in order to be able to read these traces of communism in contemporary struggles, in experiments in self-management, in the defence of public goods and public spaces, in new forms of participative democracy in struggle, or in the very simple and yet so important gestures of solidarity, we must be able to hear what the masses are doing and saying. It means: “Restoring their voice to the masses who make history. Not just putting oneself ‘at the service of the masses’ (a slogan which may be pretty reactionary), but opening one’s ears to them, studying and understanding their aspirations and their contradictions, their aspirations in their contradictions, learning how to be attentive to the masses’ imagination and inventiveness.”34 Giving voice is important, because the process of struggle is also a process where people learn, discuss and want to speak about alternatives. One of the most impressive elements of the struggles in Greece in the previous period was the extent of the debates inside movements about how things can be organized in a different way, such as the formation of schools, health systems, and agriculture. And one of the important deficiencies of the Greek Left has been the fact that it did not learn from such discussions, it did not encourage this debate, it did not get involved with it. And this can have an important cost, because if you reach the point where, as a collective subjective, you do not have enough answers and enough intellectual means to deal with the difficulties of a process of rupture, then you cannot stand up to the pressure of having to confront the systemic violence of creditors, international organizations, the eu , and, consequently, you are more likely to succumb and capitulate. This is one of the lessons of the Greek experience. Now, it is obvious that we are dealing with processes that are inherently contradictory. The idea that there can be a harmonization between movements from below and the exercise of sovereign transformative power is idealistic and can be a justification for ways to think of transformation only from “above.” And this is not the only form of contradiction: there is also the case of positive transformations “from above” encountering regressive resistances “from below.” I think that the only way to deal with this is to let this play out in the most open way. Open debate, open struggle, open demands, open movement activity. In light of the above, we can see the people as a process – not as construction or performance – the people as a process that enables the emergence of common practices, subjectivities and identities,

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but also common struggles and self-transformation. It is therefore a process of constant transformation. This requires tackling two sets of “contradictions inside the people,” to borrow Mao’s phrase. One has to do with the contemporary potential form of the unity of labour, and one with the question of a postnational and postcolonial conception of the people. Regarding the unity of labour, what we need to answer is how to articulate a politics of equality and emancipation based upon the common condition of labour at a period when we see a vast variety of forms and conditions of labour, both in terms of material conditions but also of geographical dispersion. The political possibility of this coming together is something that we have witnessed in many instances in contemporary movements, and this encounter was a basic aspect of the dynamism of mobilization in countries such as Greece. Our conception of the people is based upon class analysis and the potential for alliances of the subaltern classes. Following Poulantzas, we can say the people is a “concept for strategy,”35 that today points to the direction of an actual social alliance. This alliance formed as a result of the evolution of the contemporary types of capitalist accumulation that create “objective” material conditions that bring together various forms of waged labour and salaried employees; the inability of contemporary neoliberal policies to enhance a lasting historical bloc around finance and multinational capitals; and new kinds of precariousness, flexibility and over-exploitation that have been intensified against both manual and intellectual labour. These developments, indeed, create common demands and interests, based upon the common condition of labour, precariousness, unemployment, exploitation, and increased difficulty in dealing with basic needs; in a way, they unite the undocumented migrant with the young degree holder that moves from unemployment into precarious parttime work and back into unemployment. The absence of rights in the workplace, the return to workplace despotism even for well-educated and trained personnel, and precariousness as an existential condition are not just a “phase” or a difficulty. All of these, enhanced by indebtedness, are becoming part of the labour condition. No doubt they can feed the cannibalism of racism, but they also offer common reasons to struggle, which are shared starting points for resistance. The other contradiction has to do with the question of ethnicity and origin. The contemporary version of the people is in many aspects based upon the identification of the people and the

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nation-state, leading to the identification of the people with the nation. We know that, from the beginning, this also left out many, and today it can only lead to forms of reactionary nationalism, as the one surging now in Europe. On the other hand, a classical cosmopolitan liberalism today only ends up in a rhetoric in favour of globalization, and, despite the evocation of global rights, cannot offer an answer. Global citizenship or a global right to citizenship, however well-intended and important it might be as a demand,36 when it is linked to the existing set of international institutions and international law frameworks, runs the danger of just being a catch phrase in a world where new walls are being built against migration, and in which the figure of the globe-trotting entrepreneur is revered (exemplified in the ability for investors to actually buy permanent residence status if their investment is big enough), while the poor migrant is condemned to the permanent insecurity and extreme precariousness of illegality. This contradiction is most obvious in Europe. We are witnessing a new wave of Islamophobia directed not only against refugees, but also against large segments of the working classes (many of them European citizens) that are not of European origin. The far right is demonized, but at the same time the political agenda of the far right has been incorporated into the political mainstream, exemplified in the anti-refugee policies of most eu -member states. The “they can never be like us” phrase regarding populations of non-European origin is gradually being repeated by the political mainstream. Moreover, we have the murderous policies of “Fortress Europe” against migrants that have led to a permanent tragedy in the Mediterranean and new waves of border restrictions.

6. a po stnati o na l a nd p o st c o l o n i a l p e o p l e That is why a postnational and decolonial version of the people is more than necessary. We need a redefinition of the people based upon the condition of subalternity in the context of contemporary capitalist accumulation, which expands the linkages between subalternity and the subjection to capitalist accumulation in both direct and indirect ways. This implies a redefinition of the people that delinks it from ethnicity, origin, or common history, and instead links it to common conditions, the present, and struggle. It is a conception of the people that also includes an oppositional approach to the “enemies of

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the people,” many of them nominally “members of the nation.” We are no longer dealing with the “imaginary community” of “common blood”; it is the unity in struggle of the subaltern classes, the unity of those that share the same problems, the same misery, the same hope, the same struggles. The people are not a common origin; they represent a common condition and perspective. It is an antagonistic conception of the nation that also demands a “decolonialisation” of the people, as recognition of the consequences of colonialism and state racism, the struggle against all forms of racism within a potential alliance of the subaltern classes.37 It also requires a recognition that the resistances, histories, struggles, and traditions of migrants and refugees are necessary for the collective elaboration of a political project for a new historical bloc.38 Consequently, such a construction of the people is by itself a terrain of social and political antagonism. In this sense, following Deleuze, we are talking about a people that is missing, a people that has to be produced, a people-to-come, “[n]ot the myth of a past people, but the story-telling of the people to come. The speech-act must create itself as a foreign language in a dominant language, precisely in order to express an impossibility of living under domination.”39 In this sense, anti-racism acquires another significance. It is about creating new forms of popular unity. Practices such as selfmanaged occupied spaces for refugees, such as the ones we see in Greece and which move beyond simple autonomous voluntary solidarity towards self-management and a conception of common life-in-transformation acquire a more strategic significance. We move beyond solidarity towards the notion of “live togetherstruggle together,” which is a very crucial aspect of any attempt towards “creating a people.” It is obvious that I am referring to the European context and I am referring to a construction of the people that is related to a process of moving beyond capitalist relations of exploitation and oppression. However, I find interesting and important resonance with debates in the North American context regarding sovereignty for Indigenous people,40 linked to new anti-capitalist transformative process in the sense suggested by Glen Coulthard.41 These debates all point in an important direction, namely the possibility of an emancipative, transformative, egalitarian form of sovereignty that, in a postnational context, goes hand in hand with moving beyond the imperatives of capitalist accumulation.

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7 . creati ng la b o r ato r i e s o f h o p e However, what are the spaces for the creation of this people to come? It is here that we encounter the question of organization. It is obvious that “the people to come” require forms of organization both at the level of what we tend to call social movement and at the level of the political. The traditional “division of labour” between movement activism and politics can no longer stand. Movements are not only about the implementation of a political line elaborated outside of them, they are complex articulations of struggle, confrontation, and aspiration, but also elaboration of alternatives and spaces of dialogue. Anyone who has been part of a significant and prolonged struggle, whether it is a strike, or a student occupation, or a local mobilization against a landfill, knows that soon people start to discuss economic, political, and institutional aspects, to exchange experiences and ideas, and end up discussing actual alternatives to the exiting configuration. Movements are learning sites and sites of dialogue regarding how things can move in a different direction and can be organized in a different manner. Regarding the political level, I would like to insist on the centrality of the “united front.” In the Marxist tradition, the United Front was mostly viewed in an instrumental way. The reason for this had to do with a rather metaphysical conception of the party: one class and one party, this was the basic equation. The very notion of the united front was a recognition of the fact that this equation was not functioning. I do not think that there is any metaphysical relation between a social class and a political party, what we have are attempts to translate inherently contradictory dynamics arising out of social and political antagonism into coherent political projects. If we were to play with words, I would say that we do not need just a “working class party,” but an organization for equality and emancipation, an organization for communism, which, in turn, needs to be deeply rooted in the practices, resistances, solidarities, and the collective ingenuity of the working classes, in order to be in a position to work in that direction. Today this means bringing together many different collective forms and practices, both movements and political organizations, into a common commitment born out of a democratic process that, at the same time, respects and transforms initial practices and sensitivities, always keeping in mind that the organization, or the front, is itself a terrain, a struggle, a contested site.

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That is why we should think of the united front as a constituent process, not as a negotiation between different tendencies, while at the same time it must be a space of debate that ends in a political orientation, while being in constant reciprocal relation to the movements. To give an example, this is the difference between parties such mas in Bolivia or psuv in Venezuela that maintained a close and organic relation to social movements, an element also important in other experiments in Latin America, and the experience of Greece, where syriza was not the outcome of such a constituent process; the party did not represent a process inside the movement. syriza was a left-wing party, very active in the movement that covered a political space at a moment of acute political crisis, yet it was not the outcome of an ongoing reciprocal process with movements. This meant that the radical novelty implied in both the original conception of The Prince by Machiavelli42 and its rereading by Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks as the Modern Prince, was not something that was evident in the experience of syriza . It lacked the dialectic of being rooted in concrete experiences and movements even as it opened up a new space of political intervention and a novel historical sequence. In the case of syriza , the combination of an ideology that combined “traditional” communist reformism with left “Europeanism,” and a parliamentary practice of politics, accounts for its transformation into a “party of government” implementing austerity and neoliberal reforms. A united front can also be thought of in terms of an encounter between different movements, dynamics, and currents catalysed by a mass movement. Democratic organization serves two purposes: to facilitate participation and openness, and to enable the collective elaboration of alternatives and strategies. In order to move in this direction, we need to transform the very process of organizing a united front (or any form of mass political organization) into a laboratory of new critical mass intellectualities, a point we can find in Gramsci and which today is even more pertinent. Here is an important quotation from Gramsci: One should stress the importance and significance which, in the modern world, political parties have in the elaboration and diffusion of conceptions of the world, because essentially what they do is to work out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were as their historical

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“experimenters.” The parties recruit individuals out of the working mass, and the selection is made on practical and theoretical criteria at the same time. The relation between theory and practice becomes even closer the more the conception is vitally and radically innovatory and opposed to old ways of thinking. For this reason, one can say that the parties are the elaborators of new integral and all-encompassing intellectualities and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place.43 This suggests a need not just for open debate, but also a constant learning process, hence the importance of the notion of laboratory. It suggests the creation of spaces where people from the movements come not only to be “politicized,” something that in the tradition of the Left often meant a top-down version of ideological indoctrination, but to contribute with their own voice and experience in the complex process of elaboration of alternatives. It is here that the possibility of hegemony and a new historical bloc can emerge. I believe that the metaphor of the laboratory is a better metaphor than all the other metaphors concerning political organizing, especially coming from the field of military practices (the party as general quarters of an army). It is also here in the articulation of movements, demands, political strategies, and theories that we can see a way out of a simple invocation of horizontality or intersectionality, without falling into the trap of imposing an imaginary unity or a quasimetaphysical conception of “political perspective.” Alan Sears has captured this challenge: “A truly effective anti-capitalism requires a deep commitment to learning from every situation which requires both open-endedness and fundamental orientating principles. The resources of anti-capitalism cannot consist of the shards of the last infrastructure of dissent preserved as holy relics and passed on as ‘truth.’ The current marginal anti-capitalist left is too often grounded in a faith-based politics, founded on a worshipful approach to the experience of twentieth-century socialism or anarchism. The next new left needs to work creatively and open-endedly together to identify emergent trends and develop new politics that fits the times and is informed by past struggles.”44 What is needed is an open and democratic process, an avoidance of rigid hierarchies and the reproduction of forms of division of labour, a fight against sexism, and of course, no fear of public

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display of differences. We must demonstrate that in the fight for social transformation, we can create forms of organization that are more democratic, egalitarian, and anti-sexist than the society surrounding them.45 In this sense, we must, in a self-critical fashion, fight against all forms of bureaucratic or authoritarian mentality, and insist that pluralism or even divergence of opinions is the basis for comradeship and conscious commitment. In the current phase, we must accept the transitory character of contemporary radical political forms, avoid thinking in terms of “historic currents” (however important their history and experience might be), avoid the “arrogance of the small group,” and realize that the “Modern Prince” as a constituent process for the refoundation of the Left as a counter-hegemonic force must necessarily be thought of in terms of supersession, of a dialectical process of self-transformation and of new lasting encounters between different experiences, aspirations, programs, sensitivities and ideas. One might even suggest that a sign of the efficacy of a political organization is the degree that it changes after important “cathartic” moments of struggle.46 There are many reasons for despair in the current context, but we have the possibility to put our collective political and intellectual capacities to good use and help the collective creation of the people to come, provided that we learn from the previous experiences and remember that we cannot change the world unless we can collectively change ourselves. It is not easy, but it is more than necessary. Hope is not something to believe in. Hope is something to work towards. no t e s 1 On European integration as a class project see Monetary Union and Class, ed. Werner Bonefeld (London: Palgrave 2001); Guglielmo Carchendi, For Another Europe: A Class Analysis of European Economic Integration (London: Verso 2001); Bastian van Apeldoorn, Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle for European Integration (London: Routledge, 2002); Bernard H. Moss, ed., Monetary Union in Crisis: The European Integration as a Neo-Liberal Construction (London: Palgrave, 2005); Panagiotis Sotiris and Spyros Sakellaropoulos, “European Union as Class Project and Imperialist Strategy,” Viewpoint, 2018, https://viewpointmag. com/2018/02/01/european-union-class-project-imperialist-strategy/.

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2 On the crisis of the Eurozone and the impact on Greece see Costas Lapavitsas et al., Crisis in the Eurozone (London: Verso, 2012); Heiner Flassbeck and Costas Lapavitsas, “Against the Troika,” in Crisis and Austerity in the Eurozone (London: Verso, 2015); Stavros Mavroudeas, ed., Greek Capitalism in Crisis: Marxist Analyses (London: Routledge, 2015); Panagiotis Sotiris, ed., Crisis, Movement, Strategy: The Greek Experience (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 3 Spyros Sakellaropoulos and Panagiotis Sotiris, “Postcards from the Future: The Greek Debt Crisis, the Struggle against the eu -imf Austerity Package and the Open Questions for Left Strategy,” Constellations 21, no. 2 (2014): 262–73. 4 Panagiotis Sotiris, “The Authoritarian and Disciplinary Mechanism of Reduced Sovereignty in the eu ,” in States of Discipline. Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order, ed. Cemal Burak Tansel (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). 5 Stathis Kouvelakis, “The Greek Cauldron,” New Left Review, no. 72 (2011): 17–32. 6 Giannis Mavris, “Greece’s Austerity Elections,” New Left Review 2, no. 76 (2012): 95–107; Stathis Kouvelakis, “Syriza’s Rise and Fall,” New Left Review 2, no. 97 (2016): 45–70. 7 Josep Maria Antentas, “Spain: The Indignados Rebellion of 2011 in Perspective,” Labor History 56, no. 2 (2015): 136–60. 8 Luke Stobbart, “A Year of Change Postponed?,” Jacobin, 2015, https:// www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/podemos-iglesias-elections-ciudananoscup-spain/. 9 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). 10 Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude Versus the Hegemony of the People, eds. Alexander Kioupkolis and George Katsambekis (London: Ashgate, 2014). 11 Alberto Toscano, “Portrait of a Leader as a Young Theorist,” Jacobin, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/podemos-iglesias-europeausterity-elections-spain-theory-laclau/ 12 Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 13 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 14 Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (London: Verso, 2016). 15 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). 16 Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx (London: Routledge, 1994).

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17 Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000). 18 Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprising, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2013). 19 Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Auckland: ak Press, 2006). 20 Frédéric Lordon, Imperium (Paris: la fabrique, 2015). 21 Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, II (Hamburg: 1670), 17. “This right, which is defined by the power of the multitude, is usually called the imperium.” 22 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Writings, eds. Quentin Hoare and Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 418. 23 Pierre Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris: Maspero, 1979). 24 A position expressed mainly by Peter Hallward in his very important Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006). 25 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 1988): 119. 26 On the European context and the need for a rupture with European integration see Lapavitsas, Crisis in the Eurozone; and Cédric Durand, ed., En finir avec l’Europe (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013). 27 Peter Hallward, “The Will of the People. Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism,” Radical Philosophy 155 (2009): 17. 28 On the debates in the 1970s see Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–86, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso 2006); Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2000); Giorgos Kalampokas, Tassos Betzelos, and Panagiotis Sotiris, “State, Political Power, and Revolution: Althusser, Poulantzas, Balibar, and the ‘Debate on the State,’” Décalages 2, no. 2 (2016). On the debate regarding Bolivia see Álvaro García Linera , Las tensiones creativas de la revolución. La quinta fase del Proceso de Cambio (La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional. Presidencia de la Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional, 2011); and Jeffery R. Webber, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011). 29 Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–86, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2006), 109. 30 Étienne Balibar, Cinque Études de matérialisme historique (Paris: Maspero, 1974), 96. Balibar also made this point by means of a reference to the theoretical short circuit performed by Marx:

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31 32

33 34 35

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Marx’s short circuit is the discovery of an immediate relationship, a correlation which develops historically through economic and political mediations between the form of the labour process and the state. Then the implications of the concepts of the proletariat, of “proletarian politics” and “proletarian revolution” can appear more clearly. The proletarian condition and proletarian demands are directly perceived, in the space of the dominant ideology, as “nonpolitical,” even if, in order to obtain such a result, a whole arsenal of forms of state action must be deployed. The details of this are now, one hundred years after Marx, much better known, thanks to a series of works by both Marxist and non-Marxist historians. The class struggle and the working-class movement have considerably displaced this boundary, a boundary which is imaginary in its justifications but very real in its effects. Nevertheless, there is always still, on the side of labour, of the production and reproduction of labour-power, a sphere that is defined as “non-political”; which the state, in order to function as a ruling-class state, must keep “outside of politics. Balibar, Cinque Études de matérialisme historique, 141. Filippo de Lucchese, Conflict, Law, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumults and Indignation (London: Continuum, 2009), 65. Louis Althusser, “Conférence sur la dictature de prolétariat à Barcelone. Un texte inédit de Louis Althusser,” Période, 2014, http://revueperiode. net/un-texte-inedit-delouisalthusser-conference-sur-la-dictaturedu-proletariat-a-barcelone. Louis Althusser, La solitude de Machiavel (Paris: puf , 1998), 285. Louis Althusser, “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party,” New Left Review I (1977): 11. “The articulation of the structural determination of classes and of class positions within a social formation, the locus of existence of conjunctures, requires particular concepts. I shall call these concepts of strategy, embracing in particular such phenomena as class polarization and class alliance. Among these, on the side of the dominant classes, is the concept of the ‘power bloc,’ designating a specific alliance of dominant classes and fractions; also, on the side of the dominated classes, the concept of the ‘people,’ designating a specific alliance of these classes and fractions.” Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1975), 24. See for example: Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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37 Houria Bouteldja and Sadri Khiari, eds., Nous sommes les Indigènes de la République, coordination and interviews F. Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and S. Magliani Belkacem (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2012); Houria Bouteldja, Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous. Vers une politique de l’amour révolutionaire (Paris: La Fabrique, 2016). 38 Panagiotis Sotiris, “From the Nation to the People of a Potential New Historical Bloc: Rethinking Popular Sovereignty through Gramsci,” International Gramsci Journal 2, no. 2 (2017): 52–88. 39 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 223. 40 Joanna Barker, ed., Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). 41 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin. White Masks. Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 42 I am indebted here to the reading of Machiavelli by Althusser. Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 1999). 43 Translation modified. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Writings, ed. Quentin Hoare and Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 335. 44 Alan Sears, The Next New Left: A History of the Future (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2014), 111. 45 In this sense it is interesting to remember Lucio Magri’s insistence that the party “is a prefiguration of the new society as the hegemonic element in a political and social bloc united for the positive construction of socialism. It thereby makes possible new forms of proletarian dictatorship, and represents not only a restoration of the Leninist concept of democratic centralism, but its genuine and developed application.” Lucio Magri, “Problems of the Marxist Theory of the Revolutionary Party,” New Left Review 1, no. 60 (1970): 125–6. 46 Gramsci warned against the danger of political parties becoming anachronisms: [O]ne of the most important questions concerning the political party – i.e., the party’s capacity to react against force of habit, against the tendency to become mummified and anachronistic. Parties come into existence, and constitute themselves as organisations, in order to influence the situation at moments which are historically vital for their class; but they are not always capable of adapting themselves to new tasks and

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to new epochs, nor of evolving pari passu with the overall relations of force (and hence the relative position of their class) in the country in question, or in the international field. In analysing the development of parties, it is necessary to distinguish: their social group; their mass membership; their bureaucracy and General Staff. The bureaucracy is the most dangerously hidebound and conservative force; if it ends up by constituting a compact body, which stands on its own and feels itself independent of the mass of members, the party ends up by becoming anachronist and at moments of acute crisis it is voided of its social content and left as though suspended in mid-air. Gramsci, Selections from Prison Writings, 211.

2 Class versus Caste: The Conundrum of Dalit Politics and the Communist Movement in India (1926–2016) Debayudh Chatterjee

Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labour, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India” A Caste is an enclosed class. Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar, Castes in India

Karl Marx’s interpretations of caste1 have heavily influenced Indian communinsts’ understandings of the term. Although Marx did not devote any specific chapter, treatise, or manifesto to the caste system, the issue of caste appears a number of times in his extensive corpus. In his 1853 article, “Future Results of British Rule in India” – which later became part of his seminal study, On Colonialism – Marx defines caste as the “decisive impediment to India’s progress and power.”2 Although Marx was geographically distant from the lived reality of caste discrimination in India, his analysis was premised upon the class relations that shape caste hierarchies. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx maintains that the laws of material production that exist between the oppressor and the oppressed were sanctioned by religion to become hereditary and inescapable only after these laws had persisted for a long time and formed the basis for social organizations. He writes: “Under the patriarchal system, under the caste system, under the feudal and corporative system, there was division of labour in the whole of society according to fixed rules.

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Were these rules established by a legislator? No. Originally born of the conditions of material production, they were raised to the status of laws only much later. In this way these different forms of the division of labour became so many bases of social organization.”3 Therefore, Marx believed that the advent of modernity in the form of technological advances facilitated by the introduction of railway systems as a part of industrial capitalism would eliminate caste boundaries. This assumption propelled Indian communists to believe that the core of the problem pertained to the structure of economic exploitation that forms the base of society, and caste – which pertains to the realm of nonmaterial cultural-religious ideology – is a trajectory of the superstructure. Ever since its inception, the Communist Party in India based its anticaste programs on a broader understanding of the primacy of class struggle over all other forms of social struggle, hoping that its success would automatically dissolve caste relations. In this paper, I explore how the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the largest of the communist formations in contemporary India, negotiated caste in both theory and praxis, with special reference to its erstwhile bastion, West Bengal. I argue that in India communists have constructed and upgraded this perspective in the light of changing contexts by a continuous process of self-interrogation. In particular, I suggest that the cpi(m) ’s negotiation on the “Dalit question,” and the means adopted to deal with it, have altered over time in such a fashion that it has always succeeded, if problematically, in co-opting the caste question within its well-known stance on class struggle. Before presenting my analysis of how the communist forces dealt with the caste question over the past eighty years, I will first examine the Dalit critique of the cpi(m) as a way of highlighting why it is necessary to grapple with the caste-class discourse.

marxi s m a nd a nti c ast e asse rt i o n Anand Teltumbde observes that B.R. Ambedkar, renowned advocate for the Dalit (the untouchables), was influenced by the Fabian socialists in his formative years but retained an interest in Marxism throughout his life.4 In one of his earliest essays, he defined caste as “enclosed class,” and he regularly published articles on Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution in the journals that he edited, Muknayak and Janata. In 1940, he adopted a red flag with eleven stars (representing the eleven provinces of India) for his political

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organization, the Indian Labour Party (ilp ). Debjani Ganguly notes that on 7 November 1938, in the strike organized in Bombay by the ilp , Ambedkar shared the podium with S.A. Dange, a veteran communist leader, for the first and the last time.5 It was during the course of these movements that Ambedkar fell out with the communists because “the communists did not act (against caste prejudices prevalent among the workers) for the fear of displeasing caste Hindu workers.”6 Debjani Ganguly explains: “The main reason was the inability and unwillingness of these left-based parties to give any prominence to issues of caste and untouchability. Theirs was an instrumentalist reading of the role of caste in class struggle and nationalist politics. They were happy to welcome the Dalits into their fold, but only as toilers who could not make much of their caste identity once they were a part of the caste struggle.”7 Teltumbde argues that such a “dichotomisation of class and caste was fundamentally a blunder,” stating that “they still do not realize that it cost them a revolution.”8 During the final months of his life, when Ambedkar was immersed in the revolutionary potential of Buddhism, he could not help but compare the motives and modus operandi of Buddhism and Marxism. In spite of the fact that both these ideologies seek to remove the world of suffering or exploitation, he preferred Buddhism over Marxism because the former strives to achieve its goals without bloodshed or violence. In his penultimate lecture delivered in Kathmandu a month before his demise, he acknowledged the growing trend among Indian youth to embrace communism but dismissed the communists for their reliance on the idea of dictatorship rather than democracy.9 He also criticized the Communist Party on the grounds that its reins were in the hands of a group of upper castes detached from India’s reality on the ground.10 He levelled the accusation that: “The Communist Party was originally in the hands of some Brahmin boys – Dange and others. They have been trying to win over the Maratha community and the Scheduled Castes. But they have made no headway in Maharashtra. Why? Because they are mostly a bunch of Brahmin boys. The Russians made a great mistake to entrust the Communist movement in India to them. Either the Russians didn’t want Communism in India – they wanted only drummer boys – or they didn’t understand.”11 As Sharankumar Limbale notes, after Ambedkar’s death, the legacy of the Dalit movement was fractured along the lines of its acceptance or rejection of communism. Advocating the need to bring

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about a synthesis of Marxist and Ambedkarite thought, prominent Dalit artists and activists like “M.N. Wankhede, Baburao Bagul, Namdeo Dhasal, Daya Pawar, Arjun Dangle, Yashwant Manohar,” among others, championed the idea of fusing anticlass and anticaste ideologies because of the “similarities between the form and purpose of Dalit and Marxist literatures” in terms of the “particular aims and ideas inspiring them – specifically their commitment to humanism.”12 On the other hand, Dalit intellectuals like Bhausaheb Adsul, Raja Dhale, and Vijay Sonwane among others, rejected such a view because the “Marxist ideology of revolution is based only on economic disparity,” while “Ambedkarite ideology is founded on the phenomenon of untouchability underlying social inequality. Since Marxism does not take social disparity into consideration, Dalit critics often take the view that Marxist ideology is incomplete.”13 As Gail Omvedt observes, it is also notable that some of the most prominent first-generation Dalit activists – such as Anna Bhau Sathe, Narayan Surve, and Bhaskar Rao Jadav – came from communist backgrounds.14 Omvedt goes so far as to assert that Baburao Bagul, a member of the Communist Party and a prominent Dalit writer, “united both the left and Dalit revolts.”15 However, most of these members of a radical Dalit vanguard later focused on caste oppression in its singularity and drifted away from the left-leaning progressive writers’ movement because “the upper caste leadership inspired by the Russian revolution did not feel the need to revolt against casteism and eradicate the internal contradictions among the exploited classes. The progressive writers did not try to permeate to the lowest stratum.”16 Scholars have accused the Left regime17 in West Bengal of “invisibilizing” caste in the public domain. For example, Raj Kumar writes, “Marxists in India have often shied away from publicly addressing issues of caste. For them ‘caste’ as an autonomous social category does not exist. Their rhetoric is all about class and class alone.”18 On the other hand, he admits that “the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – cpi(m) – also has a large constituency of Dalits supporting its ideology and political goals.”19 This inevitably leads to confusion. How can the Communist Party hold a large constituency of Dalits in its base of support in spite of “shying away from publicly addressing issues of caste?” Likewise, it is necessary to posit a set of questions pertinent to the political climate and the anthropological diversity of West Bengal. How can caste be relegated to the margins

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in a state that hosts a substantial portion of the scheduled castes among its population? The organized Left parties wielded power for more than three decades by predominantly uniting the peasants and workers by championing their causes, but how did they manage to deal with caste hierarchies that supposedly bring about, as Bhimrao Ambedkar puts it, a “division of labourers,” rather than a “division of labour”?20 How could the Left Front hold on to the support of undercastes in spite of being governed mainly by leaders of Savarna origin? These questions serve as starting points for my primary research question.

c lass v ers us caste: be g i n n i n g o f a c o nfli ct i n pr e-i nd ep e n d e n t i n d i a In its initial years, the communists were reluctant to raise the issue of caste in its specificity. They identified the Dalit not by his position on the lowest rung of the caste ladder, but by his location as an oppressed member of the proletariat. Debjani Ganguly revisits these initial years of Marxist engagement with caste when she observes that the first manifesto of the Indian Communist Party, drafted by M.N. Roy in Moscow with the assistance of Mikhail Borodin and approved by both Lenin and Stalin, was distant from the Indian reality not just geographically, but also in terms of social access.21 The manifesto emphasized the need to organize the workers in a struggle against capitalism and colonialism in order to form a society that would enable its denizens to exist in freedom and equality. But what the manifesto overlooked was that caste hierarchies fractured the unity of workers themselves. In a heterogeneous semifeudal society like India, even workers who performed the same kind of labour stood divided from each other because they inhabited a system of graded inequality authorized by caste hierarchy. The possibility of executing a united working-class movement was therefore a fallacy, as the workers were not united among themselves. The manifesto also did not take into account the cause of the peasants, as its drafters believed that the Communist Party primarily belonged to the workers. The Labour Swaraj Party, an early leftist political formation, as Ganguly notes, was renamed as The Bengal Peasants’ and Workers’ Party at its Krishnanagar session in 1926. A couple of years later, following a dispute about which class of the oppressed would receive primacy, the organization changed its name to Workers’ and Peasants’ Party.22

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Even though the Communist Party did not engage directly with caste in these initial days, it did gain popularity by taking up the struggles of the workers belonging to lowest castes through its class struggle approach. In his memoir, Methor aar Jharudar Andolan (Scavenger and Sweepers Movement), Muzaffar Ahmad recounts how he provided leadership to a strike in 1928 by the manual scavengers and sanitation workers of Calcutta to fight for adequate wages. In this memoir, Ahmad never refers to the caste status that undoubtably intensified the suffering of this section of the proletariat. Instead, a close reading of the memoir reveals a few unpleasant truths. Their leadership was primarily provided by Savarnas and lacked any representation from the ones for whom the demonstrations were staged. Secondly, the movement was carried out not under the banner of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, but a different organization formed for this occasion, called the Scavenger’s Union of Bengal. Thirdly, despite the rigorous strike that went on for a few days and managed to secure most of the demands, the movement was not totally successful because of some legal glitches the Savarna23 leaders failed to acknowledge. Despite its apparent caste blindness, however, the movement brought many untouchables under the fold of the communist party. The communists continued to avoid accommodating matters related to caste separate from class issues within their agenda. In 1932, when Ambedkar and Gandhi clashed on the question on separate electorates, EMS Namboodiripad24 opined that this was a “great blow to the freedom movement for this led to the diversion of the people’s attention from the objective of full independence to the mundane cause of the upliftment of the Harijans.”25 The designation of the cause of the elevation of the Harijans (another term for untouchables) as “mundane” brought to the fore the limits of the Marxist willingness to acknowledge the significance of caste in the early days of Indian Communist Party activities. The caste-blind outlook of the communists ultimately paved the way for the initiation of a caste struggle separate from class. The leaders of these caste struggles, most notably Ambedkar, could not help but be suspicious of the communists for their hostility towards caste issues. In the case of Bengal, as Shipra Mukherjee argues, the belief that the advancement of modernity would wipe out aspects that are generally “pre-modern” and aligned with tradition and religion strengthened under the growing influence of the communist movement. It

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was argued that the advancement of a modern sensibility in Indian society would eventually reject the discourse of caste. There was also a tendency in theoretical writing to prioritize class exploitation over caste humiliation or merge them together as the “implications of both categories appear to be similar in their outcome of limited access to resources, lesser opportunities, and consequent poverty.”26

th e c o mmuni st party a n d t h e r i se o f identi ty po li ti cs i n po sti n d e p e n d e n t i n d i a Contrary to what the communists had foreseen, the advent of modernity did not succeed in freeing India from the shackles of caste hierarchy. Caste continued to exist in several forms even after national independence. The constitution drafted by Ambedkar granted these historically deprived communities a set of privileges that ended up unleashing a backlash against any form of lower caste assertion in traditional upper caste Hindu sections of the society. In the 1980s, a sea change occurred in the Indian political scenario that the cpi(m) did not anticipate. In the words of Aditya Nigam: It became clear that a period of a different type of mass struggles had set in. These were exemplified by the aasu led agitation in Assam, the tribal separatist movements and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism – the “three prongs” of the divisive forces, according to the party. They were to be later characterised as three arms of the imperialist strategy to dismember India. These new movements were movements that despite their reactionary edge, challenged the bourgeois nationalist image of a single Indian nation – an image that the cpi(m) had categorically rejected while characterising India as a multinational state. It therefore, once again faced the paradoxical situation of deciding how to fight Congress rule at the centre (especially after Indira Gandhi’s return in 1980) and face the challenge of the divisive forces. […] We would suggest that as time went by and the hollowness of the “secular nationalist discourse” of mainstream politics started resounding under the impact of an unprecedented moral and political crisis, the marginalised discourses of ethnicity and other fragmented identities started moving centre-stage.27

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With the formation of political entities like the Bahujan Samaj Party,28 caste identity gained political currency for the first time in independent India. In line with Ambedkar’s resentment towards the communists, these new forces also maintained their share of skepticism towards communism. The cpi(m) now not only had to fight the centrist Indian National Congress party, but also these new enterprises in order to secure its electoral base which had comprised people from lower classes and lower castes. It had to revise and reformulate its theories of caste; caste could no longer be relegated to the margins of theoretical understanding but had to be dealt with at its roots to sustain the political relevance of the party. The same Namboodripad who once found the cause of Harijans to be “mundane” had to revisit the issue in 1979, as political actors realized that building India along modern democratic and secular lines required an uncompromising struggle against caste-based Hindu society and its culture. Secular democracy, let alone socialism, could not take root “unless the very citadel of India’s age-old civilization and culture – the division of society into a hierarchy of castes – could be broken. In other words, the struggle for radical democracy and socialism could not be separated from the struggle against caste society.”29 Thus began a series of Communist Party engagements that addressed caste on par with class, in synchronization with Marx’s own views. Although caste began to gain prominence in the Marxist discourse, such an engagement was problematic in the sense that caste, in a Marxist understanding, was always entwined with class. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) denied treating caste as an autonomous pillar of oppression sanctioned by upper-caste Hindu culture but tried to approach it through a synthetic combination with class struggle and agrarian movements. This is evident in the treatise titled Class, Caste, and Property Relations by B.T. Ranadive30 in 1979, reprinted twice in 1983 and 1991. Ranadive argued: The new situation calls for giving up the tradition of fighting caste battles in isolation from other toilers. It was inevitable that in the earlier years the movement of the downtrodden castes should be conducted on the basis of caste vs caste. It was all the more inevitable in the case of untouchables who were denied human existence. This tradition has led to an exclusiveness which refuses to consider that there are toiling sections in the other

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castes who have to be detached from their caste leadership and be brought face to face with the common oppressor. The vested and opportunist interests in some downtrodden castes seek to keep their followers away from the common struggle so that they can continue. Without lowering the banner against caste oppressions, every effort should be made by them to join the common struggle for democracy and social advance.31 The fundamental problem with this series of engagements the cpi(m) had with caste is that it continued to identify the Dalit as a section of the lower class, which, therefore, needed to be redeemed by the Marxist tenet of class struggle. This view did not take into account that caste humiliation could be inflicted irrespective of class. Furthermore, if caste oppression happened because of production relations between the owner and the workers, then the Vaishyas, or the mercantile caste in custody of the capital, would have been at the topmost stratum of the caste ladder, rather than the Brahmins. What the cpi(m) did not recognize until this point is that caste in India was more than merely enclosed class. Caste oppression has ramifications that are, perhaps, more ruthless than class exploitation. It is a different category of subordination altogether, and this calls for a distinct analytical framework. Caste oppression is not just symptomatic of economic exploitation, but it reflects cultural hegemony and perpetrates atrocities in the form of forced denial to basic resources. While one’s class position could be changed with economic upliftment, one’s caste is not dynamic. A Dalit still remains a Dalit and faces social prejudice even if they are able to climb up the class ladder. The communist imagination, for a long time, lacked the theoretical apparatus to study caste and simply subsumed it to the agenda of class struggle. As Ganguly sums up, “every dimension of caste practice does not lend itself to be read transparently under the gaze of the capital. In deconstructive terms, one could say that caste is the difference within capital.”32

turn of th e mi llenni um: ri se o f t h e r i g h t a n d th e d eci mati o n o f th e l e f t i n b e n g a l At the turn of the millennium, however, India was confronted with a new situation in the gradual strengthening of Hindutva ideology and the ascendancy of Bhartiya Janata Party, its flag bearer, into

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state power. In the face of this “crisis,” the cpi(m) found itself forced to reconsider the caste question yet again. In 2002, Jayantanuj Bandyopadhyaya, wrote a lengthy article titled “Class Struggle and Caste Oppression: An Integral Strategy of the Left” in Marxist, the theoretical mouthpiece of the party. In that article, he asserted: “The political and ideological struggles of the left parties have reached a crossroads, as correctly emphasized by the political resolutions of the 17th Party Congress of the CPI (M). The communal fascism of the Sangh parivar, with its ideology of the Hindu Rashtra, now poses a grave and unprecedented threat to the secular fabric of Indian democracy. Gujarat-type genocides are likely to engulf the entire country if the bjp and its perverted parivar are allowed to gain further strength. The so-called non-communal regional parties, which are supporting the Sangh parivar with a view to sharing the spoils of power, are too devoid of ideologies to be relied upon as anti-fascist political forces of the future.”33 Under such circumstances, Bandyopadhyaya argued, the issue of caste needed to be dealt with separately from, though not in contradiction with, class struggle. Like his predecessors, Bandyopadhyaya, too, owed his theoretical roots to the Marxian formulation of caste. But unlike them, he departed from this point to envisage how the Communist Party’s role in carrying forward caste struggle might be done by means other than class struggle. Apart from prescribing the independent growth of left parties and forging united front tactics, he stressed the need for a cultural revolution. The necessity of a cultural revolution, at this point, was a unique addition to the party’s erstwhile imagination. Bandyopadhyaya emphasized: The class struggle there (in Russia) was carried out by the peasants and workers against the landlords and capitalists, as well as against the state controlled by the latter. But the existence of the crystallized prejudice structure of caste as a palpable objective element of India’s socioeconomic structure makes it imperative to add a specifically cultural dimension to the class struggle. […] Here the struggle against caste oppression and the struggle against communal fascism are likely to converge in one gigantic cultural revolution. The struggle for the replacement of the unscientific and bourgeois religious culture that sustains both caste oppression and communal fascism by a scientific, proletarian, and socialist culture will have to be an integral element of the

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class struggle in India. Moreover, this will have to be a protracted cultural revolution that will continue for a long time after the socialist revolution, as and when it takes place.34 The next intervention came in 2006, when the party adapted a resolution at the All Indian Convention on Problems of Dalits. While the cpi(m) critiqued the caste movements for their failure to link caste oppression with class struggle, it understood that the caste problem could be solved only through a radical change in the means of production. The cpi(m) blamed the existing semifeudal, semicapitalist system for the existence of caste after independence, even after untouchability was officially declared illegal. Caste, according to them, thrived on the existing feudal relations that sanctioned the oppression of the have-nots in the hands of the select few. Prakash Karat, the general secretary, stated: “The cpi(m) considers the struggle against caste oppression and abolition of the caste system as intrinsic to the fight for a basic social transformation.”35 The resurgence of Dalit concerns in Bengal happened side by side with the gradual decline of the left bastion in the state. The need for a separate caste-based movement to launch a battle against Brahminical oppression stemmed from the inability of the leftist ideological machinery to resist discrimination on the basis of caste. After 2006, the Dalit constituencies started gaining currency in the public life of West Bengal. As Praskanva Sinha Roy’s 2012 article suggests, there has been a renaissance in Dalit politics with the organization of Matua Mahasangha coming into force.36 The vigour gained by the Dalits has not only made them a decisive electoral constituency, but also empowered them with a distinct voice of their own. In the words of Ranabir Samaddar, “the politics of the bahujan samaj […] is not the electoral arithmetic-centric mobilisation […] it is beyond the election-centric mobilisation and alliances, and elevates Dalit subjectivity beyond the operation of governmentality.”37 Therefore, as the support base of the Left was lost in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, and subsequently, as the party was thrown out of power in the 2011 assembly elections in West Bengal, more attention needed to be devoted to caste. To highlight the party’s contribution towards fighting for Dalit rights, a book titled, In the Cause of Dalits: Struggle for Social Justice was published in 2012. Only three paragraphs of the book focus on West Bengal; however, it mostly reiterates the immense success of

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the land reform policies in economically empowering the Dalits. The book also contains an article by K. Varada Rajan, which links caste oppression with the neoliberal economy of India. Rajan maintains that the worst victims of the enforcement of these economic policies were the Dalits, who comprised 18 per cent of the total population of India. Thus, the struggle against these policies had to address the issue of caste. He wrote, “hunger deaths all over the country mainly constitute of Dalits and Adivasis. So, the policies of liberalization, privatization, and globalization have further strengthened the need to mobilize these rural poor against class and caste oppression.”38 In Bengal, Shyamal Chakrabarty, a cpi(m) Central Committee member and the general secretary of the cpi(m) -backed worker’s front, citu , engaged at length with the issue of caste. In January 2003, he published Tin Prosongo: Moulobaad, Santrasbaad, Jaatpaat (Three Issues: Fundamentalism, Terrorism, and Casteism), which was popular among the party cadres. The book was reprinted in September 2003, with three thousand additional copies of the third edition published in October 2004. After a long hiatus, the fourth edition was published in January 2009, and the fifth and final published in April 2014. These publication dates reveal crucial junctures in the history of West Bengal in the context of Indian politics. The need for the Left to engage with caste was crucial in 2003 as Mayavati, the bsp leader of Uttar Pradesh, lent her support to the bjp-led nda government at the centre. The Lok Sabha elections were five months away in January 2009, following the Singur-Nandigram massacres; at this moment the Left understood that it was losing ground. The need to keep its support base intact compelled the cpi(m) to articulate its take on caste. The final edition published in 2014, three years after the fall of the Left Front government in West Bengal and three months before the formation of the Modi government at the centre, can be seen as an attempt by the cpi(m) to regain its lower caste vote from the clutches of the emerging Hindu right. Chakraborty brings up these three controversial issues to assert the progressive orientation of his party in dealing with growing islamophobia, Hindu fundamentalism, and ongoing caste violence. In the chapters concerning caste, Chakraborty explores in detail the Brahminical Hindu tradition of the country perpetuated by the holiest of scriptures to point out how it validates the economically exploitative neoliberal power structure. While the need for an autonomous cultural revolution is acknowledged, caste oppression is still

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not treated separately from class exploitation. Chakraborty writes, “the motive of torture is more economic than it is related to caste. Class conflict and caste conflict complement each other and work together.”39 While dealing with the caste problem in West Bengal, Chakraborty resorts to two major pillars of Bengali social and intellectual thought: Rabindranath Tagore40 and Swami Vivekananda.41 In quite a hagiographic tone, he quotes from these two stalwarts to highlight their life-long rhetoric against caste discrimination and Brahminical oppression. However, Chakraborty does not consider the problematic reassertions of the organic existence of caste in their articulations. These two figures are arguably more prominent in mainstream Bengali imagination than the anticaste activists from and outside Bengal. By completely ignoring Ambedkar’s contribution to understanding the caste problem in India, Chakraborty’s argument inherits the same problem of his ancestors: the reluctance to deal with caste at its roots and the skepticism toward endorsing “identity politics.” Only at the end of his discussion does he pay lip service to the role played by “non-Marxists” in reforming Indian society and calls for the need to forge tactical alliances with their legacy. He concludes: “In this struggle [against the exploitative system], a lot of figures, who did not subscribe to Marxism, have taken part. Most of them are flag bearers and legendary. Ram Mohan Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Jyotiba Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar – they have led the way for their successors to carry on. Their legacy is still alive. We must engage with that legacy. We must acknowledge and appreciate their contributions and join hands with them in our mission to change the society in our individual and collective capacity. There is no other way.”42 These co-options of Ambedkar without serious involvement with his thoughts and pedagogy reinforce the anti-Marxist Ambedkarites’ suspicion of the Indian communists’ commitment to the caste issue. On the other hand, it is also symptomatic of the desperation on the part of the communists to regain their waning political support. Things took an even more problematic turn after the 2014 general elections, which led to radical political changes. The left parties were decimated all over the nation and the Hindu Brahminical Right – under the Bhartiya Janata Party – came to power. The role of caste-based political parties now became crucial in resisting the Right’s new power. Furthermore, with the suicide of the Dalit student, Rohit Vemula, enrolled in Hyderabad Central University, caste

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became a burning topic that engaged liberals of all types. The Left, keeping in mind its decline, could not afford to turn its back on the growing importance of recognizing and addressing caste in its singularity. To tackle the expansion of the formidable Hindu Brahminical Right across the country, it became imperative for the Left to examine its engagement with caste and devise new strategies and alliances. In a blog post published in 2016, Brinda Karat, a politburo member of the cpi(m) , made a passionate case against caste discrimination and posited a solution to combat, if not annihilate, caste. Karat held that the annihilation of caste is integral to left-wing politics in India and argued in favour of “sustained joint actions between Dalit groups and left-oriented mass organisations. In particular, trade unions and Kisan organisations can play an important role in building these new alliances.”43 But at the same time, her skepticism about the “identity politics” perpetuated by the antileft Ambedkarite Dalit forces also surfaced when she remarked, “some of them believe that the Left should be the main target and oppose any joint movements. This is not only rooted in a narrow reading and practice of identity politics but is oblivious to the qualitatively new situation that has arisen since the coming to power of the Modi Government.”44 Contradicting herself a couple of paragraphs later, Karat proceeded to formulate an inward critique of her own party. She suggested: “Unless class organisations specifically take up the issues of Dalits among the sections we are working on as part of the broader class struggle, why should Dalit workers and the poor working Dalits be attracted to the Left? It is no use criticizing ‘identity politics’ if we do not address specifically the issues faced by the Dalit working poor from our broader platforms. For this, we will have to confront any casteist feelings and approaches which may exist in some sections of mass organisations.”45

wh at now? 2 0 1 4 and i t s a f t e r m at h : toward s a c o n c l u si o n In this paper, I have attempted to narrate the deep-rooted tension between the class struggles and anticaste movements in India. While I have tried to counter the claims of Dalit agencies that the communists have done nothing to combat caste discrimination and exploitation in India, I have also attempted to critique the communist theorizations of caste in terms of their inadequacy and untimeliness. However, the question that haunts us right now, more conspicuously than ever, is

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what will happen to the resistance against the consolidated Hindu right? The 2019 Lok Sabha elections have seen the Hindu right, headed by the bjp , re-elected to power with an overwhelming majority in all corners of the nation. The seats of all left and left-centre political formations, including the cpi(m) , and bsp have been drastically reduced. In my view, there is an urgent need to unite all secular, democratic, and leftist forces in a common struggle against religious fanaticism, intolerance, ultra-nationalist rhetoric, and unregulated economic reforms. It is a moment of supreme historical importance for all these formations to understand and admit their historical conflicts, as well as look for ways to reconcile them. It is not the time to promulgate the us versus them differences that run the risk of fracturing the unity of socialist, secular, and democratic parties, but the time to write a new history of consolidating and carrying forward a new idiom of pro-people politics. I conclude by quoting from a 2016 article by Professor Rohit Azad, for his appeal seems extremely pertinent in our context: “If the ‘them’ can be aptly captured in various combinations of an image of a Brahmin upper class male, the ‘us’ should surely be a combination of a Dalit, an obc , a non-Hindu, a female and the working class and not them segregated along these categories. And I think it’s primarily a theoretical lacuna because all political praxis after all flows from a particular theoretical construct. Let the political opposition both in theory and praxis be a genuine  and an organic combination of these theoretical constructs which have the potential of producing a powerful resistance.”46 not e s 1 The caste system has its roots in the ancient Indian scriptures. Intending to divide the population into groups based on the labour they perform, it sanctions hierarchy and normalizes oppression and violence. 2 Karl Marx, “The Future Results of the British Rule in India,” in On Colonialism, eds. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages House, 1974), 83–91. 3 Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (London: Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1999), 3 June 2017, Marxists.org. 4 Anand Teltumbde, “Introduction: Bridging the Unholy Rift,” in India and Communism, ed. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (New Delhi: LeftWord, 2017), 37.

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5 Debjani Ganguly, “An Intractable Dualism: Caste and Marxism,” in Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives (New Delhi: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2008), 88. 6 Teltumbde, “Introduction,” 38. 7 Ganguly, “An Intractable Dualism,” 88–9. 8 Teltumbde, “Introduction,” 34. 9 Bhim Rao Ambedkar, “Buddhism and Communism,” Bahujan Voice, 6 (1989): 18–22, 19. 10 For a detailed history of conflicts between Ambedkar and the communists in India, see Teltumbde, “Introduction,” 9–78. 11 Bhim Rao Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Volume 17, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Dr Ambedkar Foundation, 2014), 425. 12 Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, ed. Alok Mukherjee (New Delhi: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2004), 81. 13 Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic, 65. 14 Gail Omvedt, “Preface: Literature of Revolt,” in Poisoned Bread, ed. Arjun Dangle, 4th ed. (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2014), x–xi. 15 Omvedt, “Preface,” xi. 16 Arjun Dangle, “Introduction: Dalit Literature Past, Present, and Future,” in Poisoned Bread, ed. Arjun Dangle, 4th ed. (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2014), xxvi. 17 West Bengal was ruled by the Left Front, a coalition of nine leftdemocratic parties lead by the cpi(m) from 1977 to 2011. 18 Raj Kumar, “In Cause of Dalits: Struggle for Social Justice: A Review,” Social Scientist 41, no. 3–4 (2013): 98–101, 100. 19 Ibid., 98. 20 Bhim Rao Ambedkar, “The Annihilation of Caste – Dr B. R. Ambedkar,” Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, November 2004, ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/ index.html. 21 Debjani Ganguly, “An Intractable Dualism: Caste and Marxism,” in Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives (New Delhi: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2008), 89. 22 Ganguly, “An Intractable Dualism,” 90. 23 Upper-caste, as in somebody belonging to the Varna system. 24 E.M.S. Namboodiripad (1908–1998) was a veteran communist leader. He served as the chief minister of Kerala, a state in South India, in 1957–59, and in 1967–69. 25 Aditya Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation: Epistemology of the Dalit Critique,” Economic & Political Weekly 35, no. 48 (2000): 4256–68,

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4258. Emphasis added. Harijan is a Sanskritized and sanitized term for Dalit, used and popularized by Mahatma Gandhi. Literally meaning “people of Hari (God),” Harijan indicates how the explicitly Hindu forces attempted to co-opt the undercaste population into their religion. Shipra Mukherjee, “Creating Own Gods: Literature from Margins of Bengal,” in Dalit Literatures in India (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2016), 128–31. Aditya Nigam, “Hegemony and Counter Hegemony: Understanding Indian Communism,” Economic & Political Weekly 31, no. 14 (1996): 901–6, 905. Bahujan Samaj Party was formed in 1984. Bahujan is another word for Dalit, while Samaj means society. Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya, “Class Struggle and Caste Oppression: An Integral Strategy of the Left,” The Marxist, 1 July 2002, http://www. cpim.org/marxist/200203_marxist_caste&class_jbando.htm. Bhalchandra Trimbrak Ranadive (1904–90) one of the first Polit Bureau members of the cpi(m) . He was a revered trade unionist of his time. B.T. Ranadive, Caste, Class, and Property Relations (National Book Agency, 1991), 28–9. Ganguly, “An Intractable Dualism,” 105. Bandyopadhyaya, “Class Struggle and Caste Oppression.” Sangh Parivar refers to a collection of militant right-wing Hindu nationalist organizations. Ibid. Karat Prakash, “Introduction,” in In the Cause of Dalits: Struggle for Social Justice (New Delhi: Communist Party of India (Marxist), 2000), 5–6, 7. Praskanva Sinha Roy, “A New Politics of Caste,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 34 (2012): 26–7, 26. Ranabir Samaddar, “Whatever Has Happened to Caste in West Bengal?,” Economic and Political Weekly 48, no. 36 (2013): 77–9. K. Varada Rajan, “Struggle for Social Justice Is a Part of Struggle against Neo-Liberal Policies,” in In the Cause of Dalits: Struggle for Social Justice (New Delhi: Communist Party of India (Marxist), 2012), 22–5, 25. Shamal Chakraborty, Tin Prosongo: Moulobaad, Santrasbaad, Jaatpaat (Kolkata: National Book Agency, 2014), 107. Ibid., 110–1. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 117.

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43 Brinda Karat, “Dalit Resistance and the Role of the Left,” LeftWord Blog, 9 September 2016, http://mayday.leftword.com/blog/ dalitresistance-and-the-role-of-the-left/. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Rohit Azad, “A Resistance against the Assault on Thought: A Lesson for the Left,” Rohit Azad’s Blog, 29 March 2016, https://rohitazad.wordpress. com/2016/03/29/a-resistanceagainst-the-assault-on-thought-alesson-forthe-left/.

3 Community Resistance to Mining in the Lower Aguán Valley: The Struggle for Land and the Roots of Inequality, Violence, and Repression in Honduras Bernie Hammond, Michael Berghoef, Giada Ferrucci, Amanda Grzyb, Dimitri Lascaris, and Ainhoa Montoya

According to the World Bank, Honduras has one of the highest rates of inequality in the world.1 More than 68 per cent of Hondurans live below the poverty line2 and land ownership is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the country’s elite. Despite being rich in biodiversity and natural resources, the state has licensed large portions of its arable and forest land to national and transnational corporations amid manifold complaints of political corruption and a lack of appropriate consultation with local populations about the impacts of megaprojects like mines and dams. David Harvey refers to this process as “accumulation by dispossession,” which includes depletion of the environment and the commodification of nature. He writes, “as in the past, the power of the state is frequently used to force such processes through even against popular will. The rolling back of regulatory frameworks designed to protect labour and the environment from degradation has entailed the loss of rights.”3 Communities and civil society organizations that organize to defend their territories, resist the privatization of land, and protect the environment often face violent repression by the Honduran government and private security forces, and Honduras remains the most dangerous place in the world to be an environmental activist.4 This chapter explores the relationship between inequality, struggles over land, and repressive state violence in Honduras through a case study of organized resistance by the community of Guapinol to two mining concessions owned by Inversiones Los Pinares (ilp ) in

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the Lower Aguán Valley. In June 2019, we conducted interviews and focus groups with members of the Guapinol community, media and civil society organizations, religious leaders, lawyers, and the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment as part of a fact-finding mission to investigate complaints of human rights abuses against community members who are protesting against the ilp mining projects. We contextualize the Guapinol-ilp conflict in relation to the broader Honduran history of unequal land distribution, political corruption, and state violence against environmental activists, Indigenous leaders, and subsistence farmers. We conclude that the government of Honduras has supported the corporate interests of ilp through irregularities in the mining licensing process, criminalization of the Guapinol protesters, and ongoing militarization of the Tocoa region.

h i s to r i c a l c o nflic t s ov e r l a n d Although it has been shrinking in favour of industry, agriculture continues to provide approximately 13 per cent of the total composition of the gdp of Honduras. Ownership of land is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few owners engaged in agribusiness, leaving many subsistence farming families with few resources to maintain a livelihood.5 In 1993, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Comision Económica para América Latina y el Caribe, cepal ) indicated in its last comprehensive census that 1.6 per cent of landowners possess 40 per cent of cultivated land in Honduras, while 72 per cent of producers own only 12 per cent of cultivated land.6 Recent conflicts over land can be traced back to the 1970s, under the military governments that ruled Honduras from 1963 to 1982.7 Pressured into modernizing land reforms by landless subsistence farmers and unemployed banana workers who had been fired by the United Fruit Company, President Osvaldo López Arellano passed the Agrarian Reform Law and, in 1974, announced a program to begin land redistribution. This law turned over large tracts of land to the central government and the municipalities, many in the fertile Lower Aguán Valley region that is the focus of this chapter. The land was then granted to local landless farmers and others recruited from various parts of the country. The conditions for occupancy of the land encouraged the cultivation of export crops such as African palm, but farmers also grew staple

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foods (corn, rice, beans, fruits, and vegetables) for local consumption. The Agrarian Reform Law specified that a limited number of hectares could be privately owned to prevent the historic pattern of concentration of land ownership by the oligarchy. When these conditions were met and the land had been cooperatively farmed for several years, the government granted collective titles to hundreds of cooperative enterprises. At least eighty-four of them were in the Aguán Valley and fifty-four were specifically mandated to produce palm oil.8 From the late 1970s, the government faltered in its commitment to land reform, to reducing inequality, and to cooperativism: the quality of the land transferred was poorer and assistance to cooperatives was reduced. However, it was not until the early 1990s that the concept of collective land ownership was dramatically challenged. In 1992, the Honduran government passed the Agricultural Modernization Law drafted in consultation with the United States Agency for International Development (usaid ) and underwritten by the World Bank.9 This meant that agriculture was brought under the neoliberal structural adjustment requirements of the World Bank,10 which took the form of reduced government support for local production and increased emphasis on the promotion of export production. It also included the mandate that collectively owned lands could be open to private purchase. This shift set in motion a frenetic scramble for land accumulation in which some cooperative owners refused to sell, while others sold under conditions of coercion or outright fraud and sometimes without the knowledge of other members of the cooperatives.11 Between 1990 and 1994, three quarters of the arable land in the Aguán Valley had been taken over by a few landowners among the Honduran elite. Miguel Facussé, whose family is at the centre of the Guapinolilp dispute, was the largest landowner in the region through Dinant Corporation, which dedicated most of its land to palm oil production. In the ensuing years, at 7.2 per cent of the total export production, palm oil became the second leading agricultural export product in Honduras, after coffee, which accounts for 26.8 per cent of total exports.12 The hegemonic position of the Dinant Corporation in this region was achieved in large part with assistance in the form of loans from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, which promote palm oil as an eco-friendly biofuel13 in spite of the fact that its production puts enormous strains on the water supply that is also required by the surrounding farming communities.

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Following the enactment of the Agricultural Modernization Law, thousands of families in the Lower Aguán Valley, frustrated by the lack of settlement of their land claims, moved back to re-occupy about seven thousand hectares of land that was acquired under contentious conditions by large landowners.14 In some cases, attempts by corporate security guards and police to evict these families led to considerable violence against them and resulted in a significant number of arbitrary detentions, as well as an ongoing social struggle. In spite of the risks to their safety, many subsistence farmers have actively participated in organizations in the Lower Aguán Valley represented in the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán Valley (Movimiento Campesino Unificado del Valle del Aguán – muca ).

th e 2009 c o up and po st c o u p r e g i m e s On 28 June 2009, President Manuel Zelaya was forcibly overthrown by a military-backed group of politicians.15 The alleged reason for the ouster of Zelaya was his proposed referendum on the possibility of calling for a constituent assembly that would oversee a nonbinding referendum on reforming the country’s 1982 constitution, a referendum declared unconstitutional by the country’s judicial and legislative powers and even opposed by his own Liberal Party.16 It was widely claimed that Zelaya’s goal for constitutional reform was ultimately to seek re-election for a second term, which was prohibited by the constitution. The reasons for the coup, however, lay elsewhere. Elected as a Liberal, Zelaya had moved gradually to the left, proposing government control of the extractive industry and much needed land reform. In 2006, he established an official moratorium on mining concessions by presidential decree.17 Two years later, he began to promote the redistribution of land through Decree-Law 2008–18, which would have granted land titles to subsistence farmers occupying and working lands for more than a decade.18 In addition, he was supportive of some progressive social reforms such as a 60 per cent increase in the minimum wage and free school enrolment. Internationally, Zelaya had moved closer to Venezuela and Cuba, as well as other left and centre-left countries, bringing Honduras into the Venezuelan-led economic blocs Petrocaribe and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (alba ).19

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These arrangements that had concerned members of both the Liberal and National parties were immediately ended by the postcoup government. Following the coup, Liberal Roberto Micheletti Bain, as president of the National Assembly, assumed the role of interim president. Street actions, strikes, and roadblocks in peaceful support of Zelaya in the months after the coup were met with arbitrary detentions and strong repression. All domestic and international attempts to return Zelaya to power failed and Micheletti retained control until an election in November 2009, whose legitimacy was questioned by most Latin-American governments and boycotted by Hondurans opposed to the coup. The National Party candidate Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo was elected president. One of Micheletti’s last acts as interim president was to grant amnesty to the senior military personnel involved in the illegal act of deposing Zelaya, thus guaranteeing them impunity.20 Both Micheletti and Lobo extended and augmented the country’s broad ranging neoliberal agenda initiated in the early 1990s by opening the country, and especially its extractive industries, to foreign and national corporate interests. From 2011, President Lobo, with the support of then president of the Honduran Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández, pushed forward the militarization of domestic policing, whether through the patrolling of public areas by the military or the foundation of new militarized police units such as the special forces Intelligence Troop and Special Security Response Group (Tropa de Inteligencia y Grupos de Respuesta Especial de Seguridad – tigres ) and the Military Police for Public Order (Policía Militar del Orden Público – pmop ).21 US security aid transfers to Honduras facilitated this militarization, focusing mainly on the northern areas, the so-called “drug trafficking corridor,” where extractive, manufacturing, and tourism enclaves are concentrated.22 From his position as the president of the Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández, a National Party member who had supported the 2009 coup, led a number of reforms that concentrated power increasingly in the hands of the executive, a tactic that several observers have labelled a “technical coup.”23 The most significant among these measures was the creation of the National Security and Defence Council (Consejo Nacional de Defensa y Seguridad) in 2011. This initiative brought the president of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Attorney General’s Office, and later the military police, under the control of the Honduran president, effectively removing any

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checks and balances on the executive’s implementation of national security.24 In addition, four out of five of the judges in the constitutional branch of the Supreme Court were illegally dismissed in 2012 for challenging the Lobo government’s neoliberal and security agendas, such as declaring unconstitutional the “charter cities” law that facilitates privately run municipalities with their own police, tax structures, and judicial systems.25 Juan Orlando Hernández ran for president in 2013. By then, those in opposition to the 2009 coup had already founded the Libertad y Refundación party (Libre) under the leadership of Xiomara Castro, the spouse of the deposed president Manuel Zelaya, who ran against Hernández in the election. After many reported irregularities in the voting procedures and the counting of ballots, Hernández was declared president with a wide margin and Libre’s candidate came in third place, closely behind the Liberal Party. Hernández took office in January 2014, benefiting from the concentration of power he had enabled while he headed the Honduran Congress. Throughout his term, he also initiated several measures to appease unrest at home and criticism from abroad:26 a law to protect journalists; a number of programs to help the poor that did nothing to address the structural basis of their poverty; a consultative legislative initiative; work towards compliance with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (eiti ) standards; and an international commission to address corruption and impunity under the auspices of the Organization of American States’ Mission to Support the Fight Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (maccih ). None of these measures have proven to be effective in reducing inequality, challenging the influence of the state, or curbing the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators of crime and violence. In 2017, Hernández announced his intention to run for a second term as president, which is prohibited by the 1982 constitution. In 2015, however, a now domesticated Supreme Court ruled that such a prohibition was a violation of civil rights, thus clearing the way for a second term for Hernández.27 The election of 2017 was mainly fought between Hernández and a coalition of opposition parties under the leadership of media personality Salvador Nasralla. All polls predicted that Nasralla would win and, with more than 60 per cent of the votes counted, Nasralla had what was judged to be an insurmountable lead. Suddenly, however, the vote count was suspended for more than thirty hours. There was a complete

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information blackout and when the count resumed, it showed Hernández ahead with a slim lead. Shortly afterwards, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal declared Hernández the winner.28 The election triggered the worst crisis in Honduras since the 2009 coup as tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets in angry protests. The protestors were met with harsh repressive measures that included a national curfew, arrests of protesters, and the suspension of constitutional rights for ten days.29 More than thirty people were killed and many others injured. Despite the very clear opposition to his government and its neoliberal agenda, Hernández has continued to push for the privatization of state property and social services, and the removal of any state regulation of businesses.

h uman r i gh ts vio l at i o n s In the last decade, Honduras has stood out for its exorbitant record of human rights violations. Part of this violence has been related to the political crisis triggered by the 2009 coup and the lack of legitimacy that many Hondurans have lent to postcoup governments. Micheletti’s government met opposition to the coup and its aftermath with violent repression, resulting in more than forty deaths and many injuries.30 State repression continued, according to the Committee of the Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras – cofadeh), and during the first year of Lobo’s presidency there were at least thirty-four targeted assassinations of members of the National Front of Popular Resistance formed to oppose the coup, another three hundred suspicious deaths among their members, thirty-four murders of farmers involved in land conflicts, ten murders of journalists, and thirty-one murders of members from the lgbt community.31 Since 2010, Global Witness has documented more than 120 cases in which the state or private security forces murdered Honduran environmental activists, leading them to conclude that Honduras is “the deadliest country in the world for environmental activism.”32 In 2019, Human Rights Watch concluded that in Honduras “efforts to reform the institutions responsible for providing public security have made little progress. Marred by corruption and abuse, the judiciary and police remain largely ineffective. Impunity for crime and human rights abuses is the norm.”33 This point was confirmed dramatically in

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our interview with Ramón Soto Bonilla, a member of the National Assembly for Colón representing the Libre Party: “In Honduras, to be a defender of human rights, a freelance journalist, an environmental defender, or a social activist constitutes a huge risk, a risk bigger than being a smuggler of any kind of substance. An ombudsman faces more risks than any criminal does because the official institutions of the state criminalize him.” The most notorious among these cases was the 2016 assassination of the internationally recognized environmental defender and Indigenous-rights activist, Berta Cáceres, who at the time of her death had been issued precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (iachr ). Her assassination by an ex-army officer, who was acting on orders from Roberto David Castillo, former head of the dam company Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (desa ) for her opposition to the hydroelectric project, Agua Zarca, is paradigmatic of the links between corporate interests and the violation of human rights in the country. Between 2008 and 2013 alone, 123 people were killed and another six disappeared in land disputes in the Lower Aguán Valley region.34

the extr acti v e eco no mi c m o d e l i n h o n du r as The postcoup government of Lobo officially declared Honduras “open for business” at an economic conference it hosted in 2011, an initiative launched to attract domestic and foreign investment that has continued under the Hernández regime. It consists of legislation reform that offers benefits and reassurances to businesses, and a portfolio of available economic projects, especially extractive ventures. Donald Hernández, executive director of the Honduran Centre for the Promotion of Community Development (cehprodec), explained in a June 2019 interview: “This proposal aimed at lowering the necessary requirements or procedures so that the extractivists could quickly obtain permits and receive commissions in the territory. Fiscal charges or operations permits were used to make the sale of territory in Honduras to foreign investors more attractive, mainly in relation to investments in mining, energy, and hydroelectric production.” After 2009, 30 per cent of the country’s territory was under some degree of commitment to extractive corporations, both foreign and national.35 The government justified this dramatic rise of extractive industries in Honduras as fostering national prosperity and debt

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relief. However, these industries have mostly benefitted national elites, who – through their continued presence in Honduras’s National Congress and Executive36 – have been able to pass legislation facilitating the expansion of the country’s extractive frontier.37 With the rush of applications for exploration and large-scale mining operations also came socio-environmental impacts and conflicts.38 One of the most renowned cases is Goldcorp’s San Martín mine, an open-pit gold mining operation in the Siria Valley (Francisco Morazán Department) that was established without any consultation and operated between 2000 and 2008. Extraction by this Canadian company through its local subsidiary, Minerales Entre Mares de Honduras, resulted in numerous alleged health and environmental impacts, including a high infant mortality rate due to metal concentrations potentially resulting from acid mine drainage and to the cyanide toxicity affecting water.39 The expansion of extractive industries and evidence of the negative impacts of the San Martín mine have given rise to conflicts between rural populations and extractive entrepreneurs over land, water, and other natural resources.40 At the same time, the mining sector has not registered a significant contribution to the country’s gdp .41 During the last twenty years, various sectors of the public and human rights ngo s have also mobilized nationally to oppose mineral extraction through legal challenges. In 2006, twenty antimining activists brought the first constitutional challenge against the 1998 General Mining Law before the Supreme Court, which that same year ruled thirteen of its articles were unconstitutional. Pressure on the government from the Civic Alliance for Democracy led to a de jure moratorium in 2004,42 which Zelaya’s government ratified in 2006 while starting a negotiation process with social movements to reform the law. However, the 2009 coup brought this process of dialogue and reform to a halt and Lobo’s postcoup government resumed granting mining licences. By 2012, Honduras had granted four hundred mining concessions, but only four mines were actually producing.43 With more than $100 million invested in mining projects, Canadian companies have been the largest investor in the mining sector in Honduras. The Canadian government worked with Lobo’s regime to develop a new, corporate-friendly mining law that superseded provisions previously declared unconstitutional. Honduras passed a new General Mining Law44 in 2013 in consultation with Canadian mining corporations and with the support of the Canadian International

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Development Agency, in spite of strong opposition from many sectors of the Honduran public and environmental ngo s. This law addressed gaps in the previous one, but with substantial limitations: it distinguishes between types of licences but their duration is unlimited; it continues to allow unlimited use of water within and outside the licensed area; it raises the royalties of metallic mining from 2 per cent to 6 per cent but the contribution to the municipality amounts to only 2 per cent and another 2 per cent goes to the country’s security forces; and it includes the requirement of binding consultation, yet this is only required prior to obtaining the exploitation licence and a consultation resulting in opposition to a mining project is only valid for three years. More importantly, there are documented case studies in which mining corporations are permitted to operate under this legislation while bypassing or manipulating the requirements of consultation and consent on the part of affected populations and without conducting adequate environmental impact studies.45 There is also evidence that the Honduran government has licensed territory in protected areas despite the law’s nominal prohibition of such activities.46 For these reasons, the 2013 law was also challenged by antimining activists before the constitutional branch of the Supreme Court in both 2014 and 2017. In 2017, seven of the law’s articles were declared unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruling has not, however, prevented mining companies from continuing their activities and starting new projects, like that owned by Inversiones Los Pinares (ilp ).

th e cur r ent c o nflic t i n g ua p i n o l : i nv ers i o nes lo s p i n a r e s m i n e The focus of the conflict in Guapinol, a community in the municipality of Tocoa, is the nonmetallic exploitation licences asp and asp 2 obtained in 2014 by Inversiones Los Pinares (ilp ) mining company, formerly emco mining company. The company is currently building its plant and an access road in order to extract and process iron oxide near the Guapinol and San Pedro Rivers and on land that was previously part of the core zone of the Montaña de Botaderos Carlos Escaleras National Park (henceforth Carlos Escaleras National Park), which is the source of thirty-four rivers, including Cuaca, San Pedro, Guapinol, Ceibita, and Tocoa.

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ilp is owned by Lenir Pérez and his wife Ana Facussé, daughter of the now deceased Honduran oligarch Miguel Facussé. Pérez is previously linked to the execution of construction contracts illegally granted by the Hernández government,47 and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MiAmbiente+, formerly serna ) has accused him of environmental crimes. A serna report in 2012 found that the Buena Vista I mining project, owned by Pérez, caused excessive deforestation, contamination of water supplies, and the disappearance of fish from the rivers due to mining waste that was improperly discarded.48 This project was also tainted by reports of human rights violations against locals who opposed it.  The government continued to award mining concessions even after the territory of Tocoa was declared a protected area in 2012. By 2015, there were fifty-nine mining concessions in the Department of Colón, including thirty-four in the municipality of Tocoa: twenty-five under request, twenty-one in exploration, six having received an exploitation licence, and seven at the exploitation stage.49 This means that more than 5 per cent of the Department of Colón and one- third of the municipality of Tocoa were under exploration or exploitation at that time.50 Community opposition to these projects is strong. In 2015, a survey conducted by eric and Saint Louis University51 in Tocoa showed that seven out of every ten residents rejected mining in the municipality and 63.5 per cent believed that it would not be beneficial for the region. In June 2019, members of the Municipal Committee for the Defence of the Public and Common Goods (cmdbcp ) in Tocoa (henceforth the Municipal Committee) explained how they began to protest the mine in 2015, when they learned that the asp and asp 2 mines would sit on the protected territory of the Carlos Escaleras National Park. ilp had initially tried to build an access road to the mine through Sector San Pedro but encountered strong opposition from all of the communities there. It then turned to the community of Ceibita, where the company was welcomed following negotiations with the leadership of the local patronato (municipal civil society association). These discussions involved promises of employment as security guards, improvements in the local school, and the building of a road to the mine plant that was seen as an important and desired addition to community infrastructure. Locally, those employed as security guards by the company were armed and they formed the Ceibita’s Permanent Surveillance Committee (coviperce ).

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In the face of these developments, the Municipal Committee turned to Tocoa’s mayor, Adán Fúnez (from the Libre Party), to request a consultation through the modality of cabildo abierto (a consultative assembly in the form of an open council) that only the municipal corporation can call and that would allow Tocoa residents the opportunity to discuss the mining project and potentially declare their territory free of mining. In a June 2019 interview, one member explained why the community preferred a cabildo abierto to a plebiscite: For us the big dilemma is that if they were able to commit a huge central fraud against us [during the 2017 election], they may also do it here [in a local referendum]. In fact, the mining company Inversiones Los Pinares has publicly stated that it agrees that a plebiscite should be made to consult the public about whether or not they want mining because that is a mechanism that they control. What they do not control is a cabildo abierto, which is also a legal mechanism for consultation, the holding of a public assembly in which we could request representatives from different national and international institutions. [A cabildo abierto] is not controlled by the municipal government or the company because this kind of system works with participation in person and in an assembly. The vote [in a plebiscite], on the other hand, is secret, and thus it could be subject to manipulation. In total, the Municipal Committee has made five written requests for a cabildo abierto since 2017, but all of them have been ignored. In order to make themselves heard by the mayor, they organized rallies and roadblocks; an eleven-day protest outside the town hall; collected four thousand signatures in favour of a consultation; and filed constitutional challenges and criminal reports. Protests from local community members surged. One community member reported: “The company entered illegally into our territory without the consent of the people, violating the right to free and informed consultation. So, we rose up and formed a committee because we know that if this kind of fight is not organized, it will not succeed.” During ilp ’s construction of the mining access road that runs parallel to the Guapinol River in the neighbouring La Ceibita community, residents of Guapinol felt that the soil that was displaced

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during the building process had added significant visible sediment to the river. In our June 2019 interview, Carlos Pineda Fasquelle, vice-minister of Natural Resources and the Environment, provided assurances that his ministry had tested the water in the Guapinol River and concluded that the sediment in the water was due to excessive rainfall, not the activities of the mine. Residents strongly disagree with this conclusion, arguing that the problem arose before the rainy season began. Feeling that their complaints were being dismissed, residents from Guapinol and other Tocoa communities opposed to the mine organized a blockade camp on 1 August 2018 and occupied the access road from La Ceibita that leads to the mine, thereby obstructing the transit of the mine’s heavy machinery. Named Guapinol Camp in Defence of Water and Life (Campamento Guapinol en Defensa del Agua y la Vida), the blockade was maintained daily by approximately 140 local people and it lasted for eighty-eight days. While the camp was in place, protesters met with a government commission to negotiate, but this process failed to meet their demands. The camp was attacked and dismantled on 27 October 2018 after a judge ordered the eviction of the protesters. About five hundred people gathered that day to resist the eviction. A convoy of 1,200 military and national police (including the militarised tigres ) from all parts of the Colón Department were mobilized to the area, meaning that there were 2.2 military or police for every protester present. Despite attempts to establish a dialogue with the military and police, the eviction proceeded. According to testimonies of local protesters, the military and police used live bullets and tear gas while physically attacking those involved in the blockade camp. Many protesters were wounded, and one was killed. The following day, protesters tried to set up the camp again and coviperce members opened fire on them while the police were only a few metres away. Several people were wounded and two military personnel and a coviperce member were killed. In the evening of that same day, coviperce burned down two houses of a family in Ceibita that was opposed to the mine. There is a great deal of confusion about who was responsible for the deaths that occurred. Eventually, the military concluded that it was the result of “armed criminal groups,”52 and none of the protesters in the blockade camp were charged with murder. Since the eviction of the camp, national police and military forces have remained in the area to guard the mining project and effectively militarize the surrounding territories.

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A member of the Municipal Committee clearly stated the aim of the blockade camp: “We have three demands: Stop mining, rescind decree 252-2013, and hold a town hall community consultation.” Another community member explained: “With [the repeal of decree 252-2013], the area of the national park would be liberated and we would return to the spirit of the original decree for the creation of the park. This allows us to guarantee the existence of the rivers. Here the underlying theme is water. To achieve that locally, we need to have a declaration of a mining-free municipality, a declaration crystallized in a legal public act established in the law of municipalities through an open town hall. That is what the Municipal Committee has officially requested in the committee assembly. Six times we have asked the municipal government and it has not been possible.” The modification of the law regarding the integrity of the Carlos Escaleras National Park is one of the most important issues for the communities that oppose the mine. One year after it was declared as protected area in 2012, Congress reformed the law, thus expanding the buffer zone of the park at the expense of the core zone and enabling mining extraction in the territory with a modified status. It is the contention of the community protesters that this latter decree is illegal because it was passed by the Honduran Congress without prior consultation of the Institute of Forest Conservation (icf ), the Honduran institution set to manage and regulate protected areas, as well as to elaborate the expert reports that can enable their modification.53

irregula r i ti es i n i ss ui ng i l p ’ s m i n i n g l i c e n c e s Article 48 in the 2013 General Mining Law acknowledges the possibility of zones where Honduras’s mining authority, the Instituto Hondureño de Geología y Minas (inhgeomin ) will not grant mining licences (the so-called “zones excluded from mining rights”). These exclusions include natural areas declared as protected and registered in the Catalogue of Inalienable Public Forestry Patrimony (Catálogo del Patrimonio Público Forestal Inalienable – cppfi ) and the Registry for Real Estate (Registro de la Propiedad Inmueble), and hydric recharge areas. However, a study reveals that until 2015 only 2.57 per cent of the surface of Honduras’s sixty-eight areas declared as “protected” by the Sistema Nacional de Áreas Protegidas de Honduras (sinaph ) was actually registered in the cppfi .54 This means that 98.28 per cent of sinaph ’s protected areas can currently

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be licensed for mining, regardless of whether the decree through which they were declared as protected prohibits this activity within their territory.55 The government granted the asp and asp 2 licences precisely because state public officials had failed to register the Carlos Escaleras National Park in the cppfi ; article 49 in the 2013 General Mining Law states that areas that do not meet legal procedures cannot be declared excluded from mining temporarily or permanently. The Montaña de Botaderos National Park (later renamed as Parque Nacional Carlos Escaleras to give credit to the local environmental activist who was assassinated in 1997) was declared a protected area in 2012 through Ministerial Agreement 002-2011 and Legislative Decree 127-2012. It was declared as such because it was a priority area for the conservation of Honduras’s biodiversity and ecosystems, and part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. In 2013, however, the Honduran Congress passed a legislative decree that significantly reduced its core zone.56 Given that Article 4 of decree 127-2012 prohibited mining in the core zone of the park, this new decree reduced the extension of this park’s zone in advance of granting the asp and asp 2 licences to ilp two years later and in exactly the territory where the mining projects were planned. This change occurred despite a negative expert opinion issued by officials from the icf in 2014. Human rights lawyers and members of the local community have submitted a number of complaints before different institutions, among them a constitutional challenge seeking the repeal of decree 252-2013 – a challenge that was ultimately dismissed. Nonetheless, the mining law does not distinguish between the core zone and the buffer zone; in Article 48, it states clearly that licences will not be granted in the country’s protected areas and areas of water recharge. Failure on the part of public officials to register 98.28 per cent of protected areas should thus not have been a reason to allow mining in these areas. Indeed, Article 48 of the General Mining Law is ineffectual in serving the purpose of excluding and preserving protecting areas from exploitation if we consider that only an insignificant portion of them fulfil the requirement of registration in the cppfi due to negligence on the part of icf officials to complete the due process of registration of protected areas. More importantly, the Honduran Congress passed Legislative Decree 252-2013 that modified the core zone despite the icf’s negative expert opinion, which amounts to an illegality.

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c r i mi na li zati o n o f l a n d d e f e n d e rs Residents from Guapinol, and other Tocoa communities opposed to the ilp mines, have faced threats to their lives, intimidation, persecution, criminalization, and stigmatization when they insist on their rights to defend their livelihoods, their land, their water, and their environment. In September 2018, well before the blockade camp was dismantled, the company filed a report before the public prosecutor, and eighteen of the protesters were charged with usurpation of and damages to both the company’s and the state’s property, and illegal occupation of public space. Another thirteen community members were criminally charged in January 2019. A month later, eleven of them voluntarily turned themselves in of their own accord and two were captured. After arrest, their charges were augmented to include “illicit association, arson, and illegal detention.” The charge of illicit association required the case to be heard not in the usual local courts, but in the Juzgado de Letras in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. This special court is intended for cases against organized criminal networks and enables the authorities to hold those charged indefinitely until their case is heard in court. The illicit association charges were eventually dismissed, but this decision has been appealed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the case is ongoing.57 All the community members in Guapinol who were part of the protest – not only those who were arrested – are fearful about the constant surveillance of their movements. In June 2019, a community member explained that the company knows where the protesters meet to organize resistance and it exercises surveillance of their meetings using drones. They also know where the protesters live, and several of the Guapinol protesters have been forced to move their families to another city for fear of violent reprisals against them. When asked in June 2019 how long he thought it was possible to continue protesting the ilp mining projects, one community member responded: “As long as we can! We have no other alternative. I was born here. I grew up here. With a lot of effort, I built my house here. If I were alone, I would go, but I have children and a wife. My father, my grandfather, my uncles, my whole family is here. My future is here. We have nowhere to go; we have to be here, so we are going to hold out as long as we have to.” Stigmatization and defamation have also affected the local Catholic Church, which has supported the struggles of Tocoa’s

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inhabitants throughout the conflict. This has meant that both delegates of the word (lay ministers who teach the Bible as a method of addressing social injustices) and the parish priest himself have been among those intimidated and persecuted. In a June 2019 interview, Tocoa’s parish priest explained: The hardest part is that, of the first eighteen people criminalized and prosecuted, four of them are delegates of the word [“palabra de dios”] from this parish. These four people are seriously threatened, [along with] their families (…) and the campaign of defamation, calling the parish the church of evil, calling it the church of the devil and so on … All this was happening on social networks. So, for example, during the trial of the first thirteen people, this was the kind of information that was being investigated. That is to say, the advisors and all of those from the Los Pinares company went around investigating me, what I owned, and everything from my past when I was young, why I had gone to Nicaragua … I mean, a whole intelligence investigation. The conflict has also included physical attacks, including the assassination of an environmental defender in August 2018 and the subsequent assassination of a coviperce member. Finally, the presence of narco-trafficking in the region for many years, through the activities of Los Cachiros drug cartel,58 serves as an important context for the present conflict. As the recent arrests in the US show, drug crimes and associated violence reach the highest levels of government and implicate the same people who have been determining policy with respect to land distribution and the extractive industry. National and international organizations have also served as critical supporters of the Guapinol community in their efforts to resist the ilp mine. In June 2019, one member of the Comité Ambiental de Guapinol explained: We have received a lot, a lot of support. We may not have the support of the state, of the government, but we have important international human rights organizations supporting us. The state is playing a role in which, on the one hand, they finance militarization, and on the other, they purport to give protective measures to land defenders who are vulnerable precisely because of this repressive force. With that same repressive force, the state

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intends to give us a certain kind of protection. Solutions are being sought in unsustainable and unreasonable ways. I believe that there is a great effort from many organizations nationwide and here we are participating in different spaces, with different organizations in this struggle where [the resistance] is being built. Because here we do not even finish organizing for one fight when another appears. As reported by C-Libre in June 2019 and other organizations such as Reporters Without Borders,59 attacks and threats against journalists reporting on the Guapinol case, as well as attempts to blackmail them or discredit their work, have also been prevalent. This has particularly impacted journalists reporting for Diario Colón and Radio Progreso. A member of C-Libre noted: “We have documented seven attacks against journalists in the municipality of Tocoa. Generally, these journalists tell us that they have been threatened about their approach to writing about the mining conflict and the defense of the territory by the communities of Tocoa. However, there are two other important facts to mention. The first is that, of the seventy-seven journalists murdered in Honduras, three of them were registered in the department of Colón …The second is that recently C-Libré once again issued an alert concerning César Robando, a journalist who has been subjected to a smear campaign by Inversiones Los Pinares.” In short, the 2015 Law to Protect Human Rights Defenders, journalists, social communicators and justice system workers has had absolutely no effect, as demonstrated by the continued human rights abuses against journalists. The fact that Honduras ranks 146 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index60 is strong evidence supporting this conclusion.

fo rced d i s placemen t o f p ro t e sto rs Many environmental defenders from Tocoa have fled the region (or even the country) either alone or with their families or have sent their families to safety. According to Radio Progreso, by the end of 2018, more than twenty people had been displaced as a result of the conflict with Inversiones Los Pinares. During a focus group with the members of the cmdbcp , one member stated: “The committee positions itself in the defense of water as a fundamental human right and in the defense of the territory. When water is concerned, people

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have no other option than to leave the area where they have lived all their lives. In a matter of months, communities that have lived in the area for centuries had to go.” Our interviews with residents from Guapinol and other Tocoa communities, however, suggest that the number is likely considerably higher. This displacement is occurring in a context in which applying for asylum in the US, the destination for most Hondurans fleeing the country, has become even more administratively and legally convoluted as a result of the Trump administration. The signing in 2019 of so-called “safe third country” agreements by the US with Central American governments in order to curb the flow of Central Americans seeking asylum in the US further complicates the situation for these refugees.61

co nc lusi on s Most states in Latin America have ratified human rights standards and treaties, but for millions of people the promise of human rights remains hollow. Social and political problems such as inequality, discrimination, violence, conflict, insecurity, poverty and environmental damage are exacerbated by repression and state violence. Members of the Municipal Committee for the Defense of Common and Public Goods (cmdbcp ) interviewed in June 2019 report that, while the Guapinol-ilp conflict in the Lower Aguán Valley might appear to be a local struggle, it constitutes one of the many examples of the criminalization suffered by all human rights and environmental defenders when they organize for greater equality and oppose corporate megaprojects. A member of cmdbcp noted that “(t)his conflict is not disconnected from the national conflict. Because (like) here in Tocoa, there are many parts, many municipalities in the country, that appear to be in the same situation. And sometimes with the same company, with the same employer and with the same judicial patron, the public prosecutor’s office is also establishing the fiscal requirements with investigation data that are totally removed from objectivity, from the veracity of the general interests of society.” The Guapinol case exposes the enormous risk that activists face when defending their rivers and their territorial sovereignty. Eleven years after the political-military coup d’état in Honduras, the rupture of the institutional framework in 2009 – and the subsequent wave of political, economic, social, and cultural repression – shaped a new scenario of popular organization and resistance. It has also deepened

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the state violence very typical of authoritarian regimes. By looking specifically at episodes of repression that characterize the daily life of the residents of Guapinol, the crisis is not only about employing repressive forces. It is also about a complex strategy that incorporates corruption, criminalization, and creation of special military fronts, which often collaborate with paramilitary groups and mercenaries from the same communities at the centre of the conflicts. These actions have reached extreme levels, such as the militarization of the territories where extractive projects are located. Faced with this violence, given the conditions of impunity and the absence of the rule of law, Honduras seems to be a country that has lost any semblance of legitimacy as a democracy. In Honduras, therefore, the challenge of strengthening popular power in defence of health, education, and natural resources calls for a combination of forces from different social layers. Such a combination of forces would strive to make visible the contradictions between factional powers (military and religious power), political-party structures, criminal narcopolitical structures, and the dominant economic class.62 A member of cmdbcp suggested that the local environmental conflict is ultimately part of a global struggle: I believe that we are growing as people in order to defend ourselves from the system, not only exclusively in the fight for water. Because it is in the whole country or the entire planet that we are going to have to face the fight for water and the fight for life. From there, the whole issue of common public goods also arises. Moreover, we learn something important in this process about the defense of public education and public health, which are among the few things that are still public, well somewhat public because they already entered the privatization process. But this struggle is pressing, and we are going to fight. I think it is a national consensus that we are going to maintain this struggle and we are going to hold on no matter what the price because if we allow the water to be privatized now, then all natural and public resources will be privatized as well. It is in this spirit that the Guapinol community members who experience constant threats to their lives – intimidation, persecution, criminalization, and stigmatization – should not be understood as two-dimensional victims. On the contrary, the current conflict in the

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Lower Aguán Valley is a direct consequence of the efforts of many civil society organizations, politically organized communities, and activists working to defend human and environmental rights. not e s

1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8

9 10

This chapter is based on a report, Guapinol Resists: Origins of the Mining Conflict in Bajo, Aguán, Honduras, written by an international fact-finding delegation of scholars and a human rights lawyer who visited Honduras during the week of 8–15 June 2019. The delegation was organized and sponsored by Pedro Cabezas, Coordinator of the Central American Alliance Against Mining (acafremin ), following complaints of human rights violations in Tocoa, Colón, Honduras. Funding for the research was provided by acafremin through the Sage Fund and the Romero Christian Initiate (icr ), Western University, Ferris State University, and the Sustainable Development Fund of the British Academy supported by the government of the United Kingdom’s Global Challenges Research Fund. World Bank, The World Bank in Honduras, 2019, https://www.world bank.org/en/country/honduras/overview. ine, Indicadores cifras de país 2017, 2017 https://www.ine.gob.hn/ publicaciones/cifrasdepais/cifras%20de%20pais%202017.pdf. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 147–8. Global Witness, Honduras: The Deadliest Place to Defend the Planet, 2017, https://www.globalwitness.org/es/campaigns/environmentalactivists/honduras-deadliest-country-world-environmental-activism/. Tanya M. Kerssen, Grabbing Power: The New Struggles for Land, Food, and Democracy in Northern Honduras (Oakland: Food First Books, 2013). World Bank, The World Bank in Honduras. Tyler Shipley, “Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras,” Between the Lines, 2018, digital version, chapter 1, 9–41. Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, “The Lower Aguán in Honduras and the Deadly Battle over Land Rights,” 6 May 2014, https:// www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/ethics_online/0093. Ibid. Arnup Shah, “Structural Adjustment: A Major Cause of Poverty,” Global Issues, 24 March 2013, http://www.globalissues.org/article/3/structuraladjustment-a-major-cause-of-poverty.

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11 Carnegie Council, “The Lower Aguán in Honduras.” 12 United Nations, cepalstat | Databases and Statistical Publications Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean, 2018, https://estadisticas.cepal.org/cepalstat/Perfil_Nacional_Economico. html?pais=HND&idioma=english. 13 Carnegie Council, “The Lower Aguán in Honduras.” 14 Ibid. 15 Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber, “Canada and the Honduran Coup,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30, no. 3 (2011): 328–43, https:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1470-9856.2010.00499.x; Dana Frank, The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018). 16 J. Mark Ruhl, “Travel in Central America: Honduras Unravels,” Journal of Democracy 21, no. 2 (2010): 93–107, 100. 17 acafremin , Estrategias para la defensa del medio ambiente y derechos humanos ante los impactos del extractivismo minero en Centroamérica, 2018, http://acafremin.org/images/documentos/Estratgias-para-le-Defensadel-Medioambiente.pdf, 21. 18 coha , “Human Rights Violations in Honduras: Land Seizures, Peasants’ Repression, and the Struggle for Democracy on the Ground,” 2014, http:// www.coha.org/human-rights-violations-in-honduras-land-grabs-peasantsrepression-and-big-companies/. 19 Gustavo Palencia and Anahi Rama, “Left behind by the US, Honduras Turns to Chavez,” Reuters, 26 August 2008, https://www.reuters.com/ article/us-honduras-president-interview/left-behind-by-the-u-s-hondurasturns-to-chavez-idUSN2634659620080826. 20 The Americas, “Honduran Congress Grants Zelaya, Coup Plotters Amnesty,” 26 January 2010, https://www.voanews.com/americas/ honduran-congress-grants-zelaya-coup-plotters-amnesty. 21 James Phillips, Honduras in Dangerous Times: Resistance and Resilience (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015); Frank, The Long Honduran Night. 22 Kerssen, Grabbing Power, 8. 23 Frank, The Long Honduran Night. 24 Fernando García Rodríguez, “La seguridad en Honduras: Respuestas equivocadas. Análisis de normas jurídicas emitidas post Golpe de Estado,” 2017, http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/fesamcentral/13563.pdf. 25 James Phillips, “Honduras at Ten Years after the Coup: A Critical Assessment,” CounterPunch, 28 June 2019, https://www.counterpunch. org/2019/06/28/honduras-at-ten-years-after-the-coup-a-criticalassessment/.

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26 James Phillips, Honduras in Dangerous Times: Resistance and Resilience (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015). 27 Associated Press in Tegucigalpa, “Honduran Judges Throw out Singleterm Limit on Presidency,” Guardian, 25 April 2015, https://www. theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/honduran-judges-throw-out-singleterm-limit-on-presidency. 28 Sarah Kinosian, “Call for Fresh Honduras Election after President Juan Orlando Hernández Wins,” Guardian, 18 December 2017, https://www. theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/honduras-election-president-juanorlando-Hernández-declared-winner-amid-unrest. 29 Jude Webber, “Honduras Declares Curfew as Vote Count Drags On,” Financial Times, 2 December 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/ 3b66f6fe-d5ea-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9. 30 Gordon and Webber, “Canada and the Honduran Coup,” 335; Amnesty International, Honduras: Human Rights Crisis Threatens as Repression Increases, 2009, https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/44000/ amr370042009en.pdf. 31 Todd Gordon, “Canada Backs Profits, Not Human Rights, in Honduras,” Toronto Star, 16 August 2011, https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2011/08/16/canada_backs_profits_not_human_rights_in_ honduras.html. 32 Global Witness, Honduras. 33 Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2019 Country Chapters: ‘Events in Honduras 2018’,” 2018, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/ country-chapters/honduras. 34 opdha , Informe estadístico de muertes violentas relacionadas al conflicto de tierras en el Bajo Aguán 2008–2013 (Colón: opdha , 2014.). 35 Mercedes Garcia, “Canadian Mining: Still Controversial in Central America. The Case of Honduras,” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 4 May 2016, http://www.coha.org/canadian-mining-still-controversial-in-centralamerica-the-case-of-honduras/#_ftnref16. 36 Marvin Barahona, Élites, redes de poder y régimen político en Honduras (El Progreso: eric , 2018), https://cpalsocial.org/documentos/677.pdf. 37 Although mining has featured highly among the postcoup governments’ priorities, the roots of Honduras’s mining sector can be traced back to colonial times. See Linda Newson, “Silver Mining in Colonial Honduras,” Revista de Historia de América, 97 (1984): 45–76. The sector declined in favour of the banana industry, rising again with new dimensions by the end of the 1990s. In 1998, in line with regional tendencies, the Honduran government passed the General Mining Law (Legislative Decree 292–98),

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39

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which derogated the 1968 Mining Code and was attuned with the liberal market democracy the country had embraced through the 1980s political reform and the subsequent 1990s economic reform. This new mining law sought to attract foreign direct investment by offering fiscal incentives and protecting investors’ rights, such as the free use of state idle lands without prior application, the possibility of forced land expropriation in the event of lack of agreement between the mining company and the surface owner, the unlimited use of water sources within and outside the licensed area, the lack of adequate environmental regulation, and the irrevocability and transferability of mining licences. A rapid increase in requests for licences from transnational mining corporations soon followed. Icefi, Diagnóstico de la situación minera en Honduras, 2007–2012 (Honduras: Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Fiscales, 2014), https:// icefi.org/sites/default/files/diagnostico_de_la_situacion_minera_en_ honduras_2007-2012_version_para_sitio_web.pdf. idamho, La mina San Martín en el Valle de Siria. Exploración, explotación y cierre: impactos y consecuencias (Tegucigalpa: idamho , 2013), https://www.movimientom4.org/wp-content/docs/informemina-san%20martin-honduras.pdf. Nick Middeldorp, Carlos Morales, and Gemma van der Haar, “Social Mobilisation and Violence at the Mining Frontier: The Case of Honduras,” The Extractive Industries and Society, 3 (2016): 930–8. Juan Carlos Quiroz and Juan Cruz Vieyra, “Unlocking Central America’s Mineral Potential: Leveraging Transparency to Address Governance Challenges,” The Extractives Industries and Society, 5 (2018): 255–68, 257. Executive Decree 473-2004. Quiroz and Cruz Vieyra, “Unlocking Central America’s Mineral Potential,” 262. Legislative Decree 238-2012. eric and Saint Louis University, Socio-Environmental Impact of Mining in the Northwestern Region of Honduras Seen through Three Case Studies (Tegucigalpa: Editorial Guaymuras, 2016), https://jesuits.org/Assets/ Publications/File/Impact-of-Mining-in-NW-Honduras-329.pdf. José Luis Palma Herrera, “La Minería en Honduras: análisis espacial de su conflictividad territorial desde la perspectiva de las Ciencias de la Información Geográfica,” Revista Ciencias Espaciales 10, no. 2 (2017): 25–61. Global Witness, Honduras. Ibid., 18.

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eric and Saint Louis University, Socio-Environmental Impact of Mining, 25. Ibid.

eric and Saint Louis University, Socio-Environmental Impact of Mining, 27. Honduras Forum Switzerland, “Another Month in Honduras,” 2018, https://honduras-forum.ch/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/1810_ AnotherMonthInHonduras.pdf, 9–10. Article 18.9 in Honduras’s Forest, Protected Areas and Wildlife Law, Legislative Decree 98-2007. Palma Herrera, “La Minería en Honduras,” 49. Ibid. Legislative Decree 252-2013. Front Line Defenders, “Honduras: Upcoming Hearing of Members of Comité Municipal de Defensa de los Bienes Comunes y Públicos mid Increasing Tensions,” 2019, https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/sites/ default/files/ua_hnd_eng_290819.pdf. Ismael Moreno, “Así terminó el reinado del cartel de Los Cachiros,” Envío, 396 (2015), https://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/4973. Reporters Without Borders, “Honduras,” September 2019, https://rsf.org/ en/honduras?nl=ok. Ibid. Tom Phillips and Jo Tuckman, “Trumps Plan for Those Seeking a Safe Haven: A Ticket to the Violent Heart of Central America,” Guardian, 27 September 2019. Luis Méndez, “Honduras: poder popular en tiempos de dictadura,” oistmo , 25 June 2019, https://oistmo.com/2019/06/25/honduras-poderpopular-en-tiempos-de-dictadura/.

pa r t t w o

Resisting Work and Debt

4 Against Debt’s Digital Empire: Exploring the Connections between Race, Technology, and Global Financial Regimes Max Haiven, Enda Brophy, and Benjamin Anderson

As the other chapters in this volume attest, we live in an age of deepening and intensifying inequalities. While movements for equity, social justice, and the redistribution of wealth are effervescent around the globe, so too are reactionary movements that seek to capitalize on the social discord and pain unleashed by economic inequity. On balance, the latter seem to have the upper hand. In our contribution to these discussions, we wish to map out a series of connections between three pillars of the global order of inequality which, at first glance, may not appear linked: (1) the rise of digital information and computing technologies controlled by a handful of technology companies that, since the dotcom bust of 2000, have increasingly and relentlessly enclosed the digital and communicative sphere; (2) the residual and emergent ways in which debt functions as a globally active and locally instantiated tool for disciplining workers, extracting wealth, and shaping public policy toward neoliberal ends; (3) the legacies and present-day manifestations of “empire,” by which we mean the current forms of neo-imperialism, the continued impacts and manifestations of colonialism, and the systems of racial capitalism that define the global economy today. Our chapter is an experiment in triangulating an emerging paradigm of power where each of these three poles helps renovate, perpetuate, and instantiate the others. Necessarily then, this chapter cannot promise to be comprehensive or offer a clean analytic argument. Rather, we hope to convince the reader that much can

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be gained by holding digital capitalism, debt discipline, and empire together as a nexus for critical inquiry and radical praxis. Our key interest is in discerning where the points of tension and resistance are in these relationships, the better that movements for equality might take advantage of these weak points or choke points and anticipate where such critical junctures might appear in the future. It is worth noting that all three of the vectors of inequality on which we have elected to focus have recently been presented, largely by their beneficiaries, in terms that might be said to bastardize or appropriate the ambition to “organize equality.” The tech sector’s belief in its own capacity to confront social problems via a mix of technology and entrepreneurship has drawn seething critiques.1 For example, the aggressive expansion of platform companies into new markets has been catalyzed through the exhortation that plugging the “developing world” into global networks will allow the entrepreneurial spirit to flourish, eventually leading to what Bill Gates, in the 1990s, prophesied as “friction-free capitalism.”2 The assumption here is that digital technologies will enable and enhance market participation, allowing hitherto isolated populations to compete to sell their human capital and its products on a worldwide market, eventually leading to a levelling of the global “playing field” as capitalism rewards intelligence, creativity, and hard work regardless of its national, cultural, or racial origin. While such a vision does not promise equality or redistribution of wealth (which in the neoliberal worldview is presented as unnecessary and damaging to capitalism), it does promise a (likely disruptive) transition to a world of “equal opportunity.” It is this same (cruel) optimism that has furnished a legitimation for the transition toward the so-called “gig economy,” where, in place of secure employment workers are encouraged to recast themselves as entrepreneurs with the promise that new digital platforms will reward hard work, competition, and ingenuity, completing the promise of capitalism to transform inequality from an unfair imposition to the logical and just outcome of differential talent.3 The reality, of course, is that the corporate and financial-led “development” of digital technology has created a nightmarish scenario of new mechanisms of surveillance, exploitation and inequality.4 A similar self-aggrandizing rhetoric and mythos animates attempts by the financial sector to reframe access to debt and credit as a means to organize greater equality. In a position that has become

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increasingly popular, the goal of greater “financial inclusion” has been propounded thanks to the idea that improving poor and disenfranchised people’s access to capital will allow them to make investments in education, “human capital,” and entrepreneurialism, the better to access the benefits of a brave new market.5 Such schemes have especially targeted poor people of colour, Indigenous people and other oppressed peoples, in both the Global North and Global South (though especially in the latter), and advances with a missionary zeal. Here, again, the dominant discourse suggests that the organization for equality already exists in the inherently fair structures of global capitalism, which simply need to be augmented by forward thinking and benevolent capitalist actors.6 The reality, of course, is that as the US subprime meltdown or the debacle of microfinance demonstrated, such schemes are largely mechanisms by which disenfranchised people become more indebted and dispossessed.7 As sociologists investigating the student loan market in the United States have observed, the growing access for racialized groups to an evermore financialized postsecondary education system is occurring in a process that can only be described as one of “predatory inclusion,” and this is one of the mechanisms behind “the persistence of racial inequality in contemporary markets.”8 The aforementioned examples also reveal the ways that, today, neocolonial, neo-imperial and “post-racial” capitalism functions through a rhetoric and through policies of self-serving “benevolence.” Here, racial capitalism promises to ameliorate or transcend the global and racial inequalities it created by expanding and intensifying the reach of markets, which are taken to be inherently “colourblind.”9 The vast inequalities between nations, or within nations, or across racialized groups, are seen as regrettable vestiges of past “market distortions.” When capitalism operates as it ought to, any such prejudice is, in fact, a liability. Impoverished nations are simply unfulfilled markets; racism is a dirty personal habit, or even a mental illness,10 that gets in the way of good business sense, which sees only talent. The reality is that capitalism has always thrived upon and produced racism and imperialism, and continues to do so today, though by updated means.11 This rhetoric and vision is one that, likewise, has appropriated feminist rhetoric to accelerate capitalist cycles of reproduction, offering greater market participation as a means to co-opt and quell demands for meaningful equality.12 Indeed, poor and racialized women have been key targets

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for “financial inclusion,” configured as more socially and fiscally responsible thanks to the unequal ways in which reproductive and emotional labour, including care for community, has historically been expected of women.13 In sum, we frame our triangulation of digital technology, debt discipline, and empire in terms of their false claims of mitigating inequality and suggest that those of us who would take this imperative seriously must contend with the ways in which these aspirations can easily be co-opted and monopolized by forces that would renovate and reproduce the system that, in fact, makes equity impossible. If we wish to move beyond this state of affairs, it will be necessary to re-evaluate both organization and equality, and redefine them in truly anti-capitalist ways. The neoclassical economic thought that animates the contemporary manifestations of digital capitalism, debt dominatio, and neo-imperialism insists that markets are the only just way to organize society and human cooperation, that every other form of organization is doomed to default to tyranny.14 Meanwhile, this discourse insists that substantive economic equality is a threat to the market, which can only operate if inequality drives competition and disciplines the idle to work.15 Instead, it substitutes basic legal equality (equality before the law) and equality of opportunity as a sufficient horizon for a fair society. “A long ladder is fine,” opined the Economist on the eve of the financial crisis, “but it must have rungs.”16 These myths were born of and, in turn, contribute to a society of heinous and deepening inequalities and an overarching disorganization which is leading to the destruction of the earth’s capacity to reproduce life.17

ma ppi ng i nterse c t i o n s To include debt, digital technologies, and colonialism together in the same critique might seem like an unlikely project – until one begins to map the combinations. Chronologically the longer relationship of these intersecting modes of domination is the intimate connection between colonialism and debt. As Marx notes, within the early expansion of capitalism the colonial system “served as a forcing-house for the credit system.”18 Numerous scholars have since illustrated how public debt has in turn, throughout the history of racial capitalism, been a key weapon of colonialism and imperialism. Examples include the ruinous debt forced on Haiti by the

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defeated empires of Europe as revenge for its revolution against slavery, the debt bondage that cheapened migrant Asian labour in the nineteenth century, and a long twentieth century defined by the sabotage of decolonization through mechanisms of odious national debts imposed on countries of the Global South.19 To be sure, the latest forms of science and technology have been enlisted in projects of territorial expansion and violence. Whether it was the accounting techniques that enabled and insured the transatlantic slave trade, the use of the telegraph to manage global supply chains, or the punitive power of digitally interlaced global bond and credit markets, technology has deepened the connection between finance and empire.20 In today’s digital age this tendency not only continues, it intensifies. The subprime mortgage meltdown which ignited the 2008 financial crisis revealed the advancing reliance of contemporary debt and financial power structures on the extraction of wealth from racialized communities.21 It also showed that such racialized debt regimes are evermore intensively digitized as the latest technology was used to securitize these so-called toxic debts, bundling them together and selling tranches of debt exposure to better hide the fact that these sabotaged loans were doomed from the start. Proprietary algorithms like intex calcTM purported to determine risk for underlying “asset pools,” encoding inaccurate parameters regarding the likelihood to default and projecting the range of possible outcomes with gleaming statistical certainty. Meanwhile, banks targeted racialized populations and applicants were approved for impossible loans by manipulating the applications, sometimes with the aid of utterly analog technologies such as whiteout, exacto knives, and scotch tape.22 But this is only one particularly glaring example of the way race and racism become encoded in the newly digitized regimes of debt. Although perhaps not immediately obvious, other examples abound: racially encoded algorithms that determine creditworthiness;23 high-frequency trading robots that buy and sell predatory debts (such as those of Puerto Rico) thousands of times each second in search of speculative gain;24 the foisting of new fintech and cryptocurrency solutions on poor and racialized people as quick technological fixes to engrained problems of inequality and oppression;25 the buy-now-pay-later start-up platforms marketed to allegedly at-risk young people as budgeting tools in place of meaningful social care

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and investment in communities;26 the necropolitical forms of risk management that undergird the global extractive industry and its ongoing destruction of Indigenous lands and human rights.27 At the same time social movements are also seizing on new digital technologies to understand and confront a world defined increasingly by unpayable and punitive debts.28 For instance: citizens collaborate on auditing their municipalities’ debt agreements with global banks;29 debtors assemble their own databases to connect horizontally and discover their shared persecutors; hackers and pranksters attack the ledgers of empire;30 artists reinvent the line between financial credit and social debts, revealing the hidden sources of solidarity;31 anonymous and massive data leaks allow tax-fairness advocates to expose the hordes of digital cash stashed away in tax havens by the global elite;32 and everywhere grassroots movements struggle to reinvent the economy, developing a richer network of social bonds between people and the planet.33 These examples are just some of the ways in which the constellation of domination and resistance surrounding debt, digital technologies, and colonialism comes into view. In what follows we interrogate each of these intersections in turn – empire, debt, and digital technology – ultimately building toward a consideration of the challenges and opportunities for peoples’ movements contesting them.

empi re By thinking of debt and digital technology in terms of modern empire and imperialism, we frame our approach in the tradition of antiimperialist struggle and thought. This tradition echoes the demand for self-determination from those who, throughout the history of capitalism, have been exploited, oppressed, culturally and physically erased, and made into objects of extraction by colonialism.34 It also echoes the long history of anti-imperialist struggle by the working classes at the heart of empires past and present.35 Empire was justified by and operated through racist ideologies and mythologies.36 Today, while it has become impolitic to speak of empires, they nonetheless remain, with powerful nation-states (almost always former colonizers) continuing to use violent and financial forms of coercion or enforce relations of dependency, extraction, and debt bondage on countries and peoples around the world. For instance, throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, former

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colonial nations in the Global North exploited their influence over financing institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to compel nations largely in the Global South to comply with the neoliberal agenda of corporate-led globalization, transfiguring development into a vehicle of neocolonialism.37 In the form of what Harsha Walia calls border imperialism, as well as through racist domestic policies, these same colonizing nation-states have typically also rendered racialized populations within their claimed territories as hyperexploitable.38 Moreover, today’s imperial powers are not limited to the direct coercion of gunboat diplomacy but can rely on the institutions and structures of extragovernmental, transnational finance to discipline subordinate states and their populations, imposing on them the neoliberal imperatives of privatization and austerity.39 By naming empire here we aim to encompass the complex set of relationships by which the system of capitalism has always relied on processes of imperialism, colonialisms (including settler colonialism), and the creation and enforcement of racial hierarchies.40 While the terminology of empire risks erasing the substantial differences throughout capitalist history and the manifold differences in racialized regimes of capitalist accumulation, it also has the benefit of focusing our imaginations on the continuities and connections between these moments and spaces.41 As such, empire here refers to the amalgamation of historical and contemporary practices, policies, and institutions through which capital, through structural, ideological, and physical means, expands accumulation globally, reinforces already existing colonial regimes, and subjects increasing portions of the world’s population into relations of exploitation and debt. We are also sympathetic to the argument that, in profoundly new ways, financialization has enabled global capitalism itself to become an imperial force, superintending and disciplining even imperialist nation-states, forcing everyone and everything into a terrifying death spiral of endless, relentless competition.42 As Maurizio Lazzarato elucidates, debt is perhaps the key method by which this global capitalist imperium is enforced.43 It comes as no surprise that this global order of debt is enabled and augmented through the intensive application of new information and communication technologies in order to fully integrate global capitalist exchange and open every sphere of life up to extraction and exploitation. That nations in the Global North now feel these phenomena in

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the form of austerity appear to validate the warning of anti-colonial thinkers like Aimé Césaire that the cruelties first exercised at the margins of empire will soon work their way to its heart.44 More generally, everywhere around the world individuals experience debt and credit as methods by which they are compelled to compete to deepen their participation in capitalism. Young people of wealthy nations, indebted to obtain an education or other basic necessities, find themselves increasingly desperate to gain or keep employment, militating against their inclination to organize collectively. Around the world so-called development programs, often influenced by new trends in “philanthrocapitalism,” have increasingly turned towards providing credit as a means to encourage entrepreneurship, rather than direct aid to individuals and institutions.45 Debt has become a key mechanism by which empire expands not only horizontally across the globe but also vertically, into the field of daily life and human relationships. The risk, however, is that a universalizing idea of a new, digital, financialized global capitalist empire can ignore the very real and substantial way that this ostensibly new formation is still characterized by the kinds of colonial extraction, racialized exploitation, military domination, and border imperialism inherited from the past forms of empire.46 If we are now all the subjects of a capitalist imperium then we would be well served by remembering that, as with any empire, some subjects are literally and metaphorically more creditworthy than others, and the wealth of some comes at the expense of others.47 We can, for instance, think of all the ways in which the postwar US Empire secured peace on the home front (subordinating the forms of militant class struggle of the first third of the twentieth century) by creating racialized regimes of state-backed credit which allowed many white workers to enjoy the post-war golden age through state-backed mortgages and loans while, de jure or de facto, denying these securities to Black and other racialized people.48 While unequal access to credit was a major struggle of social movements throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, leading to some modicum of government regulation in most countries, today new digital forms of credit rating and debt, which often operate entirely online from unregulated offshore offices, are developing algorithms that once again bake racism into their code.49 In this approach to thinking about empire as an umbrella term for a force that organizes difference and inequality, we are indebted to the thinking of transnational, anti-imperialist feminist scholars and

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activists for whom the term is not one of the homogenization of diverse experiences of oppression but, rather, an invitation to consider how the slow and careful work of solidarity between struggles might bring into focus common problems, targets, and manifestations of power.50 While these thinkers aim to theorize empire as such, they are wary of categorical claims, in part because in the past an overarching anti-imperialism has often failed to contend with the ways empire can conscript gender, race, and class for different subjects.51 On a moral and political level, of crucial importance are claims regarding those debts-from-below owed to the colonized and exploited of the world whose territory, blood, and bones are the mortar of empire’s foundations.52 These claims include reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, the repatriation of stolen Indigenous lands, the return of pilfered artifacts housed in colonial museums, or the restoration of natural ecosystems and cultural commons.53 These claims, while they are unlikely to be honoured, are vitally important platforms for mobilizing resistance to debt’s empire because they explicitly reverse one of debt’s most effective weapons: binding together economic and moral obligations and encouraging the debtor to imagine they are responsible for their own fate.54 In this sense, debt in general shares with colonialism the kind of politicaleconomic gaslighting where the survivor of exploitation is framed as the savage victimizer of their oppressor. Struggles for reparations for the crimes of imperialism (historic and ongoing) are often problematic in that they can appear to demand payment for empire in its own coinage, potentially at the expense of other oppressed or exploited subjects of that empire.55 But such struggles also, as Robin D.G. Kelley notes, inflame the radical imagination, not by mobilizing a rhetoric of victimhood but by implying and demanding an economy of justice that cannot be contained within the moral architecture of empire.56

d eb t For these reasons, we want to insist on the significance of debt as a key means to make sense of contemporary inequality and, in particular, the legacies and currents of imperialism, colonialism, and racism within it. Here we take inspiration from David Graeber’s pathbreaking work that explains how, though many human societies have been held together by exploitative forms of debt, global capitalism is particularly toxic in the way it leverages the junction of moral and

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financial compulsion.57 In this section, along with Miranda Joseph, Denise Ferriera da Silva, and Paula Chakravartty, we begin by recalling how the forms taken by debt under capitalism have always been haunted and shaped by race and empire.58 We then outline, amid the transition from welfare to debtfare (a term that refers to the state’s withdrawal of welfare supports and encouragement of citizens to take on personal debt instead) and the rise of neoliberalism, the normalization of consumer (or household) debt, its troubling expansion since the financial crisis of 2008, and its ongoing raced, gendered, and classed inequities.59 The work of Ian Baucom, Justin Leroy and Zenia Kish, Anita Rupprecht, and others has described how the history of the modern debt and risk-management industries and their technologies of measure are thickly entangled with the world-historic crime of the transatlantic slave trade.60 We also know that the history of empire has been waged largely through the reciprocal imposition and denial of debts by the powerful. For instance, as Lisa Lowe illustrates, the subjugation and pillage of China in the Opium Wars saw British, French, American, and other European merchant capitalists use the liberal rhetoric of free trade, progress, and internationalism to foist a poisonous but profitable drug on the world’s most populous nation.61 When Chinese authorities attempted to regulate the trade they were held accountable, through military force, for the debt of interrupting the lawful commerce of empire. The debts owed to the millions of Chinese people who suffered the drug’s cruel curse have never even been internationally acknowledged, let alone paid. Similarly, a series of scholars beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois through to Saidiya Hartman and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor have noted the way that a Black-led Reconstruction in the US was sabotaged by, on the one hand, denying the reparations due to formerly enslaved people for their abuse and, on the other, compelling many to enter into debt bondage and sharecropping to further exploit their labour.62 Joseph, as well as thinkers like Jackie Wang, have traced the way these imperial debt politics have shaped the current regime of American mass incarceration, where the so-called debt to society that imprisoned people are assumed to owe disguises the systemic and structural deficits of care and justice that led to the conditions of their criminalization to begin with.63 This constructed social debt becomes an economic one when the US bail bond industry targets populations of colour for its extractive loans, which, when they

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go unpaid, serve as a pretense for further incarceration – a central grievance within the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the police murder of Black teenager Michael Brown, which became pivotal to the Movement for Black Lives.64 This is to say nothing of the way the global financial system enthusiastically directs credit towards the carceral industries of the world, from the firms that build and run (or subcontract for) prisons (public and private), to those that perfect new forms of digital surveillance. We might also note, along with Arthur Manuel, that in an era when colonial settler states like Canada are keen to “reconcile” with Indigenous nations, this often takes the form of endless, doomed land negotiations between these nations and the colonial government, or lawsuits in that colonial government’s own courts, for which these nations must borrow massive sums.65 Meanwhile, of course, the historical debt that colonial settler states owe for the original theft of the land is rendered invisible.66 What is increasingly acknowledged as problematic, even by mainstream economists, are the ever-expanding forms of consumer (or household) debt that ballooned in the aftermath of the financial crisis.67 Since the 1970s the growing influence of financial actors and logics, the dissolution of welfare state supports, the spread of precarious employment, and flatlining wages have produced the economy’s structural reliance on consumer credit. The shift toward debtfare may have allowed capitalism to contain in a very limited way some of the contradictions associated with the grave crisis of social reproduction generated by neoliberalism,68 but it has also created profound systemic vulnerabilities as the financial crisis illustrated in such dramatic fashion. As these examples indicate, it has, today, become impossible to imagine debt as a purely economic affair. More accurately the socialized dynamics of debt today reveal it, more than ever, as a means by which capitalism comes to expand intensively into the field of social reproduction. As Silvia Federici and Veronica Gago each argue, debt unleashes forms of privatization and austerity that download more and more socially reproductive labour onto family units, disproportionately onto women.69 Indeed, Gago draws the links between the structural violence of debt imposition and the particularly gendered forms of violence that rise as societies are thrust into penury.70 For these reasons, feminist currents within the Quebec student strike of 2012 outlined the special relevance of student debt to women, who

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are also steered into lower-earning industries and unlikely to earn the same money as men for the same work.71 As several scholars including Ananya Roy and Joseph note, women are particularly targeted for, or excluded from, debt, based on gendered notions of trustworthiness, capacity, risk aversion, and community-mindedness.72 While indebtedness is an increasingly common condition, its inbuilt inequities along the intersections of class, race, and gender are determinant within this power relation. These include growing “unbanked” populations of the poorest consumers who cannot access services by established banks and are thereby thrust into the arms of more expensive lenders.73 The proliferation since the 1980s of payday lending stores charging extortionate rates, especially in working class communities of colour, is the clearest marker of the racialized distribution of opportunity built into the substitution of debtfare for welfare. Moreover, the digital platforms at the commanding heights of an increasingly cybernetic economy are moved by the very same logics. For example, the ride-hailing platform Uber is exploring the feasibility of expanding into offering small loans to its hypersurveilled, maximally exploited, and minimally paid workforce of disproportionately racialized drivers.74 Today, however, the very technologies that have allowed debt to become a key weapon and logic of finance’s global empire seem to simultaneously call into question its legitimacy. For one, it is becoming increasingly obvious, even to stalwart defenders of the global financial system, that the total circulating value of financial assets (essentially debts) far outpaces the economic productivity of the planet: there is a massive, ultimately immeasurable, quantity of claims to future wealth (such as derivative contracts) circulating in purely digital form, that can never be all redeemed at once. And yet these contracts continue to operate in the world as punitive and extractive mechanisms of capitalism’s empire: they have real power. Still, it is increasingly difficult, even for the accountants of the empire’s investment banks or their regulators (increasingly the selfsame people) to tell the real money and debt from the systemic hyperbole of financialization. Many theorists, even mainstream commentators, have observed that, in these conditions of mass actuarial make-believe, the perpetuation of punitive debt on poor people and countries of the world is purely a matter of power, not accounting, let alone justice.75 Indeed, in a world that has been dominated by the digitized monetary policy of quantitative easing,

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it is hard to deny that eliminating the debts of the world’s poorest actors might be as simple as simple as hitting the literal or proverbial backspace key.76 But of course, who has access to these databases and the authority to make such deletions? From a certain distance, as if seen by aliens, one would have a hard time denying that almost all the decision-makers are descendants of the racially privileged citizens of colonial or settler-colonial nation-states, which is to say white, whereas the world’s debtors, whose lives and deaths are gambled on digitized financial market, would appear largely racialized. Mediating the relationship between the two groups is an expanding system of digital technologies dedicated to the goals of producing, tracking, sorting, policing, and collecting debt.

th e d i gita l In the face of the social devastation incurred by this global empire of debt, technological solutionism is rampant. A perfect symbol of the contradictions here are the many American cryptocurrency and fintech entrepreneurs, hucksters, and gamblers who descended upon hurricane and austerity-ravaged Puerto Rico.77 Smugly retracing their forefathers’ colonial footsteps in seizing upon this imagined financial terra nullius, these men (because they’re almost all men) aim to create a tax-free, high-tech utopia built on a foundation of entrepreneurial affect, market-based extraction, and the libertarian worship of digital technology.78 The relationship between the parallel expansion of debt and digital technologies has a genealogy which stretches back to the disintegration of Fordism. In the early 1980s, Cees Hamelink traced the “converging interests” of the financial and “information” sectors.79 From that decade onward, finance played a central role in the privatization of telecommunications infrastructure across the world. After the Volcker Shock sent interest rates soaring, national debts were used as a lever to encourage privatization. Between 1984 and 1999, up to one trillion dollars of state-owned telecommunications networks were sold off and around half of the 189 members of the International Telecommunications Union (itu ) at least partially privatized their telecom sectors. In many countries the national telecommunications company became the largest company listed on the national stock exchange.80

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As the infrastructure required for a globalized, digitized, and highly concentrated financial sector was transferred into capital’s hands, banks and other financial entities led the first wave of labour outsourcing, one which more often than not retraced the passages of colonial rule. Winnifred Poster has documented the labour process of Indian workers charged with selling and collecting on credit from British and American consumers.81 More recently, as a xenophobic backlash in America has targeted call centre workers in India, debt collection companies and law firms in the United States have found it convenient to outsource remote collection work to cities like Mexico City and Tijuana, where a suitably desperate, freshly deported, English-speaking population of Mexican passport holders can be employed on the cheap to collect on student, medical, and other forms of debt from consumers across the border. Relying on debtor data transmitted from servers across the border in the United States and submitted to strict security regimes at work (more than one worker has compared their workplace to a prison), these digital debt labourers migrate virtually each day to the country which has deported them, where their families and loved ones often remain.82 The overlap between debt and the digital may have reached a kind of apotheosis with the rise of platform capitalism.83 Venture capital funds bankroll the developing sector, which according to Adam Arvidsson displays a new logic of capitalist governance – what he calls, echoing Randy Martin, the social logic of the derivative.84 As Arvidsson argues, the algorithms that Facebook uses share a genealogy with those of derivative financial instruments. Little surprise then that the company has patented a technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on their social connections. Moreover, the global operations of platforms like Facebook have taken on decidedly colonial hues. Free Basics, a program developed by Facebook with six internet service providers, is marketed as an “onramp to the internet” in developing countries where access is otherwise difficult. In the future, web connectivity will be delivered by a fleet of solar-powered drones, but when populations are brought online they get the dubious benefit of a stripped-down, “poor man’s” internet.85 According to Global Voices – an anticensorship network of bloggers and activists – the architectural and content limitations of Free Basics are utterly artificial and exist primarily as a mechanism for collecting profitable data from users. Facebook’s failed attempts to launch its digital currency,

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Libra, indicate its hunger to capitalize on the global flows of ‘small money,’ including remitances. At the outer reaches of the platform empires, we find the extension of what has been called “data colonialism,” although we are wary of this terminology in light of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s important corrective that “decolonization is not a metaphor.”86 That such initiatives are discussed as philanthropic by their developers is hardly surprising. There is a keen synergy between the tech sector and the Davos crowd: the hand-picked global elites and powerbrokers who gather annually at the Swiss resort to glad-hand. After the self-acknowledged historic failure of structural adjustment-driven neocolonial debt imperialism, international capital and its supranational institutions (including the World Bank, imf , and others) have enthusiastically embraced technologically augmented fintech approaches, which attempt to use debt, this time targeted at the world’s poorest communities and people (often women).87 They do so not in the name of reducing inequality (of which they, after all, are the beneficiaries) but in the belief that such schemes, as well as attempts to provide financial services to the unbanked masses, will allow the neoliberal entrepreneurial spirit to gain a foothold in new markets. That these projects, which encourage competition and profiteering, have often proven ineffective or even socially destructive to communities (though often lucrative to investors) has not caused the new financial missionaries of debt’s empire to meaningfully question their underlying assumptions, only to renew their bonds with techno-evangelists in the faith that only more capitalism will cure capitalism of its morbidity. Indeed, the use of digitized debt and the magic of fintech to solve the problems of racialized poverty are also actively and enthusiastically deployed in the Global North: crumbling government health, education, and social services are increasingly financialized through schemes like social impact investing, direct privatization, or through new forms of public-sector accounting.88 Yet when we read between the spreadsheets, we see the larger story. As Ferreira da Silva and Chakravartty note, along with Roy, racialized populations are targeted for “financial inclusion” to open new frontiers of wealth extraction and labour exploitation with the promise of social mobility.89 But racialization already marks the horizon of exclusion from the body economic, and racialized subjects, especially Black and Indigenous subjects, are frequently doomed to have their fiscal

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investments transformed into often deadly liabilities, as the subprime mortgage meltdown revealed. This is also revealed in the aftermaths of financial remedies offered to Indigenous nations in lieu of the repatriation of stolen lands.90 Graeber’s work shows us that debt has always hidden and normalized social violence, making it appear that the oppressed and exploited owe something to the oppressor and exploiter while hiding the true debts owed for the perpetuation of these injustices.91 In a digital age, this occultation of justice in the name of debt is facilitated and accelerated as platforms and algorithms render the social relation of debt increasingly opaque.92 Within capitalism’s broader reconfiguration, many populations are rendered temporarily or permanently surplus in the eyes of that system, consigned to precarity, poverty, and existential anguish, often subjected to increased policing and imprisonment.93 As the world’s wealthy take an ever-greater share of its wealth for themselves, yet remain dependent on everincreasing rates of consumerism, the production of debt becomes a crucial stopgap. Indeed, discovering new ways to offer people access to debt has become one of the most crucial industries of capitalism today. While they may pay lip service to notions of financial inclusion and financial literacy, the vast majority of new fintech schemes simply attempt to use the latest technologies to make punitive forms of debt more accessible or irresistible. In Kenya, for example, loose regulatory policy at the intersection of finance and tech has enabled mobile lending apps like M-Shwari to flood the market, creating an epidemic of household debt, violence, and suicide according to one investigation. As an interviewee in the article describes, the fintech apps “give you money gently, and then they come for your neck.”94 In spite of the new vectors of inequality the convergence of tech and debt has unleashed, both sectors, individually and together, continue to mobilize a rhetoric and a strategy that associates their machinations with liberal feminist tropes. Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s95 2013 bestseller, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead reiterated the hegemonic discourse of financialized capitalism that the major barriers preventing women’s full socio-economic participation are cultural and behavioural and that it is the responsibility of women to overcome gendered habituation and compete for their piece of the pie. This, coming from a powerful woman in the heart one of the tech sector’s most notoriously patriarchal companies (one first designed to allow male Harvard undergraduates

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to rate their female classmates on the basis of appearance), helped buttress a longstanding ethos common to both tech and finance that insisted that both sectors, individually and especially together, arrived to redeem capitalism itself, finally delivering so-called equality of opportunity while preserving an economically productive level of necessary inequality.96 Of course, as numerous feminist media theorists have illustrated, these technologies have in fact unleashed vast new terrains of gendered oppression and exploitation, which include the often vicious and violent forms of online harassment, the prevalence of gendered violence in the so-called sharing or gig economy, or the particular ways in which allegedly neutral and datadriven algorithms are informed by and contribute to a patriarchal culture where fundamental and essentialist beliefs about gender are normalized and reproduced.97

r es i stan c e The intersections of debt, empire, and digital technology we list above do not constitute anything close to a comprehensive or systemic account of the topic but are offered to excite the imagination towards – and catalyze anger against – this fraught intersection. Could debt be a platform for resistance to this neocolonial order? Many hopeful experiments have emerged in the past decade in this regard. The Debt Collective, which emerged in part out the Occupy Wall Street offshoot StrikeDebt, is attempting to use a digital platform to organize a debtors’ union in the United States, mobilizing people who owe debts to a common creditor to band together to challenge their oppressor.98 Their most successful campaign to date has been a debt strike against Corinthian, a for-profit college that explicitly targeted poor Americans of colour to invest in an already-sabotaged professional degree.99 This campaign cancelled millions of dollars of odious debt and led to significant changes to US law and policy. Meanwhile, in Europe, citizens groups have challenged the agenda of austerity by creating networks of municipal organizations that undertake peoples' audits of government finances and debts, demonstrating that resources that exist to care for the population are instead being delivered to transnational financial vultures.100 These audits take inspiration from similar efforts in the 1990s and 2000s from the Global South.

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These efforts echo several generations of struggle against debt in the Global South. As early as 1965, Kwame Nkrumah identified debt as the key weapon of neocolonialism, an observation taken up (fatally) by other anti-colonial African leaders like Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, and Amilcar Cabral.101 The 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s all saw a series of uprisings against the punitive debt politics of the imf and wb around the world. Many southern nation-states also developed platforms for auditing their debts as a means to gain bargaining power to prevent the sacrifice of their populations on the altar of transnational finance.102 Central to many of these efforts have been the contributions and interventions of artists. Since debt is, ultimately, an imaginary set of relations between people, institutions, and financial entities, and in an era when the will of global capital to sacrifice whole populations for the sake of corporate profit has reached a level of horrific absurdity, it should be no surprise that artists find much material to work with.103 DebtFair.org, for instance, interrupts the financialized pageantry of the global art world  by curating the work of artists selected not by virtue of their work but on the basis of to whom or what they owe their debts – often to the host gallery’s corporate patrons themselves.104 And then there are those initiatives that seek to create a space of exodus from the debt system, within, against, and beyond the current order – what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney signal as the undercommons.105 Cooperation Jackson, in Mississippi’s capital, for instance, has developed a profoundly inspirational set of experiments in creating a network of grassroots cooperatives that seek to directly challenge the racial order of wealth and economic control in the US South.106 The Madison, Wisconsin-based Mutual Aid Network, meanwhile, has created a hub for imagining new methods for organizing forms of cooperation and care that might allow us to survive and thrive beyond digital debt’s empire.107 In both cases, digital methods are important, but always as a means to building grassroots forms of solidarity, mutual aid, and collective power. Recently, there has been a profound enthusiasm for the capacity of digital technologies to allow large populations, even, potentially, all of humanity, to organize the economy differently, towards the horizon of equality. We have already discussed the perils of (cruel) optimism towards cryptocurrencies which can appear to challenge global capitalism when, in fact, they simply renovate it. We have also seen

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a series of suggestions that digitized global capitalism has created a logistical and communications infrastructure that could, theoretically, be re-appropriated for human and humane ends. But Jasper Berne’s warning is apt: these technologies are far from neutral tools.108 In any case, as vitally important as it may be to dream big and to maximize the potential of new technologies to transform society, technology cannot fix capitalism, which is a set of social relations. As important as grand schemes may be, there is also the vitally important work of transforming human relationships and institutions at the grassroots level. Ultimately, however, we believe that the debts that are owed to the oppressed, exploited, and colonized cannot be repaid in the currency of empire. There is not enough capitalist money in the world to pay back the debt of its own gory creation. We owe ourselves its abolition. no t e s 1 Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018). 2 Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1995); Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy (New York: Warner Books, 1999). 3 Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). 4 Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: nyu Press, 2019); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2018). 5 Susanne Soederberg, “Universalising Financial Inclusion and the Securitisation of Development,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2013): 593–612, doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.786285; Daniela Gabor and Sally Brooks, “The Digital Revolution in Financial Inclusion: International Development in the Fintech Era,” New Political Economy 22, no. 4 (2017): 423–36, doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.12 59298; Philip Mader, “Contesting Financial Inclusion,” Development and Change 49, no. 2 (2018): 461–83. 6 See for instance, Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin, 2008).

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7 Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism – An Introduction,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 361–85; Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018). 8 Louise Seamster and Raphaël Charron Chénier, “Predatory Inclusion and Education Debt: Rethinking the Racial Wealth Gap,” Social Currents 4, no. 3 (2017): 199–207. 9 Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 10 James M. Thomas and W. Carson Byrd, “The ‘Sick’ Racist: Racism and Psychopathology in the Colorblind Era,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 13, no. 1 (2016): 181–203, doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1742058X16000023. 11 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 12 Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 13 Ananya Roy, “Subjects of Risk: Technologies of Gender in the Making of Millennial Modernity,” Public Culture 24, no. 166 (2012): 131–55, https:// doi.org/10.1215/08992363-1498001. 14 Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin, 2008); F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, ed. by Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 15 See for instance Jerry Z. Muller, “Capitalism and Inequality,” Foreign Affairs, 15 September 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/2013-02-11/capitalism-and-inequality. 16 Anon., “Inequality and the American Dream,” The Economist 379, no. 8482 (2006): 8. 17 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Knopf, 2015). 18 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume 1) (London: Penguin, 1990), 919. 19 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Reconstructing Haiti 1801/2010 and on,” Social Text, (2012), https://socialtextjournal.org/reconstructing_haiti_18012010_and_ on/; Jerome Roos Lowe, Why Not Default?: The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 20 Anita Rupprecht, “‘Inherent Vice’: Marine Insurance, Slave Ship Rebellion, and the Law,” Race & Class 57, no. 3 (2016): 31–44, doi:

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10.1177/0306396815611849; Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares (London: Routledge, 2017); Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1780–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Winnipeg: Fernwood Press, 2011). Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York City: nyu Press, 2017); Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Chloe Watlington, “Tales from the Cryptos,” The Baffler, 43 (2019), https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/tales-from-the-cryptos-watlington. Max Haiven, “The Uses of Financial Literacy: Financialization, the Radical Imagination, and the Unpayable Debts of Settler Colonialism,” Cultural Politics 13, no. 3 (2017): 348–69, https://doi. org/10.1215/17432197-4211350. Shiri Pasternak, “How Capitalism Will Save Colonialism: The Privatization of Reserve Lands in Canada,” Antipode 47, no. 1 (2014): 47–54. Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London, uk : Pluto Press, 2012). pacd , “What the Spanish Citizen Debt Audit Platform (pacd ) means by ‘Citizen Debt Audit’ and ‘Illegitimate Debt,’” Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt, 2013, http://www.cadtm.org/What-the-SpanishCitizen-Debt. Paul Geddis, “This Guy Took Out a Gigantic Loan to Destroy the Financial System,” Vice, 16 March 2013, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/ article/ppq9xk/spains-robin-hood-prefers. Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages against Artwork: Socially Engaged Art and the Decommodification of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, “The Panama Papers: Exposing the Rogue Offshore Finance Industry,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, n.d., https://www.icij.org/ investigations/panama-papers/.

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33 Commons Strategies Group, Patterns of Commoning, eds. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, 2015, http://patternsofcommoning.org/. 34 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2008). 35 Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019). 36 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed, 2012). 37 Éric Toussaint, The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and Their Repudiation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019). 38 Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Chico: ak Press, 2013). 39 Roos, Why Not Default? 40 Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016). 41 See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 42 Jerome Roos, “The New Debt Colonies,” Viewpoint Magazine, 2018, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/new-debt-colonies/, 6. 43 Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt (Cambridge: mit Press, 2015). 44 Aimé Fernand and David Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). 45 Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy, “Bonded Life: Technologies of Racial Finance from Slave Insurance to Philanthrocapital,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 5–6 (2015): 630–51. 46 See Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 47 Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 48 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 49 Robert Bartlett, Adair Morse, Richard Stanton, and Nancy Wallace, “Consumer-Lending Discrimination in the FinTech Era,” National Bureau of Economic Research (2019), https://doi.org/10.3386/w25943. 50 Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Mohanty, Feminism without Borders. 51 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995).

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52 See Max Haiven, Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (London: Pluto, forthcoming), especially chapter 2. 53 Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, “Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology,” Resilience, (2018), https://www.resilience.org/ stories/2018-01-04/unearthing-the-capitalocene-towards-a-reparationsecology/. 54 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). 55 Ama Biney, “What Should Reparations for Slavery Entail?,” Pambazuka, 15 December 2016, https://www.pambazuka.org/pan-africanism/ what-should-reparations-slavery-entail. 56 Robin D.G. Kelley, “‘A Day of Reckoning’: Dreams of Reparations,” in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 110–34. 57 Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. 58 Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012). 59 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011); Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline, and the Surplus Population (London: Routledge, 2014). 60 Ian Baucom, Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History: Specters of the Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy, “Bonded Life: Technologies of Racial Finance from Slave Insurance to Philanthrocapital,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 5–6 (2015): 630–51, doi: 10.1080/09502386.2015.1017137; Anita Rupprecht, “‘Inherent Vice’: Marine Insurance, Slave Ship Rebellion, and the Law,” Race & Class 57, no. 3 (2016): 31–44, doi: 10.1177/0306396815611849. 61 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 62 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, 1935); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Taylor, Race for Profit.

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63 Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2018). 64 Neil L. Sobol, “Charging the Poor: Criminal Justice Debt & Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons,” Maryland Law Review 75, no. 2 (2016): 486–540. 65 Arthur Manuel and Ronald M. Derrickson, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-up Call (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015). 66 Max Haiven, “The Uses of Financial Literacy: Financialization, the Radical Imagination, and the Unpayable Debts of Settler-Colonialism,” Cultural Politics 13, no. 3 (2017): 348–69. 67 Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 68 Genevieve LeBaron and Adrienne Roberts, “Confining Social Insecurity: Neoliberalism and the Rise of the 21st Century Debtors’ Prison,” Politics and Gender 8, no. 1 (2012): 25–49, doi: 10.1017/S1743923X12000062. 69 Silvia Federici, “Women, Money, and Debt: Notes for a Feminist Reappropriation Movement,” Australian Feminist Studies 33, no. 96 (2018): 178–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2018.1517249; Silvia Federici, “From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 2 (2014): 231–44, https://doi.org/10.1215/003828762643585; V. Gago, “Financialization of Popular Life and the Extractive Operations of Capital: A Perspective from Argentina,” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1 (2015): 11–28, https://doi.org/10.1215/003828762831257; George Jepson, “Re-Gendering the Indebted Man: Female Subjectivity in the Argentine Financial Crisis,” Mute, 20 March 2019, https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/re-gendering-indebted-manfemale-subjectivity-argentine-financial-crisis; Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago, Una lectura feminista de la deuda: “Vivas, Libres y Desendeudadas Nos Queremos” (Buenos Aires: Fundación Rosa Luxemburgo, 2019), https://rosalux-ba.org/2019/05/09/una-lectura-feminista-de-la-deuda-pdf/. 70 Verónica Gago, “Is There a War ‘on’ the Body of Women?: Finance, Territory, and Violence,” Viewpoint Magazine, 7 March 2018, https:// www.viewpointmag.com/2018/03/07/war-body-women-finance-territoryviolence/. 71 See Madison Trusolino, “Reading, Writing, and Resistance: Feminist and Neoliberal Subjects in the Canadian Academy,” (Unpublished thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2014). 72 Ananya Roy, “Subjects of Risk: Technologies of Gender in the Making of Millennial Modernity,” Public Culture 2, no. 166 (2012): 131–55, https:// doi.org/10.1215/08992363-1498001; Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society:

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Accounting for Life Under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Mehrsa Baradaran, How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Shirin Gaffary, “It Looks Like Uber Is Getting into the Small Loan Business for Its Drivers,” Vox, 6 September 2019, https://www.vox. com/2019/9/6/20853357/uber-driver-direct-loans-payday-small-lorenagonzalez-ab5. Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015). Johnna Montgomerie, Should We Abolish Household Debts? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). Watlington, “Tales from the Cryptos.” Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018). Cees J. Hamelink, Finance and Information: A Study of Converging Interests (Noirwood: Ablex, 1983). Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, “The Global Media,” in The Global Transformation Reader, eds. D. Held and A. McGrew (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 216–29. Winifred Poster, “Hidden Sides of the Debt Economy: Emotions, Outsourcing, and Indian Call Centers,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 54, no. 3 (2013): 205–27. Enda Brophy and Rodrigo Finkelstein, “Digital Debt Labour: Offshoring, Deportation, and Debt Collection in Mexico.” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 18, no. 1 (2020): 304-321. Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). Randy Martin, Knowledge ltd : Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). “Free Basics in Real Life: Six Case Studies on Facebook’s Internet ‘On Ramp’ Initiative from Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” Global Voices AdVox, 27 July 2017, https://advox.globalvoices.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/08/FreeBasicsinRealLife_FINALJuly27.pdf. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject,” Television and New Media 20, no. 4 (2018): 336–49, doi: 10.1177/1527476418796632; Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. Larry Elliott, “Austerity Policies Do More Harm than Good, imf Study Concludes,” Guardian, 27 May 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/

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business/2016/may/27/austerity-policies-do-more-harm-than-good-imfstudy-concludes; Silvia Federici, “From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 2 (2014): 231–44, doi:10.1215/00382876-2643585. Nick Bernards, “Tracing Mutations of Neoliberal Development Governance: ‘Fintech,’ Failure, and the Politics of Marketization,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51, no. 7 (2019): 1442– 59, https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19862576; Daniela Gabor and Sally Brooks, “The Digital Revolution in Financial Inclusion: International Development in the Fintech Era,” New Political Economy 22, no. 4 (2017): 423–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1259298. Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012); Ananya Roy, “Subjects of Risk: Technologies of Gender in the Making of Millennial Modernity,” Public Culture 24, no. 1 (66) (2012): 131–55, doi:10.1215/08992363-1498001. Alyosha Goldstein, “Finance and Foreclosure in the Colonial Present,” Radical History Review, 112 (2014), doi: 10.1215/01636545-2349095. Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Aaron Benanav and John Clegg, “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes, 2 (September 2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-miseryand-debt; Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018). Kevin P. Donovan and Emma Park, “Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah,” Boston Review, 20 September 2019, http://bostonreview.net/ class-inequality-global-justice/kevin-p-donovan-emma-park-perpetualdebt-silicon-savannah. Sheryl Sandberg and Nell Scovell. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (London: WH Allen, 2015). Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013). Lisa Nakamura, “The Unwanted Labour of Social Media: Women of Colour Call out Culture as Venture Community Management,” New Formations, 86 (2015), https://lnakamur.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/ unwanted-labor-of-social-media-nakamura1.pdf; Lisa Nakamura,

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“Racism, Sexism, and Gaming’s Cruel Optimism,” in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, eds. Jennifer Malkowski and Trea Andrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Penguin, 2016). The Debt Collective,” The Debt Collective, n.d., https://debtcollective.org/. Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, “A Year after the Student Debt Strike Policymakers Are Battling Over the Way Forward,” Washington Post, 18 February 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/gradepoint/wp/2016/02/18/a-year-after-the-student-debt-strike-policymakersare-battling-over-the-way-forward/?noredirect=on. pacd , “What the Spanish Citizen Debt Audit Platform (pacd ) Means by ‘Citizen Debt Audit’ and ‘Illegitimate Debt.’” Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International, 1965); Thomas Sankara, “A United Front against Debt (1987),” Viewpoint Magazine, 1 February 2018, https://www. viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/united-front-debt-1987/; Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher, eds., Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral (Dakar and Montréal: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2013). Éric Toussaint, “Bankocracy. Belgium: Resistance Books, iire , cadtm ,” 2015, http://www.cadtm.org/IMG/pdf/Bankocracy_web.pdf. Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Socially Engaged Art and the Decommodification of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Max Haiven, Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (London: Pluto, 2018). Haiven, Art after Money, Money after Art, 109–207. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). “Cooperation Jackson,” Cooperation Jackson, n.d., https://cooperationjackson.org/. “Mutual Aid Networks,” Mutual Aid Networks, n.d., https://www. mutualaidnetwork.org/. Jasper Bernes, “Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Prospect,” Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class, and Other Misfortunes, 2013, http://endnotes.org.uk/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-thecommunist-prospect.

5 Into the Weeds: Political Organizing as Theory Ann Larson

In this essay I describe a campaign in which I participated as an organizer to demand student debt cancellation from the federal government for people who had attended fraudulent for-profit colleges. I demonstrate what happened when borrowers whose financial lives had been ruined by the decision to get a college education rose up together to fight back. I also detail how this experience created forms of knowledge that could only have been generated in the practice of struggle. In doing so, I challenge a common assumption that political organizing is a practice, a site where theory is applied. In that paternalistic frame, there are those who think and offer thoughts to those who are thought about and for whom ideas serve as a foundation for action. The organizing that I describe here helps to reveal the limitations of that view. To be clear, I am not asserting a dialectic between thinking and doing, where one set of practices informs the other, enriching both. Instead, I argue that in our era of inequality, mass indebtedness, and looming climate crisis we must jettison unhelpful divisions between thinking and doing. Since it is only collaborative action toward concrete material goals that can bolster an insurgent yet frail socialist politics, practice is the critical work that our era demands. In 2014 I co-founded the Debt Collective, a militant, member-led organization that demands debt relief from creditors. For our inaugural project, we collaborated with people who had attended Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit chain that had at that time more than one hundred campuses around the country. At a cost of two to three times higher than public schools, for-profit colleges surged in the 1990s. Their growth was underwritten by a liberal commitment

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to increasing educational opportunity as long as the cost was born by individuals themselves. For-profit colleges became a multibilliondollar industry within a neoliberal framework that defunds public schools and treats education as an investment that individuals must make to improve their human capital relative to others against whom they compete for access to scarce resources.1 Corinthian sold the dream of a better life to working-class people, disproportionately women and people of color, who enrolled to earn precious credentials for higher paying careers. Once the largest for-profit college chain in the nation, the company took in more than one billion dollars per year in federal funding, only a fraction of which was spent on instruction.2 Profits rolled in to the wellconnected, including Senator Diane Feinstein’s husband and former Corinthian investor, Richard Blum, and President Clinton’s former chief of staff, Leon Panetta, who served on the board of Corinthian. Students who attended the colleges that proved so profitable to elites ended up with little more than a worthless piece of paper and a lifetime of debt.3 With crucial assistance from the Debt Collective in the form of resources, legal advice, and media training, fifteen former Corinthian students launched a debt strike in 2015.4 They refused to repay their loans and demanded full debt cancellation from the federal government, which had issued and guaranteed the loans. Relying on an obscure law called Defense to Repayment, which says student debts can be canceled in cases of fraud, hundreds more former for-profit students submitted debt discharge applications (two years later, more than 160,000 people had filed a claim).5 Strikers also asserted that public higher education is a right and should be free for all. The strike won widespread support from a host of Progressives and liberal publications. The New York Times op-ed page argued that Corinthian debt should be canceled.6 Eleven states attorneys general, thirteen senators, and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus made statements in support of the strikers’ demands. Even candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted her approval: “No one should be in debt to a college that defrauded them – forgiving students is the right decision.”7 Clinton knew that the Department of Education did not need to seek congressional approval to cancel debts; the secretary could simply erase them automatically. How did the Department of Education respond to this public outcry considering it had the legal and moral authority to act as well

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as considerable political cover from Democratic party leaders? Over the next two years the agency took a series of steps that illustrate a gulf between words and deeds. The department’s response also suggests a deeper problem: liberalism is too compromised by its commitment to individual competition and to the ideology of meritocracy to deliver on its own ostensible values.

step o ne: sympat h i z i n g The Department of Education’s first response to the strike shows how liberalism substitutes condolences for action. This had become evident during the 2008 financial crisis. In 2009, Obama announced to great fanfare the Home Affordable Modification Program (hamp ), an initiative that was supposed to assist three to four million homeowners to avoid foreclosure. Yet when the program came to an end seven years later, only a little over one million people had received help.8 Despite the fact that there was widespread public support for the program and no acts of congressional obstructionism, Democratic elected officials and party bureaucrats did not make good on their promises. The Department of Education responded to the Corinthian crisis in much the same way. The strikers were invited to Washington dc where they met with officials from the department, including under secretary, Ted Mitchell.9 At the meeting, fourteen former students described in painful detail how Corinthian employees had lied to them and coerced them into signing loan documents. Striker, Ann Bowers, revealed the structural similarities between the struggles of underwater homeowners and her own. “What am I supposed to do if I can’t pay this debt?” she asked Mitchell. “Should I take my dog and go live in a box on the street?” When people have to go into debt for basic needs, including housing and education, they put their lives at risk. Officials listened to the stories that were, in effect, all the same story and said they were sorry that students were suffering. In an “I feel your pain” moment, Mitchell said he was personally committed to doing all he could to meet strikers’ demands with action. After the meeting, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (who had not been present) discussed the Corinthian case in an interview. “You have to be made of stone not to feel for these students,” he said.10

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Like Obama, who in speech after speech framed home ownership as a path to the middle class, Duncan’s comment revealed the neoliberal rationality of individual competition lurking under the surface. “Students everywhere,” he continued, “deserve and need the opportunity to make their lives better through education – to climb the economic ladder.”11 As soft padding around policies that valorize individual effort and competition in a world of scarcity, liberal sympathizing eased the way for the Department of Education to extend the pain.

step two : wa i t i n g Liberalism feels like a waiting period that may never end. A primary purpose of this tactic is to allow policymakers and elites to announce their intention to do something about a problem while hoping the problem goes away on its own as public attention dies down or as they move on with their careers. The department’s first official response to the Debt Collective’s growing campaign – by this time two hundred borrowers were on strike and thousands had disputed their loans – came three months later in the form of a memo. Continuing to foreground his agency’s sympathy with borrowers, Secretary Duncan said he was disappointed that some “bad actor” colleges had “preyed on some of our nation’s most vulnerable students.”12 He announced that he had appointed a “Borrower Defense Special Master” to review individual student’s claims of fraud.13 Prognostications of pain did not end there, as the similarities between the administration’s handling of the foreclosure crisis and its treatment of Corinthian borrowers became uncanny. Duncan announced that the special master would be former securities lawyer, Joseph A. Smith, the man who had been nominated to monitor the National Mortgage Settlement in 2012. The National Mortgage Settlement was a federal program that was supposed to punish banks and help underwater homeowners. In the end, like the Home Affordable Modification Program (hamp ), this Borrower Defense program provided far less relief than promised. By hiring Smith to oversee former Corinthian students’ claims, the department embarked on a similar trajectory: it would do all it could to avoid relieving debts while claiming to be deeply engaged in the process of relieving debts.

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As the months wore on, thousands of former students from forprofit colleges came forward with similar complaints. The media began to publish stories about the abusive behaviours of scam colleges, including what recruiters at Corinthian had called the “pain funnel” which entailed preying on people’s emotions about their economic problems.14 Under pressure to show it was making progress, the department doubled down on making people wait: two months after the special master was appointed, the agency announced that it would set up a “negotiated rulemaking” process to determine how to respond to claims from students who had attended other forprofit schools, including itt Tech and the Art Institute.15 These two maneuvers set up ostensibly to facilitate debt relief (the process for Corinthian borrowers headed by the special master and a separate process for everyone else) were an attempt to signal to the public that the department was taking action on an important issue. In reality, the wheels of bureaucracy were spinning in place. Meanwhile, debtors were suffering. Debt collectors working on behalf of the federal government have extraordinary powers. They can garnish wages, offset borrowers’ tax returns, and ruin credit scores. Collectors can seize a portion of a debtor’s disability or Social Security benefits to pay defaulted debts. Since for-profit colleges enroll disproportionate numbers of low-income and first-generation collegians, those debtors were harmed the most by collection efforts. Debt Collective members were not the only ones sounding the alarm. In September 2016, Senator Elizabeth Warren released findings from an investigation that showed as many as eighty thousand Corinthian borrowers were still being collected on.16 In the year and a half since former students had declared a debt strike and made an in-person appeal to the Department of Education, federal officials shifted the responsibility away from schools and government regulators and onto the borrowers themselves. In a telling exchange in a United States Senate committee hearing that might as well have been a scene from a Kafka novel, Acting Education Secretary John King told Warren that his department was reaching out to borrowers one by one to let them know they might be eligible for relief.17 Notified borrowers then had to apply, and the applications had to be individually reviewed and approved. This lengthy process was taking place even though the department already knew which borrowers had attended which schools and who was eligible.

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s tep th r ee: i nd i v i dua l i z i n g Liberalism feels like one has to prove one is worthy of basic rights. The primary result of this tactic is that individuals get bogged down in the details of their specific cases, so they are unable to see themselves as members of a class, a collective systematically wronged and robbed. In April 2015, Corinthian students were shocked to find out their campuses had closed. The remaining schools had collapsed for good in the wake of the growing debt strike movement and increased public scrutiny. Approximately sixteen thousand people were still attending at the time.18 Rather than simply cancel their loans automatically, an action allowed under the law, the Department of Education set up another protocol whereby individual students had to fill out a form attesting that they had been attending the school when it closed. In other words, students were required to send data to a federal agency that already had the information it was asking for because it had issued the loans. The department’s tactic for limiting debt relief worked. Of those left in limbo by Corinthian’s closure, less than half had their debts canceled six months later. A second form of individualizing was imposed on those students who had left the schools prior to the closure. Those borrowers were required to provide the department with paperwork, including citations of the specific laws that the claimant believed the school had violated, a bizarre request to make of nonlawyers from a federal agency that employed dozens of them. Former students were also responsible for figuring out if they were eligible for relief. For example, the department had determined that Corinthian had lied to students enrolled in a Criminal Justice program housed at a campus in West Los Angeles. But only students enrolled in the program from July 2013 to September 2014 were deemed eligible for relief. Someone taking classes in the same program at the same school before or after those dates was stuck with the debt. The department’s individualized process was not a program for granting relief; it was a program for denying it. Individualizing basic rights means relying on numerical data. The Department of Education decided which Corinthian campuses were defrauding students by relying on numbers provided by the schools themselves. The data the department considered truly meaningful is apparent in a letter sent in 2015 to the ceo of Heald

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College, a branch of Corinthian, by Robin Minor, the Department of Education’s acting director of administrative actions (a Kafkian title if there ever was one). The letter starkly reveals the logic at work: an attention to numerical detail bordering on the absurd. “Heald Stockton’s backup data reflected only 209 placements rather than 281,”19 Minor wrote and continued: “In addition, of those 209 placements, (1) Heald Stockton reported as placed at least 23 students who had in fact completed Heald Stockton’s diploma program in Medical Assisting, which is not accredited by maerb [Medical Assisting Education Review Board], rather than the 98 credit-hour associates in Applied Science (aas ) program; (2) Heald Stockton counted 13 students twice and counted one student three times.… The Department’s recalculation revealed that the correct number of placements was only 109 rather than 281.”20 The letter demonstrated that regulating US higher education in the neoliberal era is a job for forensic accountants who pore over spreadsheets to find mathematical errors. Individualizing debt relief based on schools’ job placement statistics was an attempt to make an arbitrary policy appear like the result of objective analysis. In her book about for-profit education, Tressie McMillan Cottom explained that regulators’ emphasis on job placement statistics is “mostly a distraction” from the real issues, including a lack of good jobs, racism, and gender discrimination.21 The Heald College enforcement letter illustrates how Obama’s Department of Education conducted a rarified regulatory process divorced from the needs and concerns of ordinary people.

s tep fo ur : pa per p u sh i n g Liberalism feels like being buried in bureaucratic documents written in an esoteric language. In Chain of Title, David Dayen described how banks illegally foreclosed on millions of people using fake documents. Only the most dedicated homeowners who spent years studying the industry were able to spot the fraud. A primary purpose of the paper pushing strategy is to protect lenders by burying nonprofessionals in documents with which they feel unqualified to engage. During the Debt Collective’s campaign, the Department of Education issued a regular stream of memos, press releases, reports, spreadsheets, and forms usually rendered in an elite idiom that obscured the line between action and inaction. Reports written

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by Special Master Smith are an example of the kind of demoralizing paperwork dump to which former for-profit students became accustomed. The first report was released in September 2015. In it, the special master wrote that the department had received 4,140 debt disputes from Corinthian College debtors.22 Smith explained why none of the disputes had yet been approved. The Borrower Defense to Repayment regulation, he wrote, “[i]ndicates that a borrower’s defense is based on acts or omissions by the school. Thus, for the defense to be successful, the evidence must support the claim that those acts or omissions occurred. Furthermore, the terms of the regulation also indicate that, from a legal point of view, those acts, or omissions must be such that they would give the borrower a cause of action against the school.”23 The tactics used to lure in students, including promising them new jobs, higher salaries, and better lives, were now being referred to as “acts, omissions, and causes of actions.”24 The implication was clear: only trained professionals could establish that those things, whatever they might be, had actually occurred. This was a convenient reversal of the position the department held when it required individual borrowers to affirmatively state that they had been defrauded. Smith functionally moved debtors’ urgent needs into a realm of in/ action where erudite professionals studied, ruminated, and, most of all, took their time. In the special master’s third report, issued six months later, Smith recommended discharges for 736 Corinthian borrowers while 8,952 claims had yet to be approved.25 The fourth and final report was released almost a year and a half after Corinthian students declared a debt strike and more than a year after Corinthian had declared bankruptcy. The special master wrote that the department had so far received a total of 26,603 applications, which he acknowledged represented a “sharp increase.”26 The department had approved only 3,787 claims and the rest were still under review. Exquisite in their soul-crushing banality, the memos are an example of paper-pushing bureaucracy at work. In his final report, the special master suggested that what had turned out to be a process of limiting debt relief was an act of liberal sympathy for those whose worthy attempt to improve their human capital had merely hit an unfortunate roadblock. “Although the college investment still pays off for most students who graduate,” he wrote, “any students that

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enroll in colleges that engage in the deceptive, fraudulent practices evidenced at [Corinthian] risk having their investment do more harm than good.”27 As if channeling his experience denying loan modifications to defrauded homeowners, Smith defended the value of college as an investment and suggested that students were partly to blame for enrolling in deceptive colleges. This expression of faith that our economic system can work for “responsible individuals” is reminiscent of “America is Already Great,” the slogan some Democrats used in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to “Make America Great Again.” Debtors were not surprised that the special master had not recommended automatic, group-wide debt relief for Corinthian borrowers. Nor were they cheered by the closing lines of his final memo: “the leadership of the [Department of Education] has informed me that it will continue to issue periodic reports.”28

step fi v e: arro g a n c e Liberalism feels like being patronized by elites who are disengaged from the concerns of regular people. In late October 2016, the Department of Education published the new regulation – more than a year in the making – describing how it would apply the Defense to Repayment rule. The 927-page document had been drafted, officials wrote, to “give students access to consistent, clear, fair, and transparent processes to seek debt relief.”29 Critical observers noted that the department had made itself the arbiter of group-wide claims. Only the Secretary of Education in his or her infinite wisdom could decide that a group of student debtors should have their loans cancelled. Yet, even the most cynical could allow themselves to hope that some, maybe even most, of the tens of thousands of former for-profit college students who had applied for relief might soon receive it. Liberalism makes people wait, requires that they prove themselves worthy, and buries them in paperwork. But a liberal universe is also supposed to mean that those who doggedly pursue justice will eventually get it. The 2016 presidential election revealed that universe to be an abyss. Days before the vote, the Department of Education released the regulation with an effective date of July 2017. That meant the administration that had written the rules that would leave the actual canceling of debts up to the next one, which they likely presumed

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would be headed by Hillary Clinton. Instead, it was up to Donald Trump, and a department headed by Betsy DeVos, to follow through on the Obama administration’s commitment to provide “every penny” of relief to defrauded debtors. By mid-2019, DeVos has not cancelled a single loan. The process of providing relief hit a brick wall when Trump came to power. Hitting this wall demonstrated to thousands of Debt Collective members that the Democrat party officials who had claimed to sympathize with them and to want to help them did not and would not. The strike illuminated liberalism’s ideological underpinnings and helped reveal connections between the particular strategies employed by Department of Education officials, and borrowers’ daily struggles with debt. In other words, if the previous pages seem too weighted with procedural information, too infuriatingly “in the weeds,” it is because bureaucracy wielded like a cudgel feels like that. But the view from the depths also illuminates. It is from there that we can see further. While there are surely many reasons why someone might subscribe to a politics rooted in a desire for small government, vote for the candidate who promises to “drain the swamp,” or decide not to vote at all, it is not hard to see that life in the weeds might be one of them. Officials in Obama’s Department of Education had the moral and legal authority – as well as the political cover – to relieve debtors’ suffering. Instead, under the banner of sympathy and reform, they delivered a group of aggrieved working-class people into a maze of delay and obfuscation where they were patronized by pretentious professionals and then delivered into the hands of President Trump. This is an illustration of the dire necessity of rejecting a class politics rooted in condescension and disdain for working-class people.

acts o f th in k i n g Collective action taken by debtors revealed how their struggles were connected to specific actions (not) taken by government officials. Four years later, the Debt Collective’s campaign has also helped lead to what could be the most transformative change in US higher education in decades. In June 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders paused his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to return to Washington and introduce the College for All Act. In a bold rejection of the status quo, the bill would cancel all $1.5 trillion dollars

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in student debt held by forty-four million people and make public college tuition free.30 Members of the Debt Collective stood shoulder to shoulder with Sanders on the lawn of the United States Senate as he introduced the bill. Their prior actions launching a debt strike to force the Obama administration to acknowledge their right to cancellation had a more profound impact than anyone could have imagined in advance. Julie Margetta Morgan, a former policy adviser to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has explained how the Debt Collective’s campaign helped to shift the terrain. Watching the Corinthian debt strikers battle for relief, she said, “helped to make people more comfortable with the argument that sometimes debt has to be just wiped away.”31 The “people” Morgan is referring to are other policymakers and lawmakers in Washington who came to a new understanding by watching a grassroots organizing effort unfold. This is an extraordinarily revealing statement about the power of action to produce unique vantage points. As I have argued elsewhere, academics have a vital role to play in organizing such new ways of seeing.32 That is my theory anyway. no t e s 1 Marshall Steinbaum, “A Brown v. Board of Ed. for Higher Education,” Boston Review, 1 September 2017, https://bostonreview.net/educationopportunity-class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-brown-v-boardhigher-ed. 2 US Congress, Senate, help Committee, Corinthian Colleges, 112th Congress, 2012, https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/for_profit_report/ PartII/Corinthian.pdf, 378–400. 3 Molly Hensley-Clancy, “Lower Education: How a Disgraced College Chain Trapped Its Students in Poverty,” Buzzfeed, 13 November 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/lowereducation. 4 Sarah Jaffee, “‘We Won’t Pay’: Students in Debt Take on for-Profit Institution,” Guardian, 23 February 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/ education/2015/feb/23/student-debt-for-profit-colleges. 5 US Congress, Senate, letter to Senator Patty Murray, 115th Congress, 2018, https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/BDQ12019Report.pdf. 6 Editorial Board, “Speedy Help for Victims of College Fraud,” New York Times, 26 September 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/opinion/

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sunday/speedy-help-for-victims-of-college-fraud.html?searchResult Position=15. Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton), “No one should be in debt to a college that defrauded them – forgiving students is the right decision. Thx, @usedgov. http://nyti.ms/1MjvreX -H,” Twitter, 9 June 2015, 2:21 p.m., https:// twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/608383554045804544?s=20. David Dayen, “Obama Failed to Mitigate America’s Foreclosure Crisis,” Atlantic, 14 December 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2016/12/obamas-failure-to-mitigate-americas-foreclosurecrisis/510485/. Alan Pyke, “Inside the Historic Meeting between Student Debt Strikers and Their Government Antagonists,” Think Progress, 1 April 2015, https://thinkprogress.org/inside-the-historic-meeting-between-student-debtstrikers-and-their-government-antagonists-1be0c85449e2/. David Halperin, “Arne Duncan Transcript: Some For-Profit Colleges Have the ‘Ethics of Payday Lending,’” Huffington Post, 10 June 2015, https:// www.huffpost.com/entry/arne-duncan-transcript-so_b_7557408. Ibid. Department of Education, “Education Department Appoints Special Master to Inform Debt Relief Process,” Washington, 2015, https://www. ed.gov/news/press-releases/education-department-appoints-special-masterinform-debt-relief-process. Ibid. Chris Kirkham, “For-Profit College Recruiters Taught to Use ‘Pain,’ ‘Fear,’ Internal Documents Show,” Huffington Post, 8 February 2011, https:// www.huffpost.com/entry/for-profit-college-recruiters-documents_n_ 820337. Department of Education, “Negotiated Rulemaking for Higher Education 2015–2016,” https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/ hearulemaking/2016/index.html. Senator Elizabeth Warren to John B. King, Washington, 29 September 2016, https://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/2016-9-29_Letter_ to_ED_re_Corinthian_data.pdf. AlexisCSpan, “Senator Warren Grills Secretary King on Corinthian Debt Relief,” C-Span, 25 February 2016, Washington, video, 5:33, https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4582497/senator-warren-grills-secretaryking-corinthian-debt-relief. Michael Stratford, “Corinthian Closes for Good,” Inside Higher Ed, 27 April 2015, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/27/ corinthian-ends-operations-remaining-campuses-affecting-16000-students.

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19 Robin S. Minor to Jack D. Massimino, Santa Ana, 14 April 2015, https:// s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1873943/healdfine-letter.pdf. 20 Ibid. 21 Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of for-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York: The New Press, 2018). 22 The Department of Education, “First Report of the Special Master for Borrower Defense for the Under Secretary,” 3 September 2015, https:// www2.ed.gov/documents/press-releases/report-special-masterborrower-defense-1.pdf. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 The Department of Education, “Third Report of the Special Master for Borrower Defense for the Under Secretary,” 25 March 2016, https:// www2.ed.gov/documents/press-releases/report-special-masterborrower-defense-3.pdf. 26 The Department of Education, “Fourth Report of the Special Master for Borrower Defense for the Under Secretary,” 29 June 2016, https://www2. ed.gov/documents/press-releases/report-special-master-borrower-defense4.pdf. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Andrew Krieghbaum, “Borrower Defense Rules Finalized,” Inside Higher Ed, 28 October 2016, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/10/28/ education-dept-releases-final-version-defense-repayment-loan-rules. 30 Emily Cochrane, “Bernie Sanders Unveils Education Plan to Eliminate Student Debt,” New York Times, 24 June 2019, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/06/24/us/politics/bernie-sanders-student-debt.html. 31 Jillian Berman, “Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Cancel Student Debt Has Its Origins in Occupy Wall Street,” Marketwatch, 27 April 2019, https://www. marketwatch.com/story/student-debt-cancellation-entered-presidentialpolitics-this-week-but-the-idea-goes-back-to-occupy-wall-street-201904-26. 32 Ann Larson, “The Fight for Free College is Your Fight Too,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 July 2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/ The-Fight-for-Free-College-Is/246752.

6 Organizing Dark Matter: W.A.G.E. as Alternative Worker Organization Greig de Peuter

th i s i s no t an a rt wo r k On 20 September 2018, w.a.g.e. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), an artist-initiated activist organization based in New York City, launched wagency. Countering unpaid work in the arts, the wagency platform gives artists digital tools to request payment for their contributions to US nonprofit galleries and museums – from a solo exhibition to an artist’s talk. “w.a.g.e. is not an artwork,” w.a.g.e. insisted when it announced wagency.1 This refusal to be misclassified as an art project highlights w.a.g.e.’s activist intentions: to transform prevailing institutional practices through collective action. w.a.g.e.’s clarification also tacitly names a contradiction for which it has low tolerance: the art world currently has an appetite for socially engaged and politically radical artwork while many art institutions seem content to restrict their engagement with labour justice to an exhibition theme or panel topic.2 At the same time, when the art press has covered w.a.g.e., the stories often focus on discrete programs that w.a.g.e. has developed. This chapter does not approach w.a.g.e. as an art project or reduce its distinction to having devised a fee calculator for example. Instead, w.a.g.e. is positioned as an alternative worker organization – albeit one whose strategies are shaped by the specific conditions of the art field, the economic habits of which w.a.g.e. has worked for more than a decade to reform. w.a.g.e. was founded in 2008. Emerging in advance of Occupy Wall Street, w.a.g.e. was among the currents of discontent anticipating the surge of collective outrage in the face of deepening class

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inequality and deregulated industry in the US. Like many activist groups, w.a.g.e. grew out of conversations between friends and acquaintances. Its founders, some of whom rented studio space in the same building,3 talked about how, even if their profiles as artists were rising, they struggled to get by – while many nonprofit galleries seemed to expect them to show work for nothing, or next to nothing. Initiated by a group of more than ten visual and performing artists and independent curators that included A.K. Burns, k8 Hardy, Lise Soskolne, and A.L. Steiner, w.a.g.e. began to build solidarity through open forums, where they sounded out artists’ concerns about money matters. w.a.g.e. continued its “consciousness-raising” work, singling out the problem of nonpayment in presentations, workshops, and interviews. In 2012, w.a.g.e. released the results of its artist survey: 58 per cent of 577 respondents reported a situation of receiving no compensation from a New York nonprofit art institution.4 w.a.g.e. incorporated as a nonprofit in 2011, and in 2014, one of w.a.g.e.’s co-founders, Soskolne, became w.a.g.e. ’s full-time paid organizer. The same year, it launched its signature policy initiative, w.a.g.e. Certification, a voluntary program recognizing nonprofit galleries and museums that pay artist fees as set by w.a.g.e. . By 2019, seventy-two institutions had been certified. Alongside coordinating wagency , w.a.g.e. has spearheaded new projects, including a blockchain-based platform that would help to return to artists a share of the expanded value when one of their artworks is resold at a profit in the commercial market. Inside a decade, w.a.g.e. went from a small, feisty grassroots collective to an internationally recognized, yet lean, organization, which not only advocates for labour standards in the nonprofit art sector, but also provides practical tools to begin the work of doing better by equality. w.a.g.e.’s lineage could be mapped from multiple branches internal to contemporary art: the tradition of institutional critique;5 the embrace of the collective as a way of working;6 the practice of artists creating and managing their own institutions such as artist-run centres;7 the recent spike of interest in labour issues, artistic labour, especially among artists, theorists, and curators; and so on.8 But w.a.g.e. is only partly locatable within practices more or less unique to the art world. w.a.g.e. ’s aspirations – to redistribute wealth and raise compensation to benefit the people who produce value in the art economy – are squarely within the traditions of unionism. Already notable for its longevity, w.a.g.e. is an early twenty-first-century

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addition to the episodic history of collective labour organizations formed by American visual artists at the margins of the commercial cultural industries.9 Formally, w.a.g.e. is not a union. Nor does its dispersed artist constituency easily lend itself to organizing or have work relationships that neatly fit traditional models of collective representation. Typically, an artist engages an art institution on a short-term project basis, whether it is a six-week exhibition or a two-hour presentation. w.a.g.e. ’s constituency lacks a single, stable employer to whom to address economic demands – but they also, by virtue of their employment status, do not have access to collective bargaining rights.10 The employment status of the artist – most of whom earn their primary keep beyond their art practice – parallels that of freelancers, independent contractors, gig workers, and other workers who are not in a “standard employment relationship,” the fraying normative arrangement around which many social protections and rights have been designed.11 Artists also operate in a professional milieu of intense competition, individualizing coping tactics, and deep attachment to work. Setting out to improve artists’ livelihoods despite these challenging conditions, w.a.g.e. is an example of what Immanuel Ness terms “new forms of worker organization,” permutations of which range from worker centres to rankand-file-led unions.12 While there frequently is greater interaction with unions than the label implies, “alt-labour” signals similar experiments that support nonunion workers, such as the Fight for $15 campaign and the intern labour rights movement, which have mobilized, outside a collective bargaining framework, to improve workers’ conditions.13 In the last decade or so, nonunion cultural workers and their allies have initiated several organizations fitting into this alt-labour constellation, such as the Urban Worker Project, Game Workers Unite, Gulf Labor Coalition, Model Alliance, Precarious Workers Brigade – and w.a.g.e. . This chapter is a case study of w.a.g.e., which has received only passing attention in cultural labour studies. Informed by w.a.g.e.authored texts, media coverage of w.a.g.e., and interviews with the group’s core organizer and programer, this chapter surveys w.a.g.e.’s strategies for organizing “dark matter,” a concept that Gregory Sholette repurposed from physics as a metaphor for the majority of artists and activities that populate the art world and uphold and subsidize its most visible and commercially successful figures.14

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Inevitably partial, the account that follows describes w.a.g.e. in five registers: its practice of parrhesia; algorithm of fairness; strategy of certification; posthorizontalist form of organization; and platformization of labour politics. While w.a.g.e. has been tackling dilemmas specific to the nonprofit arts, its strategies hold wider relevance to confronting the challenge of organizing workers who are outside of an employment relationship, who lack access to unions, and for whom the opportunity to be self-expressive or the promise of exposure may be regarded as compensation enough.

parrh esia w.a.g.e.’s focus on nonpayment was a strategic decision informed by reflection on the Art Workers Coalition (awc ).15 Between 1969–71, the awc agitated in New York City around a raft of contentious issues – ties between art institutions and the military complex, artists’ lack of control over the context in which their work was shown, the marginalization of women artists and artists of colour, and much more.16 While respectful of the awc ’s historic significance, w.a.g.e. stingingly identified the most lasting concrete policy achievement from the awc ’s lengthy list of demands: free admission to the moma one evening a week, which has become a corporate sponsorship opportunity.17 From crushing mfa (Master of Fine Arts) debt to big-oil money sloshing around the museum world, harassment in art-world workplaces, and the icon of culture-led gentrification, the starchitectdesigned gallery, w.a.g.e. is not unaware that the art sector is overdue for “total structural reform.”18 Nevertheless, w.a.g.e. honed in on a single issue. By isolating nonpayment, w.a.g.e. puts to the test a premise of collective action theory: a source of dissatisfaction is more likely to scale to a grievance with the capacity to mobilize when there is a perception of unfairness or injustice in the mix.19 w.a.g.e. ’s early talking points included that the art market is awash in capital while artists endure precarity, gallery staff is on payroll while artists are compensated ad hoc, if paid at all, and art institutions’ ability to fulfill their missions depends on the contributions of artists whose sustainability is not necessarily a budgetary priority of those same institutions. Without a shared workplace to build a sense of common cause, w.a.g.e. turned to communication through art world channels,

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from symposia speeches to open letters, to reach its constituency and lodge its complaint. From the outset, w.a.g.e. linked the instance of nonpayment to artists’ material conditions generally. At one of w.a.g.e. ’s first public talks, at Creative Time’s “Democracy in America” (2008), w.a.g.e. addressed an audience of artists, curators, and art administrators and aficionados. “w.a.g.e. rage ” spray-painted on their shirt, one member shared: “let me tell you about the glamour of being an artist in this city: the glamour of not being able to eat well; … the glamour of not being able to go to the doctor; … the glamour of every year moving further and further away from the city; … and the glamour of spending your every last dollar every month.”20 Most artists’ income from their practice is insufficient to live on, and multiple job holding is industry standard. Beyond highlighting artists’ strained livelihoods, w.a.g.e. troubled how artists are routinely invited by gatekeepers to accept the promise of exposure in lieu of monetary payment. As w.a.g.e. lamented in its “wo/manifesto,” the currency of exposure compels cultural workers to adopt the market rationality of the “speculator.”21 How w.a.g.e. has gone about broaching nonpayment measures up well to the ethos of parrhesia. This Ancient Greek term, on Foucault’s definition, refers to a practice of speech that operates as a mode of criticism, is voiced “from below,” and relies on “frankness” more than “persuasion.”22 The parrhesiastes, or speaker, occupies a subordinate position in relation to their addressee, and speaks at some “risk” to themselves, with Foucault describing parrhesia as an act of “courage” rooted in a sense of “duty.”23 Parrhesia is, he writes, “a ‘game’ between the one who speaks the truth and the interlocutor. The parrhesia involved … may be the advice that the interlocutor should behave in a certain way, or that he is wrong in what he thinks, or in the way he acts.”24 Writing about the interaction of social movements resisting precarious labour and art institutions claiming a progressive identity, the philosopher Gerald Raunig proposes a twofold parrhesia strategy: “an attempt of involvement and engagement in a process of hazardous refutation, and as self-questioning.”25 In naming nonpayment, w.a.g.e. did not so much lay bare a previously undisclosed truth as publicly amplify an open institutional secret – while also asking artists to question how they themselves might hold sensibilities that prop up the sector’s payment norms. w.a.g.e.’s strategies follow from analysis of the position of its interlocutor, the nonprofit art institution, in the political economy of

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contemporary art. In a text presented at the 2015 Artist as Debtor conference, w.a.g.e. elaborated on the nonprofit as a nodal point in the circulation of financial resources in the US art system.26 Whether from government programs or private foundations, arts funding flows to nonprofits, who subsequently distribute the funds to individual artist projects. w.a.g.e. emphasizes the fact that nonprofits’ status as charitable organizations are premised upon their service to the social good. As w.a.g.e. ’s presentation highlighted, however, the nonprofit art institution is entangled with powerful class interests: the nonprofit is a tax shelter for philanthropists as well as a recipient of grants from foundations whose coffers are often a living legacy of industrial-era class exploitation; private collectors who sit on a nonprofit’s board may have vested interest in showing certain artists to increase the value of work in their own collections; and exhibiting an artwork at a nonprofit confers moral worth, which can enhance an artwork’s monetary value. While w.a.g.e. stresses how enmeshed nonprofit art institutions are with capitalist forces, w.a.g.e. posited that the charitable nonprofit has a tough time recognizing artists as workers who generate value on behalf of these institutions in no small part because nonprofits project their charity status onto artists.27 w.a.g.e. has not exempted artists from critique, however. It acknowledges artists’ “complicity” in nonpayment when exposure is accepted as legitimate compensation on the basis of a privately held, hopeful notion of “exceptionality”: “the fugitive promise of commercial success,” writes w.a.g.e. in an internal policy document, “has reinforced artists’ belief that it is they who might be the next exception.”28 Such a belief, for w.a.g.e. , miscalculates the centrality of “dark matter” to art’s stratified economy of rewards, wherein, as Jodi Dean writes in a different context, “the many” is mobilized to produce “the one.”29 Exceptionality’s “cruel optimism”30 overlaps the so-called “cultural discount,” the budgetary assumption that the gratifications of art-making offset the sting of low pay.31 Isabell Lorey goes further: “perhaps those who work creatively, these precarious cultural producers by design, are subjects that can be exploited so easily because they seem to bear their living and working conditions eternally due to the belief in their own freedom and autonomy, due to self-realization fantasies.”32 It is within artists’ own “accounts of value”33 that w.a.g.e. makes an intervention – not to blame artists for nonpayment but to raise their expectations, and indeed encourage a sense of entitlement to payment.

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Savvy about cultural-capital sensitivities within the art world, w.a.g.e. has pressured institutions reputationally. Institutions were not anonymized in w.a.g.e. ’s compensation survey results. When the curator of a preeminent international exhibition was recorded as seeming to suggest that participating artists were not paid because the invitation to exhibit was its own reward, w.a.g.e. posted a satirical video inviting this curator to accept the same logic for a prospective curatorial project.34 And when the New Museum announced expansion plans, w.a.g.e. shared an open letter: “congratulations – that’s big news. It could also be big news for the hundreds of artists who supply the content for your programs each year. After all, if you plan to double in size, surely there will be a significant increase in the number of programs being produced, which would surely provide income to more of the artists upon whose work your existence is predicated.”35 Soskolne admits “there are dangers with naming and shaming.”36 An art institution named in w.a.g.e. ’s compensation survey, for example, threatened to sue. But just as art institutions are vulnerable reputationally – especially when their missions are couched in support for the arts – w.a.g.e. , too, has established its legitimacy as a moral voice, which it has accrued over the years through expressions of support from high-profile institutions, coverage in key publications, and association with respected artists in the contemporary art field. Ultimately, however, w.a.g.e. ’s parrhesia is underpinned by the belief that nonpayment is not inevitable.

each ac c o r d i ng to t h e i r tao e To solve the nonpayment problem, w.a.g.e. proposed nonprofit art institutions collectively abide by a standard artist fee system. This approach illustrates two more premises of collective action theory. First, that mobilization depends on an institutional actor believed to be in a position to remedy the grievance.37 So, while w.a.g.e. calls out nonprofits, it engages them not only as antagonists but also as potential allies. The prospect of solidarity rests partly on the fact that many arts administrators moonlight as practicing artists or are trained as artists and are hardly unaware of the challenges in artistic careers, but also on the fact that a group must believe that their demand – artist fees in w.a.g.e. ’s case – is deserved and achievable.38 w.a.g.e., however, did not simply assert the need for artists fees – it also determined the rates. “We chose,” writes w.a.g.e. , “to set our

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own prices because there were none.”39 w.a.g.e. produced “policy from below,” where the people most directly affected propose – in the context of collective organizing – regulatory solutions to mitigate their challenges.40 By setting fees, w.a.g.e. reaffirmed that “standards can be set by workers.”41 Having identified the nonprofit as a strategic lever of redistributive justice, w.a.g.e. came to conceptualize “equity” in its context as “begin[ning] with recognizing that the contribution made by cultural producers is integral to the functioning of the arts institution. Financial compensation for this contribution,” states w.a.g.e. , “acknowledges its value.”42 Despite its name, w.a.g.e. has not sought wages but fees. Bypassing thorny questions about how to measure labour time in the making of art, w.a.g.e. adopts the language of fees because artists are not in an employment relationship with nonprofits. For w.a.g.e. , fees neither cover production costs nor imply the purchase of work. Instead, w.a.g.e. defines artist fees precisely as payment “for the work of working with an institution”:43 “We define it as the expected remuneration for an artist’s temporary transactional relationship with an institution.”44 Positioning artists as “contracted workers,” w.a.g.e. describes a fee as payment for “services rendered and content provided.”45 A fee, insists w.a.g.e. , “is not a reward.”46 Against the prevailing practice of offering fees based on each individual artist’s perceived merit, w.a.g.e. advocated for a standard fee structure that is applied equally to all artists. In pressing for artist fees, w.a.g.e. has revived earlier fleeting efforts of American artists, such as the Artists’ Union-supported “Rental Policy” campaign of the 1930s.47 One of more recent references for w.a.g.e. , however, was the Canadian artists’ organization carfac , which formed in 1968 and compelled nonprofit galleries to adhere to its regularly updated fee schedule as a condition of government funding.48 Because no such guidelines existed in the US, w.a.g.e. designed its own fee structure, which covers sixteen categories, from solo and group exhibitions to published texts. Beyond raising expectations – the crux of organizing, argues labour activist Jane McAlevey49 – w.a.g.e. codifies expectations, arguing, “for conditions to change, institutions must adopt and commit to using shared standards.”50 For w.a.g.e. , the problem is not only that institutions fail to pay – many do pay – but that the amounts are so erratic and the reasoning so opaque. Standard fees remove inconsistency and provide a benchmark for

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artists and institutions to consult, and also strengthen artists’ bargaining power: “If you don’t have a minimum,” says Soskolne, “you have no place to start from – and, therefore, no place to go.”51 w.a.g.e.’s fee structure acknowledges the uneven economy of nonprofit institutions, which range from small artist-run centres to globally recognized museum brands. In the name of fairness, w.a.g.e. opted for scaled rates, indexing minimum fees to a gallery’s budget, specifically its total annual operating expenses (taoe ), a figure that US nonprofits must legally disclose. “Our model ties artist fees to these costs,” w.a.g.e. explains, “because they are the financial articulation of an institution’s priorities,” and its means.52 w.a.g.e. ’s fee system has three tiers. The first, Floor w.a.g.e. , applies to institutions with expenses below $500,000. The second tier includes organizations with budgets between $500,000 and $5 million, and the third tier covers institutions with yearly expenses higher than $5 million. Key to w.a.g.e. ’s fee structure is that the minimum rates for institutions within the second and third tiers scale according to a fractional percentage of an institution’s taoe . For example, a gallery in the first tier would pay $1,000 for a solo exhibition and $150 for a commissioned talk, the rates would be $10,000 and $1,500 respectively for a gallery in the third tier. w.a.g.e. has created an online fee calculator, which allows institutions and artists to calculate minimum rates. w.a.g.e.’s fee system is underpinned by a class analysis that stresses commonality over exceptionality. Defining fees as compensation for “the work of working with an institution” points to a kind of universal artistic labour. The demand for fees is, moreover, an ethical proposition. Institutions are asked to take responsibility for artists’ collective reproduction: “we don’t have art,” says one w.a.g.e. ally, “unless we have working artists.”53 w.a.g.e. also views a fee system as a means to counter class-based exclusion in the arts. “The barriers to entry are so high at this point,” says Soskolne, “that only those who can afford to work for free can afford to participate.”54 The culture of nonpayment “precludes the participation of most working people, which means that the kind of art that is being produced and supported is representative of an elite and predominately white constituency.”55 While fees cannot independently upset these intersecting inequalities, they remain a necessary component of any policy effort to expand access to artistic careers. w.a.g.e.’s fee structure sets minimums. But it is a bargaining device and, as such, artists may negotiate upward – but only to a

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point. w.a.g.e. sets a “maximum wage.” As Soskolne reflects, “we used to make the case for compensation on the basis of [artists] being this marginalized underclass, but now it’s actually our proximity to wealth.”56 w.a.g.e. recognizes the stratification of not only institutions but also artists: dark matter and superstars that have come to expect lavish fees are mutually constitutive. Rooted in the principle that “nobody unduly profits from the redistribution of wealth – including artists,”57 w.a.g.e. stipulates that an exhibiting artist must not receive a fee greater than the average salary of the exhibiting institution’s full-time staff. w.a.g.e.’s fee structure makes a redistributive claim and invites art institutions to reflect on the coherence of their missions and budgetary practices. But because artists lack the legal right to collectively bargain and thereby hold institutions to fees, w.a.g.e. confronts a common challenge of policy from below: adoption.

c erti fi cati o n as st r at e g y w.a.g.e. ’s fee framework is the policy pillar of w.a.g.e. Certification, w.a.g.e. ’s primary strategy for bringing compensation standards to nonprofit art institutions. The certification method reflects the structural constraints w.a.g.e. operates within. As Mark Graham and others write in the context of digital labour platforms: “if formal channels for worker voice are not available, then workers may need to develop their own means for bringing their demands to bear upon any exploitative platforms or clients.”58 Certifying galleries and museums that adhere to w.a.g.e. standards is an alt-labour approach that makes institutions responsible for upholding minimum rates. w.a.g.e.’s certification program is rooted in self-regulation, a form of governance that follows from the nonprofit sector’s composition. w.a.g.e. initiated certification in a context that lacks a national framework such as that in Canada where government-funded art institutions are expected to comply with carfac rates. Assuming such state involvement would be unlikely in the US, w.a.g.e. opted against lobbying politicians for top-down policy change. Soskolne adds that self-regulation was necessary “because foundations” – a major arts funding source in the US – “are also self-regulating.”59 Certification was also designed as a self-regulatory system in an

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attempt to navigate lingering aversions to bureaucracy in the arts. w.a.g.e. wagered that nonprofit institutions were capable of reforming their budgetary practices without being forced to do so by government or binding contract. w.a.g.e. first experimented with certification in 2010 when the group was invited by curator Lauren Cornell to be part of an exhibition, “Free,” at the New Museum. w.a.g.e. contributed by negotiating fees for the exhibiting artists. w.a.g.e. ’s institutional certification program was formally launched in October 2014. The first certified gallery was w.a.g.e. ’s long-time interlocutor and ally, Artists Space. By 2019, w.a.g.e. had certified sixty-three nonprofits in the US, the biggest cluster in New York City. To put this figure in perspective, there were some ninety-five thousand art nonprofits in the US in 2013.60 While most w.a.g.e. -certified institutions are small-scale, “there’s enough anecdotal evidence,” according to w.a.g.e. , “to indicate that artists are most likely to not get paid by the large institutions … As institutions get larger, they have a tendency to become further removed from … providing support to artists, because they incur many other additional expenses.”61 Buy-in from large institutions is, however, vital to w.a.g.e. ’s profile and impact. So, it was seen as “precedent-setting”62 when, in 2018, w.a.g.e. certified its first museum – the Institute of Contemporary Art (ica ), Philadelphia, which is a part of the University of Pennsylvania and has a nearly $5 million budget and twenty-five full-time staff. Since 2014, w.a.g.e. has focused on certifying institutions, though it rehabilitated its pilot tactic in 2018 when it certified the Carnegie International exhibition. In pursuing institutional certifications, w.a.g.e. behaves like a union in that it represents artists’ grievances – but the daily work of certification revolves less around organizing artists than mobilizing institution staff that resolve to use their positions to materially express support for artists whose work is their institution’s condition of possibility. w.a.g.e. urges galleries to align their payment conventions with their missions to support the arts. But certification is more than a rhetorical appeal to consistency; it is an invitation to solidarity, calling on institution insiders to “serve as our advocates.”63 And Soskolne reports that the impulse to certify is institution driven: “people have been reaching out to us to get certified.”64 Interest in certifying comes from varied sources, from a gallery’s curatorial team to its advisory board. The ica director, Amy Sadao, suggests

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gathering support toward certification by building “a coalition among … board leadership and patrons who really support living artists and emerging artists.”65 w.a.g.e. does not necessarily wait on institutions to initiate a discussion about certification. w.a.g.e. board members have undertaken behind-the-scenes advocacy, and Soskolne often follows up directly after an institutional representative has signed up on w.a.g.e. ’s website to explore certification. The certification program creates a context for w.a.g.e. to enter a formal conversation with an institution about labour standards. The process can involve extensive one-on-one communication between w.a.g.e. and institutional representatives. It can entail working through challenges such as exhibition formats that are not captured in w.a.g.e. ’s fee schedule. w.a.g.e. and the ica discussed traveling exhibitions, for instance, deciding that the ica was responsible for writing artist fees into agreements when an ica exhibition is presented elsewhere. As an ethical proposition, however, the certification program seeks to prompt conversations within institutions to “seriously engage with the idea of what equitable exchange means, then internalize the answer into their respective missions so they can carry it forward.”66 At the ica , they prepared for certification for about one year, though the groundwork had been laid earlier through internal discussions.67 Staff reflected on issues such as how certifying might impact programming, concluding that the ica would need to “do less to enable the right kind of budgets.”68 Certified institutions are required to comply with w.a.g.e. ’s fee structure – the point on which Soskolne says she has encountered resistance from some large museums that “don’t want to be told what to do … by a scrappy little organization.”69 But “standards,” w.a.g.e. maintains, “don’t mean much without standardization,” or wide take-up.70 Echoing sectoral unionism, w.a.g.e. certification aims to create conditions where artists would be able to count on minimum fees from any nonprofit with which they work in the US. To be certified, a nonprofit must document that it paid appropriate w.a.g.e. fees for the previous year, that it included artist fees as a dedicated budget item, and that it has not allowed fees to displace production-cost coverage. After a gallery has been certified, w.a.g.e. is not directly involved in fee administration. In keeping with self-regulation, w.a.g.e. grants institutions access to its “online auditing infrastructure,”71 including a fee calculator. Journalist Tim Schneider explains: “after registering on the

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organization’s website with details about its taoe , administrators are asked to enter the details for every relevant event in the institution’s programming calendar, such as the program title and payment date, the names of artist, the fee category, and the amount paid to participants. The interface saves each record to the museum’s profile as a way to track their overall progress.”72 Certification doubles as a counter-publicity device. Whether or not an institution posts a w.a.g.e. -certified logo on its website, certified status tells artists that the institution took the decision to recognize its labour foundation, to compensate artists equitably, and to alter power relations by removing the fear that may otherwise prevent artists from requesting payment. “A w.a.g.e. -certified organization,” says Soskolne, “signals that it stands in solidarity with artists as part of an equitable community no matter what their material practice or reputation might be.”73 The reputation of the w.a.g.e. Certification program is bound up with that of the institutions bearing w.a.g.e. ’s seal of approval. A new certification is also a promotional moment. Some institutions have released announcements that are picked up by the art press. Some allies use the media release to nudge their colleagues. “We’re proud to be the first museum to join this diverse group of arts and culture institutions across the US who are certified, and hope that it will encourage other museums to do the same,” said Sadao in the ica’s release.74 In its announcement, Buffalo art centre Squeaky Wheel expressed its view of certification’s political stakes: “if we are reimagining our organizational structure to be with w.a.g.e. , it is because we believe that artists provide ways to reimagine ourselves and our future … We cannot do this as long as we depend on labor that is not properly compensated. The word ‘community’ must mean something if the futures we imagine are to exist.”75 Self-regulated labour standards regimes are contentious. The use of codes of conduct by transnational corporations forced to appear concerned about conditions within their supply chains, for example, has been dismissed as an ineffective means to protect workers’ rights, owing to compromised compliance monitoring and weak enforcement.76 In w.a.g.e. ’s case, it is impossible to predict whether a state-oriented campaign to pressure, say, New York City’s Cultural Institutions Group to require gallery and museum members to meet w.a.g.e. standards as a condition of public funding, would have been more impactful. w.a.g.e. is not alone, however, in

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using certification as a strategy to improve working conditions for nonunion, project-based workers in creative industries where labour regulations are light and collective labour identities have weak precedent. For example, New York’s Model Alliance launched a campaign in 2018 for a binding agreement that would better protect fashion models from sexual harassment,77 and in 2017, UK academics announced the Fairwork Foundation, a proposal for a certification scheme for digital labour platforms.78 But whereas those initiatives are dealing with for-profit businesses, w.a.g.e. engages nonprofits whose commitment to the arts and artists is central to their public missions. This normative dimension is integral to w.a.g.e. ’s ability to make a case for reforming payment practices – and it allows artists to stake a claim on art institutions as also their institutions. Contra corporate social responsibility, w.a.g.e. ’s certification program resonates with what activists have recently termed “worker-driven social responsibility,” which “[incorporates] workers’ organizations and community organizations into the setting of standards and the monitoring of compliance,” and “[draws] on the knowledge and trust of workers and their organizations.”79

co unter-at e l i e r w.a.g.e.’s strategies arise from a particular organizational form and set of processes. As it came to focus on certification, w.a.g.e. confronted the limits of its composition as a grassroots activist collective. When the group was mainly raising awareness about nonpayment, “[h]orizontal, non-hierarchical, consensus-based process worked well,” w.a.g.e. reflected.80 But “policy change” by contrast, they found, “involves sustained, internal work. It means developing models through writing, research, correspondence, making presentations, as well as meeting and organizing together with others who are making similar or compatible efforts through groundwork and investigating the possibilities of institutional change.”81 Marking its formalization, w.a.g.e. incorporated in 2011 as a nonprofit organization. It is overseen by a board of directors who at the time of writing include co-founder and artist A.L. Steiner, artist Andrea Fraser, curators Richard Birkett and Howie Chen, and academic Suhail Malik. Steeped in the same institutional forms taken by its interlocutors, w.a.g.e. is a charitable nonprofit sustained by foundation grants as well as artists’ donations and speaking fees, and a one-time

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crowdfunding campaign that raised nearly $53,000. Since 2014, w.a.g.e. has employed Soskolne on a full-time basis, and contractors are periodically hired for policy and technical projects. While it advocates on behalf of artists as workers, w.a.g.e. is not a democratic worker organization in the way that a union elects representatives, for example. w.a.g.e. ’s nonprofit status, policy orientation, and community support system are traits it shares with many altlabour groups. w.a.g.e. ’s hybrid makeup – part-guild, part-policy institute, part-tech incubator, part theorist – also reflects how its protagonists have turned to alternate ends the flexible competencies, network sociality, and forms of social practice characteristic of contemporary artists. While currently led by Soskolne, w.a.g.e. is energized by collective cognition and community engagement. w.a.g.e.’s early public forums and nonpayment survey were organizationally formative inquiries into artists’ conditions. Since then, w.a.g.e.’s research practice has been geared toward what was referred to earlier as policy from below. w.a.g.e.’s mission to transform nonprofit institutions’ economic relations with artists was supported early on by one of its key allies, Artists Space. w.a.g.e. aimed to certify Artists Space (where Soskolne also worked as a grant writer), but this prospect “was going to take time, investigation, and discussion, so w.a.g.e. proposed a temporary partnership with Artists Space to help us in that process.”82 In 2011, the gallery served as a kind of policy lab for what became w.a.g.e. certification. Artists Space opened its ledgers to w.a.g.e., and w.a.g.e. also programed gallery events on art and labour. As part of its budget research, w.a.g.e. compared Artists Space’s payment history to carfac rates – one example of how w.a.g.e. drew upon the policy contributions of artists’ organizations outside of the US which had proven that bringing standards to the sector was not unattainable. w.a.g.e. has also dialogued with groups such as the Scottish Artists Union and the UK-based Precarious Workers Brigade. Soskolne’s conversations with art labour organizations, as well as with select artists, researchers, and curators, have been integral to w.a.g.e. ’s policy formation process. These conversations sometimes piggybacked on speaking invitations from institutions, indicating one way in which w.a.g.e. has leveraged art world conventions, namely its economy of events, to access transnational support and an audience to whom to float ideas. w.a.g.e. has also conducted in-depth interviews and focus groups with artists and

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collectors, among others, to gather input on policy proposals. And w.a.g.e. has contributed to wider policy-from-below initiatives, including The People’s Cultural Plan, which consolidated proposals from several New York activist groups for advancing intersectional responses to systemic inequalities within the city’s cultural sector.83 Vital to w.a.g.e. ’s process is a “summit” model where policies are deliberated and decided upon. Typically following community consultation, working groups, and iterative policy drafts, w.a.g.e. summits are one to three-day closed meetings with a small group invited by w.a.g.e. and structured around sessions on specific policy points. The details of the w.a.g.e. certification program, for example, were solidified at a 2014 summit in New York City, whose participants included w.a.g.e. co-founder A.K. Burns, artist Andrea Fraser, Artists Space staff, curator Howie Chen, and researchers Alison Gerber, Stephanie Luce, Andrew Ross and Marina Vishmidt, and Soskolne. In 2017, w.a.g.e. hosted a summit to develop policy for a blockchain-based iteration of The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement. Initially published in 1971, this agreement has been described as an “attempt at reconfiguring ownership relations around works of art,” and was prepared by curator and art dealer Seth Siegelaub and lawyer Robert Projansky.84 The agreement was designed to be used by artists who sell their work commercially and includes among its terms a royalty right whereby the artist is entitled to 15 per cent of the proceeds when a work is profitably resold. Aiming to rejuvenate this contract by bringing it online and using the blockchain to track artwork ownership and royalties, this project is an example of w.a.g.e.’s expansion into digital platform development. It is notable that w.a.g.e.’s artist resale summit took place at the ica in London, to which two former Artists Space curators relocated – w.a.g.e.’s transnationalization thus mirrors the mobility of art world labour. w.a.g.e. has closed a gap in artists’ collective representation in the US art system. Yet w.a.g.e. ’s organizational form is not without tensions. w.a.g.e. ’s endurance testifies to the commitment of its core organizer, but its current reliance on one person raises questions about sustainability and institutional memory – and it is doubtful that such a lean organization would have the capacity to pressure, let alone administer, widespread institutional certifications. While it canvasses artists through a variety of means, w.a.g.e. remains directed by a single artist-organizer and is steered by a small core – a political structure that strikes parallels to early craft guilds. A worker

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organization’s capacity to mobilize members in struggles is, however, vital to winning gains. Soskolne is alert to the tension between horizontal and vertical models: “I think to totally decentralize and have people … representing themselves” – via chapters, for instance – “it starts to get really unruly, and I worry about that. But I also can see that w.a.g.e. can’t be an autocratic movement. It can’t be run by one person indefinitely.”85 w.a.g.e. ’s economic independence is another issue: as a nonprofit, w.a.g.e. is eligible for grants, but this also makes it dependent on foundations, which are a key broker in the matrix of institutional relations that w.a.g.e. seeks to transform. These are some of the dilemmas that form the background to w.a.g.e.’s most recent strategic innovation, wagency .

d i spers i ng pr e ssu r e , platfo rmi ng ne g o t i at i o n s Shortly after the institutional certification program was launched, w.a.g.e. board member Suhail Malik floated a parallel strategy: to certify individual artists that commit to work exclusively with w.a.g.e.-certified galleries and museums.86 While this closed-shop model was abandoned, the artist-certification idea evolved, over three years of policy and technology development, into wagency – a digital platform and sectoral coalition that upholds w.a.g.e.’s payment standards. After Soskolne and some board members brainstormed online, w.a.g.e. held a summit on artist certification in November 2015 in London, which produced a preliminary framework that Soskolne went on to revise through policy drafts, grant applications, presentations, and focus groups. With wagency, w.a.g.e. expanded its strategy from mobilizing institutions (via a moral appeal to reputation) to organizing artists (via socio-technical practices of solidarity). wagency’s technological infrastructure was designed by artist and programer Daniel Sauter, whom w.a.g.e. contracted to automate w.a.g.e. Certification and to begin to build the suite of tools underpinning wagency to enable artists to make fee requests through w.a.g.e.’s website. Hinging on artists’ participation, w.a.g.e.ncy is a mechanism to “self-organize around the demand to be paid.”87 Launched in September 2018, the wagency platform allows artists to calculate, request, and negotiate fees. Its users – wagents in w.a.g.e.’s idiom – pay a five-dollar monthly subscription, providing w.a.g.e. with an independent income stream. When a wagent is

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invited to contribute to an exhibition or program at an institution, they log on to wagency to generate a fee schedule. After entering the institution name and content type, the platform calculates a minimum fee according to w.a.g.e. ’s taoe algorithm and using budget information from GuideStar, a database of irs -reported financial profiles of US nonprofits for which w.a.g.e. holds a licence. Using wagency ’s email delivery system, the artist dispatches a fee request to their institutional contact in an autopopulated, customizable message, which appears as sent from w.a.g.e. and is copied to the artist. The email gives the recipient the option to either accept the request or negotiate. If they click “accept,” the wagent ’s status, which is reflected in a live svg logo in their email signature, becomes “Certified wagent .” If they click “negotiate,” and the institution offers a subpar rate, but the artist refuses it – w.a.g.e. describes this as a “boycott” – the artist remains certified: they upheld w.a.g.e. standards. An artist that accepts a subpar fee is not certified but retains the status “Active wagent .” wagency notifies institutions about payments due and follows the thirty-day term of New York’s Freelance Isn’t Free Act, a regulation forwarded by the Freelancers Union. Payments are not processed via wagency , but the platform does afford the archiving of transactions, which could be integrated into backend compliance monitoring for institutional certification. wagency is a workaround to resource limitations. w.a.g.e.’s institutional certification program is mostly “one person … applying pressure to thousands of organizations,” says Sosklone.88 Even if w.a.g.e. hired more staff, “[t]here still won’t be enough womanpower in w.a.g.e. to put the pressure on institutions that’s needed to shift the field completely.”89 wagency ’s strategic gambit is to enlist artists’ direct participation in the fight for fees, dispersing pressure on galleries to respect w.a.g.e. standards and, ultimately, to certify. “Now,” Soskolne explains, “it goes from being one person to being hundreds of people that are applying pressure.”90 This shift has implications for w.a.g.e. ’s organizational identity – the organizer function is partially detached from w.a.g.e. staff, and w.a.g.e. moves from having a general constituency to a paying membership. Politically, wagency integrates vertical and horizontal modes of engagement: policies architected by a core collective are spread and enforced through a distributed network. Depending on individual artists taking the decision to exercise agency, wagency

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operationalizes the assumption that artists should take greater responsibility for transforming the culture of nonpayment: “by placing the onus on artists to make demands,” writes w.a.g.e. , “we’re also holding them accountable for their willingness to self-exploit through their claims to exceptionality.”91 wagency’s membership fee was set at a flat rate to “reinforce common interests,”92 but w.a.g.e. has been frank about “the dual class position of artists.”93 As an organizing device and a policy framework, wagency was designed to work within and against divisions of economic and cultural capital between artists through protocols of crossclass solidarity. Permitting wagents to shuttle between “certified” and “active” status, for example, was intended to prevent wagency’s membership from skewing to an exclusive club: “we don’t want to create a situation in which only those who can afford to turn down opportunities can be certified.”94 But wagency also calls on artists who are in a position to refuse subpar fees to do so as a gesture of solidarity with artists who are less able to forgo payment. w.a.g.e.’s logic was that “the 1% would take the risk on behalf of the dark matter.”95 At the same time, w.a.g.e., attuned to reputational economies, assumed that “big names will inspire others to sign on.”96 Still, w.a.g.e. regards dark matter as its “base,” and wagency does not simply position “‘successful’ artists” as benevolent protectors.97 Rather, it seeks to regulate these artists when they function as employers. Higher-profile artists frequently hire studio assistants, who are often younger artists working precariously. For assistants, the artist studio is a workplace. But here, too, w.a.g.e. troubled the lack of standards. In response, w.a.g.e. requires Certified wagents to use a customizable contract to formalize the artist-assistant relationship. Delivered via the wagency platform, the wagency Work Agreement provides space and context for identifying terms of employment, including worker classification, job description, minimum rates, hours, protections against harassment, health and safety provisions, and benefits. The artist assistant contract indicates wagency ’s potential to scale across the often-concealed workforces that prop up the art world’s luminosity. wagency presents artists with a negotiating channel to which worker initiative and mutual trust are decisive. Essentially, says Sauter, the platform “facilitates the conversation” between artist and institution about fees.98 But wagency requires the artist to make

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the first move. As Soskolne explains, “the idea of wagency is to flip the labour relation … wagents don’t wait for institutions to offer arbitrary fees. Instead, wagents determine the cost of their own labour and request w.a.g.e. fees through the wagency platform. They say, ‘this is my rate,’ which is the way that an independent contractor would normally work.”99 Artists’ self-representation is performed, however, within programed constraints: “you cannot actively request fees that are substandard.”100 wagency’s efficacy depends on its perceived credibility. From a “communication design” perspective, says Sauter, wagency’s goal is to “build trust on both sides.”101 Using GuideStar in the calculation of artist fees, for instance, conveys that the recommended rate is based on accurate data. What Sauter calls the “trust circle” is also formed by interface familiarity: to institutions, wagency ought to have the appearance of “sensible accounting software.”102 And upon receiving a fee request, an institutional representative is able to click through to the w.a.g.e. website, which lists certified institutions and provides the fee structure rationale. While w.a.g.e. initially conceived of artist certification as “a more adversarial us vs. them approach,” it came to steer away from antagonistic framing.103 Whether wagency prompts a nonprofit to honour one wagent’s fee request or nudges a gallery toward institutional certification, the platform constitutes through its use a “coalition” of artists and institutions, says Soskolne.104 Recognizing both of these parties have administrative lives to maintain, wagency builds in incentives for users such as allowing them to track payments within their accounts. As payment data are gathered, wagency could also be utilized as a research tool for aggregate reporting on the sector’s payment practices.105 wagency faces the challenge of network effects. Its capacity to systemically disrupt payment norms would “require critical mass.”106 Before launching wagency , w.a.g.e. approached select artists to join, and more than one hundred wagents had signed on in its inaugural week. Soskolne hopes that artists “will want … to be seen on … the right side of equity.”107 But artists may prove to be reluctant wagents for several reasons, beginning with the platform’s novelty. “[W]e’re inventing this new system that nobody has ever seen before, therefore of course it’s going to be complicated and not easy,” admits Soskolne.108 Beyond user experience challenges, wagency ’s take-up could be inhibited by the sheer weight of the

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nonpayment and multiple jobholding norms – which reflect and reinforce the expectation that artists are unlikely to extract a sustainable livelihood from their practice. Artists might also fear missing out on opportunities in a highly competitive, gate-kept economy of visibility. For some artists, the calculated fee, imagines Soskolne, may “be sort of a shock at first – ‘I’m not worth that much!’”109 Such a reaction is, however, one of w.a.g.e. ’s intentions: to recalibrate artists’ self-assessment of their value. As the platform went live, Soskolne was willing to consider wagency as an experiment, or a “test of what artists really want and what they are actually willing to do.”110 At a moment when so much contemporary art reaffirms the agency of historically marginalized social subjects, wagency ’s fate will be something of a barometer of artists’ belief in solidarity and collective agency for themselves. wagency was designed for artists but has broader labour market relevance. w.a.g.e. declares on its website: “we see the contemporary fight for non-wage compensation as part of a wider struggle by all gig workers who supply content without payment standards or an effective means to organize.”111 w.a.g.e. has already presented the platform to the National Writers Union, a New York-based union of freelance writers. While w.a.g.e. ’s leverage resides in the moral claims that are made by nonprofit art institutions, it is not a leap to imagine the application of a wagency -like platform to other cultural production contexts, such as live music venues, or to digital labour platforms that are currently accelerating the degradation of the value of professional creative work. As wagency ’s developer, w.a.g.e. can also be located in the emergent space of “worker-tech” – “organising platforms … for contract and self-employed workers to develop forms of … mutual support.”112 Initiatives range from coworker.org, to The Workers Lab, Turkopticon, and worker-owned platforms, or “platform cooperatives”113 – a field of worker-led innovation in which altlabour is a key actor. To this field, wagency does not simply add a contract generator for independent workers – although commercial platforms such as And Co already do this. If a platform is a “performative infrastructure,”114 wagency distinctly enables artists to enact payment negotiations within the protective bounds of collectively set labour standards. This is not, however, to lapse into “technological solutionism.”115 wagency is a technical platform that is

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insufficient on its own: it is co-constituted by inquiry with cultural workers, participative policy formation, conjunctural analysis, and persistent effort to convince artists to place the value of solidarity before hope in exceptionality.

o r gani z i ng, ex pa n d e d This chapter has offered an introduction to w.a.g.e. through a case study of its strategies for combating economic inequality within the US nonprofit art sector. This account, while partial, illustrates that the burden, but also the inventiveness of organizing is high where there is no preset path, such as collective bargaining, to pursue. w.a.g.e.’s “repertoire of contention”116 has spanned: crafting a critical idiom around inequality in the arts; writing policy toward a more equitable distribution of resources; implementing strategy to raise labour standards; and developing a platform that harnesses the distributive properties of the internet to turn a challenge – a dispersed constituency – into a strength – multiplied pressure. Altlabour groups such as w.a.g.e. reflect and require an expanded conception of what counts as organizing. This is not, however, to make a virtue out of the difficulties of improving workers’ rights in the absence of workplace-based power. On this point, recent events provide a glimpse of a potential fresh tactic. Staff at the New Museum – an institution that w.a.g.e. has pressured, unsuccessfully, to certify – mounted a successful union drive.117 This could be an opening for a new exhibition of dark matter solidarities: unionized staff could bargain to build w.a.g.e. standards into collective agreements, traditional employees thereby using their status to support those who do not have a seat at the table. For w.a.g.e. , an ongoing challenge remains artists’ openness to identifying as workers. Says Soskolne, “I think we (artists) would do well to de-exceptionalize our labour … and they (institutions) would do well by looking toward us as workers.”118 This does not necessitate shutting down other identifications – but it is difficult to imagine realizing greater economic equality within and beyond the arts without such a shift in collective ways of seeing.

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no t e s 1 w.a.g.e. , “Introducing wagency ,” 17 September 2018, https://mailchi. mp/wageforwork/introducing-wagency. 2 See Helena Reckitt, “Support Acts,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 5, no. 1 (2016): 6–30, 25. 3 This building was located in Brooklyn’s “Industry City.” On Industry City, see Lise Soskolne, “Who Owns a Vacant Lot?,” Shifter 21: Other Spaces, 2013, https://shifter-magazine.com/soskolne_vacant_lot. 4 Kyle Chayka, “Advocacy Group w.a.g.e. on What Its First Survey Tells Us,”n.d.,https://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/801870/advocacy-groupwage-on-what-its-first-survey-tells-us-about-how-artists-are-treated-in-nyc. 5 Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge: mit Press, 2009). 6 Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, eds., Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 7 Jeff Khonsary and Kristina Lee Podesva, eds., Institutions by Artists, Volume 1, (Vancouver: Fillip Editions, 2012). 8 Cecilia Widenheim, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lisa Rosendahl, Michele Masucci, and Annika Engvist, Work, Work, Work: A Reader on Art and Labour (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). 9 See Gerald M. Monroe, “The Artists Union of New York,” Art Journal 31, no. 1 (1972): 17–20; Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 10 Nicole S. Cohen and Greig de Peuter, “Creative Accounting: w.a.g.e. ’s Fight for Artist Fees,” Frieze 170, April 2017, https://culturalworkersorganize.org/creative-accounting-w-a-g-e-s-fight-for-artist-fees/. 11 Leah Faith Vosko, Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 19–26. 12 Immanuel Ness, ed., New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism (Oakland: PM Press, 2014). 13 Josh Eidelson, “Alt-labor,” The American Prospect: Ideas, Politics & Power, 29 January 2013, https://prospect.org/notebook/alt-labor/; Ruth Milkman and Edward Ott, eds., New Labor in New York (Ithaca: ilr Press, 2014). 14 w.a.g.e. embraced Sholette’s term to conceptualize its core constituency. See Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2010).

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15 Soskolne, “Public Assets,” (presented at Common Practice, Platform Theatre, Central Saint Martins, 15 February 2015), http://www.commonpractice.org.uk/public-assets-small-scale-arts-organisations-productionvalue/. 16 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 17 Soskolne, “Public Assets.” 18 w.a.g.e., “Introducing wagency .” 19 John Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilization, Collectivism, and Long Waves (London: Routledge, 1998). 20 k8 Hardy, “w.a.g.e. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy),” (presented at Democracy in America: The National Campaign, Convergence Center at Park Avenue Armory, Creative Time, New York, 2008). 21 w.a.g.e. , “w.a.g.e. Wo/manifesto,” w . a . g . e . , https://wageforwork.com/ about/womanifesto#top. 22 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 18–9. 23 Ibid., 16, 15, 19. 24 Ibid., 17. 25 Gerald Raunig, “The Double Criticism of Parrhesia: Answering the Question ‘What is a Progressive (Art) Institution?’,” Transversal Texts, trans. Aileen Derieg, April 2004, https://transversal.at/transversal/0504/ raunig/en. 26 w.a.g.e. , “On Merit,” The Artist as Debtor: The Work of Artists in the Age of Speculative Capitalism, Cooper Union, 23 January 2015, http:// artanddebt.org/artist-as-debtor/. 27 Ibid. 28 w.a.g.e. , “wagency Artist Certification & Coalition – Internal Draft,” https://wageforwork.com/certification#top. 29 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2018), 140. 30 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 31 Andrew Ross, “The Mental Labor Problem,” Social Text 63 18, no. 2 (2000): 1–31, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/31872. 32 Isabell Lorey, “Governmentality and Self-Precarization: On the Normalization of Cultural Producers,” Transversal Text, trans. Lisa Rosenblatt and Dagmar Fink, January 2006, https://transversal.at/ transversal/1106/lorey/en. 33 Allison Gerber, The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017), 29. 34 Whitney Kimball, “w.a.g.e. Mocks Documenta Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargriev For Use of Free Labour,” ArtFCity, 11 February 2013,

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http://artfcity.com/2013/02/11/w-a-g-e-mocks-documenta-curator-carolynchristov-bakargiev-for-use-of-free-labor/. Alex Greenberger, “w.a.g.e. Issues Open Letter to New Museum about the Institution’s Planned Expansion,” Artnews, 16 May 2016, https:// www.artnews.com/art-news/news/w-a-g-e-issues-open-letter-after-new-museumannounces-expansion-6353/. Lise Soskolne in discussion with the author, 17 August 2018. John Kelly and Vidu Badigannavar, “Union Organizing,” in Union Organization and Activity, eds. John Kelly and Paul Willman (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2004), 32–50, 33. Ibid., 33. w.a.g.e., “Introducing wagency .” Greig de Peuter and Nicole S. Cohen, “Emerging Labour Politics in Creative Industries,” in The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries, eds. Kate Oakley and Justin O’Connor (London: Routledge, 2015), 310–2. Grace Halio, “ica Philadelphia Receives w.a.g.e. Certification,” Artnews, 22 March 2018, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ica-philadelphiareceives-w-g-e-certification-10018/. Art Workers Council Frankfurt, “Working Artists and the Greater Economy: An Interview with w.a.g.e. ,” Art Workers Council Frankfurt/M., March 2013, https://awc-ffm.org/. w.a.g.e., “Introducing wagency .” Ibid. w.a.g.e. , “On Merit.” Ibid. See Nicolas Lampert, A People’s Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements (New York: The New Press, 2015), 162. See www.carfac.ca. Jane McAlevey, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting the Labor Movement (Brooklyn: Verso, 2014). w.a.g.e. , “No Standards without Standardization,” 22 March 2018, https:// mailchi.mp/wageforwork/no-standards-without-standardization-995069. Lise Soskolne in discussion with the author, 18 December 2014. w.a.g.e. , “No Standards without Standardization.” Sadao in Benjamin Sutton, “Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art is the First Museum Certified by w.a.g.e. ,” Hyperallergic, 23 March 2018,https://hyperallergic.com/434372/institute-contemporary-art-philadelphiawage-certified/.

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54 Soskolne in Sarah Jordan, “The Art of Fair Pay,” The Philadelphia Citizen, 27 June 2018, https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-art-of-fair-pay/. 55 Ibid. 56 Soskolne, 17 August 2018. 57 Soskolne in Conor Risch, “w.a.g.e. Advocates for Artists Working for Fair Pay,” Photo District News, 9 July 2015, https://pdnonline.com/features/fine-art-photography/w-a-g-e-advocates-for-artists-workingfor-fair-pay/. 58 Mark Graham, Vili Lehdonvirta, Alex Wood, Helena Bernard, Isis Hjorth, and David Peter Simon, The Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work at the Global Margins (Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, 2017), 12. 59 Soskolne, 17 August 2018. 60 Roland J. Kushner and Randy Cohen, “National Arts Index 2016: An Annual Measure of the Vitality of Arts and Culture in the United States: 2002–2013,” Americans for the Arts, 2016, https://www.americansforthe arts.org/sites/default/files/2016%20NAI%20%20Final%20Report%20 %202-23-16.pdf, 2. 61 Soskolne in Risch, “w.a.g.e. Advocates for Artists Working for Fair Pay.” 62 Soskolne, 17 August 2018. 63 Trong Gia Nguyen, “w.a.g.e. Against the Machine,” Art21 Magazine, 27 April 2009, https://magazine.art21.org/2009/04/27/wage-against-themachine/#.Xi82QhdKjgs. 64 Soskolne in Risch, “w.a.g.e. Advocates for Artists Working for Fair Pay.” 65 Sadao in Sutton, “Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art is the First Museum Certified by w.a.g.e. .” 66 Tim Schneider, “What It Means for ica Philadelphia to Become the First w.a.g.e. -Certified Museum – and Why Other Institutions Should Care,” Artnet News, 28 March 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ ica-philadelphia-wage-certification-1253390. 67 Sadao in Schneider, “What It Means for ica Philadelphia to Become the First w.a.g.e. -Certified Museum.” 68 Sadao in Sutton, “Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art is the First Museum Certified by w.a.g.e. .” 69 Soskolne, 17 August 2018. 70 w.a.g.e., “No Standards without Standardization.” 71 Schneider, “What It Means for ica Philadelphia to Become the First w.a.g.e.-Certified Museum.” 72 Ibid. 73 Hrag Vartanian, “How Much Will Artists Be Paid under the New w.a.g.e. Certification Program?,” Hyperallergic, 14 October 2014,

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https://hyperallergic.com/155160/how-much-will-artists-be-paid-under-thenew-w-a-g-e-certification-program/. Sadao in ica Philadelphia, “Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania Becomes First Museum Certified by w.a.g.e. ,” Institute of Contemporary Art, 12 March 2018, https://icaphila.org/press_ releases/institute-of-contemporary-art-at-the-university-of-pennsylvaniabecomes-first-museum-certified-by-w-a-g-e/. “Announcing w.a.g.e. Certification,” Squeaky Wheel, 2017, http:// squeaky.org/announcing-w-a-g-e-certification-for-2017/. Don Wells, “Too Weak for the Job: Corporate Codes of Conduct, NonGovernmental Organizations, and the Regulation of International Labour Standards,” Global Social Policy 7, no. 1 (2007): 51–74, https://doi. org/10.1177/1468018107073911. wsr Network, “A Comparative Analysis of the Model Alliance’s respect Program,” wsr : Worker-Driven Social Responsibility Network, 15 June 2018, https://wsr-network.org/ resource/a-comparative-analysis-of-the-model-alliances-respect-program/. Mark Graham and Jamie Woodcock, “Towards a Fairer Platform Economy: Introducing the Fairwork Foundation,” Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research 29, no. 1 (2018), http://www. alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/article/view/22455. Janice Fine and Tim Bartley, “Raising the Floor: New Directions in Public and Private Enforcement of Labor Standards in the United States,” Journal of Industrial Relations 61, no. 2 (2018): 252–76, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0022185618784100, 6. Art Workers Council Frankfurt, “Working Artists and the Greater Economy.” Ibid. Lauren O’Neill-Butler, “w.a.g.e. ,” ArtForum International, 23 November 2011, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/w-a-g-e-discuss-theircertification-projects-29628. The People’s Cultural Plan, 2017, https://www.peoplesculturalplan.org/. Lauren van Haaften-Schick, “Conceptualizing Artists’ Rights,” Oxford Handbooks Online: Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), https://doi. org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935352.013.27. Soskolne, 17 August 2018. Ibid. w.a.g.e. , “Introducing wagency .” Soskolne, 17 August 2018. Ibid.

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90 Ibid. 91 w.a.g.e. , “w.a.g.e. . Mini-Summit,” 2015. 92 w.a.g.e. , “w.a.g.e.n.c.y . Artist Certification & Coalition – Internal Draft.” 93 Soskolne, 17 August 2018. 94 w.a.g.e. , “w.a.g.e. . Mini-Summit.” 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 w.a.g.e. , “w.a.g.e.n.c.y . Artist Certification & Coalition – Internal Draft.” 98 Daniel Sauter in discussion with the author, 14 September 2018. 99 Soskolne, 17 August 2018. 100 Sauter, 14 September 2018. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 w.a.g.e. , “w.a.g.e. . Mini-Summit.” 104 Soskolne, 17 August 2018. 105 Ibid. 106 w.a.g.e. , “w.a.g.e. . Mini-Summit.” 107 Soskolne, 17 August 2018. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 Soskolne in Tim Schneider, “w.a.g.e. Just Released a Calculator That Tells Artists If They’re Getting Paid Fairly for Their Work,” Artnet News, 21 September 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/wagency-artistsfair-pay-1352893. 111 w.a.g.e. , “About,” https://wageforwork.com/about#top. 112 Matthew Taylor in Benedict Dellot and Fabian Wallace-Stephens, “The Age of Automation: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and the Future of Low-Skilled Work,” rsa Action and Research Centre, September 2017, https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/reports/rsa_the-age-ofautomation-report.pdf, 3. 113 Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 155–92. 114 Jose van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2013), 29. 115 Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: Public Affairs, 2014). 116 Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1986), 2.

W.A.G.E. as Alternative Worker Organization 117 Colin Moynihan, “Workers at New Museum in Manhattan Vote to Unionize,” New York Times, 24 January 2019, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/01/24/arts/design/new-museum-vote-to-unionize.html. 118 Soskolne, 17 August 2018.

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Affective Strategies and Healing Justice

7 Rising from Survival to Social Justice: Converging Media and Social Movements in India Kiran Prasad

i ntro duc t i o n The competition for rapid economic growth, mass production, and an affluent lifestyle has resulted in a race among nations for prosperity. It was in the midst of such an unbridled situation that the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development called upon nations to pause and reflect on the sustainability of the approach to economic development they were pursuing. As of 2015, the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (sdgs) which formed this agenda had been adopted by all United Nations member states. The sdgs recognize that ending poverty and inequalities must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, conserve the environment, and spur economic growth. Goal five of the sdgs specifically calls to achieve gender equality and empower women and girls. Goal ten calls for reducing inequality within and among countries – developed and developing – in a global partnership. While India has often been hailed as one of the success stories of economic globalization, it is beset with glaring gaps in gender equality and social progress. R. Prasannan, the chief of the New Delhi bureau of The Week, raises some interesting questions about the Indian economy in his review of T.N. Ninan’s book, The Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future (2015). He writes: “Which is the most common animal imagery of India? An ambling elephant? A ferocious tiger? A royally lazy lion? A sacred cow? All these animals have been dumped on us in herds and packs by economic writers … T. N. Ninan, one of India’s finest economic

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writers, uses animal imagery, but the most appropriate one – the tortoise. May not sound very flattering but this book is not a flattering account of the so-called India story. As the subtitle suggests, it is about both challenge and promise.”1 The challenge lies in a serious examination of where development ends and destruction begins in the context of the natural environment, and the promise is about well-being and sustainable development. In a continuing description of the imagery, Prasannan writes: “the tortoise imagery fits India most. Slow-moving to the extent of being immobile, cautious to the extent of being cowardly: withdrawing at the slightest hint of danger. But hard-shelled, not-so-easy to break and, for all you know, the one that could win the race in the end, like in the fable. But till it wins, the bets are off.”2 The examination of extreme inequality in India provides a needed jolt to the future of globalization and capitalism. While the urbanrural divide is pronounced in twenty-six African, Latin American and Asian countries leading to skewed development, South Asia, including India, is home to the largest rural-urban disparities. These disparities are marked by gender discrimination, which is complicated by characteristics including residence (rural areas), ethnic background (Indigenous minorities), and socio-economic status (poor households). Poverty and difficult physical and social environments are rife, in addition to women being exposed to exploitive and abusive treatment, all of which have an adverse impact on the lives of Indian citizens.3 In the light of these stark development disparities and inequalities, the pursuit of the sdg s must be viewed as an attempt to reconcile economic growth with social justice through alternative development approaches.4 Women and the marginalized communities of India are playing a key role in spearheading social movements that aim for a more equitable distribution of resources, the conservation of natural resources, and the right to information and sustainable development. As women and tribal communities are often excluded from the mainstream media, they must make use of alternative media and other forms of mobilization such as protests, campaigns, and social movements.5 This chapter examines the use of innovative forms of communication that have resulted in moving women and tribal communities through poverty and disempowerment, to tasting success in their march toward social justice and the achievement of the sdg s.

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growi ng i neq ua l i t y as a ch allenge to h uman d e v e l o p m e n t The Human Development Report6 points out that India’s Human Development Index score shrank by 27 per cent over the past decades due to the rise of different forms of inequality. While India ranks fourth on the Forbes list of billionaires, its Human Development Index was 131 in 2017. Journalist P. Sainath voices the growing concern over the “stunning growth of inequalities” in India, with the increasing number of Indian billionaires every year on one hand and the growing number of farmers committing suicide on the other.7 According to him, “as many as 3,100,000 farmers have killed themselves in 20 years between 1995 and 2015 … (while) the number of Indian dollar billionaires grew to 8 in 2000, 53 in 2012, and 121 in March 2018. The wealth of these 121 billionaires accounts for 22% of India’s gdp .”8 India is the third largest economy in the world in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (ppp ), a measure of actual standard of living, with a ppp of almost $8 trillion. In 2016, India climbed sixteen places from 55th to 39th on the Global Competitiveness Index prepared by the World Economic Forum, with the economy characterized by improved business sophistication and goods market efficiency.9 This remarkable economic achievement has yet to be translated into human development for the vast majority however, as India’s rank slipped to 131 among 188 countries in terms of human development, and 132 out of 146 countries in the Gender Inequality Index, reflecting the dismal status of women.10 The sliding human development indicators in spite of economic growth make it clear that the sdg s cannot be achieved without the active pursuit of gender equality, environmental conservation, and social progress in India. The social movements that are underway in India foreground the struggles of communities of communities that seek more equality in opportunities and equitable benefits of sustainable development. The following section gives an insight into the glaring gender gap in India, which is the key inequality to be bridged for the achievement of sdg s.

glari ng gend er ga p i n d e v e l o p m e n t The 2016 Human Development Report11 red flags the stark reality that the largest gender disparity in development was in South Asia, where the female hdi value was 20 per cent lower than for

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males; India accounts for the largest gender disparity in the region. In rural India, where teenage marriages are common, women face insecurity regarding a regular income, food, shelter, and access to health care. It is an understatement to say that violence against women is multidimensional; it is structural, brutal, and a part of everyday life.12 Indian women marry at a median age of just seventeen years, and 16 per cent of women aged fifteen to nineteen have already started bearing children according to the 2005–06 National Family Health Survey.13 With 212 per one hundred thousand live births, India ranks among the countries with the highest Maternal Mortality Rates (mmr ), accounting for one-third of maternal deaths in 2015 worldwide.14 It is estimated that every year, seventy-eight thousand women die during pregnancy and childbirth, even though 75 per cent of these deaths can be prevented by health care.15 India is ranked 170 out of 185 countries in the prevalence of anaemia among women (48 per cent of women are anaemic), has the highest rate of malnourished children in the world at 44 per cent, and stands at 114 out of 132 in stunted growth of children, with a 38.7 per cent incidence of developmental issues in children.16 A collaborative study by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (ncpcr ) and Young Lives India (yli ) revealed that India was eleventh in countries worldwide with the highest incidence of child marriages, accounting for 47 per cent of all children, with thirty-nine thousand minor girls being married every day in India. unicef further points out that India accounts for 33 per cent of the global total of over seven hundred million women married as children, leading to high levels of depression among them. The National Crime Records Bureau estimates that over twenty thousand young mothers, mainly housewives, commit suicide every year, making them the largest demographic group in India to commit suicide, followed closely by farmers.17 The triggers for these deaths range from an unplanned pregnancy to an abusive or alcoholic husband, pressures to have a male child, and hormonal changes, among others. The Programme for Improving Mental Health Care (prime ) project in Madhya Pradesh is an example of an intervention program for neonatal depression related problems.18 Gender discrimination and violence against women have had a profound effect on the sex ratio in India, which has been dropping steadily for the past fifty years. In 2011, the sex ratio of females stood at 940 females per one thousand males, the lowest ratio after

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independence.19 The Pink Economic Survey (2018), which is the first national data of its kind, gives estimates based on the sex ratio of the last child (srlc ), which is heavily male skewed, to show that twenty-one million girls were unwanted by parents in India. These human development indices show that India has failed to convert its economic growth into transformations in the lives of women and children, who are among the most vulnerable populations. In light of the persistent inequality of women, the gender equality survey of the World Economic Forum places India at 87 out of 142 countries in the Global Gender Gap Index. 20 India is ranked 126 on educational attainment, 134 on economic participation and opportunity and third last in the health and survival of women. India has the lowest rates of women’s labour force participation in Asia. While only 27 per cent of the women are in the workforce, they have to contend with a 25 per cent pay gap. According to the Gender Diversity Benchmark Survey for 2011 and 2014, Indian companies lose 11 per cent of their female workforce every year as women are haunted by “daughterly guilt” and maternal guilt that leads them to prioritise caring for parents, children, and extended family by leaving their careers.21 The 2011 census reveals that about twenty-seven million households, constituting 11 per cent of total households in the country, are headed by women and are often among the poorest.22 Violence against women including domestic violence is not a random event but is both consequence and cause of gender inequality.23 Studies indicate a link between women’s employment and domestic violence. National Family Health Survey (nfhs -3) data reports that there is much higher prevalence of violence against women who were employed in the past twelve months (40 per cent) than women who were not employed (29 per cent).24 Studies show that women who have more education than their husbands, who earn more, or who are the sole earners in their families, have a higher likelihood of experiencing intimate partner violence than women who are not employed or who are less educated than their spouse.25 This reality in India contradicts the widely held global perception that better economic status for women lowers their risk of marital and domestic violence. It is estimated that around 30 per cent of the sex workers in India are below eighteen years old and many women have been pushed into sex work.26 It is even more shocking that, as of late, several panchayats (local administrative bodies especially in North

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India) have begun to hand out punishments to women that include approving their sale to criminals, gang rape, excommunication from the village (along with their families), and social boycott by the community. Such local bodies are not instruments of political empowerment, rather they are emerging as instruments of oppression of women. Notwithstanding the glaring gender gap in development, women have assumed the leadership of many crucial social movements in India that have been recognized as responsible for a paradigm shift toward sustainable development.27 The right to information campaign led by Aruna Roy, the struggle for natural resources led by Medha Patkar, the sustainable agriculture movement led by Vandana Shiva, and a host of local agitations led by women like C.K. Janu and Mayilamma, have played a leading role in steering social movements for justice and grounding sustainable development in India.28 These social movements have raised many crucial issues around inequitable processes, which see economic growth as the most important measure of development.

wo men, co nv ergi ng me d i a , a n d so c i a l m ov ements fo r s us ta i nab l e d e v e l o p m e n t The low status of human development and rising income inequalities belie the dominant claims that the benefits of development would trickle down and reduce the development gaps. Indeed, development paradigms have relied heavily on top-down approaches with information, knowledge, and expertise flowing from scientists, development planners, policy makers, and bureaucrats who advocate the “lab to land” approach symbolized by the green revolution in India. As Vandana Shiva puts it: “The so-called green revolution was neither green, nor revolutionary. It has dispossessed small peasants, pushed our rich agro-biodiversity to extinction, mined our aquifers, decertified our soils and undermined our nutrition and health … It was supposed to create prosperity, but it left farmers steeped in debt. Both in financial and ecological terms, industrial agriculture and chemical farming is based on a negative economy – it uses more inputs than it produces. The consequence is impoverished eco-systems and impoverished and indebted farmers.”29 Buttressing this argument is the case of Punjab. Once regarded the cradle of the Green Revolution, the prosperity of Punjab was the success story

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across urban and rural India for decades. Presently, Punjab has seven thousand farmers who have committed suicide, with eleven villages put up for sale and a phenomenal farmers’ debt estimated to be over 1,500 billion.30 While it is well documented that over a quarter million farmers have committed suicide from 1995 to 2010 in India, even more farmers across India are being pushed to the brink of debt and suicide. Rural communities have realized that economic progress should be ecologically sustainable and satisfy the basic needs of the community. The right to information was among the first of the many development issues to witness a concerted mass movement across India. The Magsaysay awardee and the guiding spirit behind the right to information law, Aruna Roy, led the path-breaking experiment in social audit over two decades ago. A mass organization of workers and peasants – Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (mkss ), founded by Aruna Roy in 1990 – made use of the public right to scrutinize official records at the village level and uncovered the misuse of public funds meant for local development. The mkss compelled the administration to release details of specific development projects and then conducted jan sunwayis (public hearings) in 1994. The jan sunwayis were so successful in unmasking corrupt officials that they not only had to endure public humiliation but return the money back to the villagers as well.31 This campaign is striking and worthy of emulation in poorer parts of the world, especially since it is the illiterate and oppressed rural folk who spearheaded it, and not the urban, politically aware, and educated people.32 The Right to Information Act gave a stimulus to the nationwide anti-corruption people’s campaign led by veteran social activist Anna Hazare, who fasted for thirteen days in August 2011. Hazare broke his fast only after both houses of the Indian Parliament agreed to consider the draft of the Lok Pal Bill by Team Anna that proposed an ombudsman with legal powers to act against corruption. The movement for a stringent anti-corruption law across India saw a convergence of social movements, new media, and civic engagement never witnessed before in the country.33 While people from all walks of life staged sit-in protests at designated venues, led marches, and took part in relay hunger strikes, the mass media in the country gave considerable support to and coverage of the movement to spur people’s participation. The movement created awareness by holding candlelight vigils, fasting in support of Anna

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Hazare, giving media interviews, sending emails, tweeting, forming online forums, and sending mobile clips of the protests organized across the country and even abroad.34 The right to information and the anti-corruption campaigns have combined to question many development ventures that result in environmental degradation and further impoverishment of local communities. In the Himalayan hills of Uttar Pradesh in India, people collectively rose up to defend local interests against timber logging by contractors and private agencies that jeopardized ecological stability and reduced local people’s opportunity to benefit from sound forest exploitation. The Chipko movement was spearheaded by women who protected the trees from felling by hugging them. The Appiko movement similarly originated as a forest protection movement in Karnataka. Women activists are beginning to transform this environmental philosophy into a political ecology, and policymakers have been forced to heed their interventions in the protection of forests and have ordered a stop to the large-scale felling of trees. Against this backdrop, it is interesting to examine the case of the Narmada anti-dam movement spearheaded by Medha Patkar for more than two decades. Medha Patkar, founder of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (nba or Struggle to Save Narmada River) and the National Alliance of People’s Movements, is a powerful voice for millions of the voiceless poor and oppressed people whose uncompromising insistence on the right to life and livelihood has compelled the postindependence generation in India to revisit the basic questions of natural resources, human rights, environment, and development. The nba began as a fight for information by the tribal and peasant communities about the Narmada Valley Development Project in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat, and continued as a fight from 1990–91 for the just rehabilitation of millions of people ousted by the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the world’s largest river projects, and other large dams along the Narmada River. The Sardar Sarovar Dam would displace 320,000 tribal people and submerge over thirty-seven thousand hectares of land upon completion. When it became clear that the magnitude of the project precluded accurate assessment of damages and losses, and that rehabilitation was impossible, the movement challenged the very basis of the project and questioned its claim to “development.” The nba was able to drive home the message that “There Are Many Alternatives,” against the global media refrain that

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“There is no Alternative” (tina ). They asserted that there are rational, cost-effective, and environmentally more benign alternatives to the Sardar Sarovar Project35 such as check dams, rainwater collection tanks, and mini water projects. With the active involvement of the local people in several states, all of these alternatives have evinced greater support and participation than large dams involving massive funds with heavy costs of submergence, environmental impact, rehabilitation, and resettlement of affected people. The nba , which has been a people’s movement for over thirty years, is oxygen for other movements36 and has also become symbolic of the global movement against big dams. The nba has inspired many local communities to protest against mining and logging rights given to big commercial businesses. The agitation led by C.K. Janu asserting the right of the tribal people over forest land in Muthanga, Kerala is another long struggle. In Kerala, the southernmost state of India, several protest movements have been launched against the unregulated drawing of ground water by Coca-Cola and Pepsi from Plachimada and Kanjikkode in Palakkad championed by the adivasis or local tribes led by Mayilamma. The Plachimada struggle attracted global attention when the bbc reported, and the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment confirmed, that the Coca-Cola sold by the company contained more than the admissible level of harmful chemicals. Medha Patkar and Vandana Shiva, along with several environmental activists and global ngo s, arrived in Plachimada and extended their support to the agitation. After long legal battles, the Supreme Court of India ruled against the company and gave the community the right to draw water and natural resources. This is a defining moment in the struggle for sustainable development, where the local tribes engaged the multinational giant in a protracted legal battle that ended at the Supreme Court and forced them to shut operations in their village. A similar struggle ensued in Odisha, an eastern state of India, where a massive protest reminiscent of a real-life avatar, led by the Indigenous communities, saved the mountains that are sacred to the tribes and is their only habitat from UK-based corporate giant, Vedanta.37 The Dongria and Kutia Kondh, tribes that live in the 250 square kilometres of the Niyamgiri Hill ranges of western Orissa’s Kalahandi district, have been officially recognized as primitive tribal communities that need special protection. The Niyamgiri Hills,

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which the Dongria Kondhs worship, are the centre of rich deposits of bauxite that Vedanta wanted to mine. The Saxena Committee that enquired into Vedanta’s business suggested that the Vedanta operations endangered nearly 750 square kilometres of forest land. The Environment Ministry also stepped in to keep Vedanta from developing its plans to mine in the Niyamgiri Hills after the tribes won a court verdict in their favour. The various people’s movements in favour of environmental conservation are also involved in finding sustainable eco-friendly solutions to the challenges posed by large scale commercial exploitation of natural resources and forests. While the international development debate continues to grapple with the challenges of climate-smart agriculture for improving water and food security in the developing world, there are some successful initiatives in India that can offer solutions in this area. In twenty-five villages across the Rayagada district of Odisha, tribal village women have reclaimed the denuded commons and achieved a remarkable turnaround in food security and livelihoods through eco-friendly alternatives to shifting cultivation.38 The Ama Sangathan (Women’s Federation) – a sister organization of Agragamee (the State Resource Centre for Adult and Continuing Education) – is an umbrella organization of twenty-five women’s organisations known as Mahila Mandals (mm ). Under its auspices, 1,200 tribal women members proposed a project entitled, “Reclaiming the commons with women’s power: Eco-village development in tribal Odisha” to the Indigenous Peoples Assistance Facility (ipaf ), which was sanctioned in 2012. This initiative enabled village communities to develop a model for the reversal of ecological degradation of their lands and commons by combining traditional knowledge systems with agroecological models. The initiative was able to establish a women-centred model for the governance of the commons that would provide for the livelihoods as well as income needs of tribal communities in a sustainable manner. It was successful in growing seasonal agrocrops, millets, pulses and other herb-culture varieties in the villages through mixed cropping. This initiative made it evident that sustainable agriculture, food security, and environment conservation could be achieved with women farmers at the forefront, and enabled them to have food security and generate livelihoods in a vast barren landscape with hardly any scope for water harvesting. It has offered hope to many rural women grappling with the suicide of male farmers who have been left to fend

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for themselves and manage the food security of their families. The inclusion of hitherto fringe voices and marginalised perspectives of women, tribes, peasants, and local communities into the mainstream discourse on climate change has begun to shape sustainable development that includes ecological balance.39 In addition to these struggles for access to resources and sustainable livelihoods, it has been an arduous task for many local communities to gain the right to communicate their concerns about the cost, nature, and benefits of development projects. The mainstream dominant media have been criticized as too commercial in their approach and not effectively serving local community issues and the interests of the poor. This has led to a search for alternative media that could enable the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, particularly rural women, to be heard on their own terms.40 Radio broadcasting has traditionally been the primary medium for entertainment, information, and education amongst the masses in the developing countries owing mainly to the affordability and portability of radio receivers. Despite the availability of diverse national, regional, and local media, the main challenges to media pluralism are the inclusion of the poor (260 million) and women. In this context, women in India have begun to successfully use alternate media to promote gender justice and sustainable development. Community media in various forms – radio, video, television, information and communication technologies such as the internet and web-based networks – are enabling women to engage in debate about their rights and gain knowledge about social, political economic, and environmental policies.41 Community radio has played a central role in giving voice to rural women who are often homebound, have lower exposure to mass media, and have rarely appeared before the television camera to highlight their problems. The transformation of these rural women from information deprived to active media makers, producers, and managers of community radio is a fascinating story. The Women Speak to Women Project of the Deccan Development Society of Andhra Pradesh; the Radio Ujjas of Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan in earthquake ravaged Bhuj; Chala Ho Gaon Mein of Alternative for India Development, Bihar, in the Palamau tribal district of Jharkhand; Namma Dhwani, the voices initiative in Budikote, Karnataka; sewa ’s Rudi no Radio in Gujarat, and Agragamee’s Ujjala in Jeypore, Orissa, all have programs designed and produced

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by the rural women’s networks focusing on remote villages that remain untouched by the mainstream media. “Ek kahani meri bhi” (“I Too Have a Story”), is a program on Community Radio Bundelkhand that reveals the stories and histories of women in the community. These media initiatives endeavour to foster grassroots development while building networks and solidarities among the rural women. Even more surprising is the entry of rural women in the management and production of newspapers given their limited levels of education. Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh is remote, and few newspapers reach there. Those that do are in Hindi and do not address local concerns. Khabar Lahariya, a fortnightly rural newspaper in Bundeli, the local dialect, is produced by a group of seven Dalit and Kol rural women. The group is responsible not only for newsgathering and writing, but editing, photography, illustration, production, and distribution. It is supported by Nirantar, a Delhi-based group that works with gender and education. This newspaper, which started publication in May 2002, has a print run of 1,500. It is sold in nearly two hundred villages in the district. Khabar Lahariya provides news that touches lives and brings about change. An investigation by the paper into illegal mining rocked the local administration. The newspaper office now has a framed copy of the Chameli Devi Jain award citation on its wall, which the group won for outstanding contribution to journalism.42 The team of rural women journalists have expanded their outreach by launching Chambal Media, a rural digital-media start-up that aims to focus on news generated by marginalised communities and women. Many of the estimated eighty million members of India’s tribal communities, where there is a high degree of illiteracy, lack access to mainstream media outlets. Most of the news sources are in Hindi, a language alien to them. Journalists from the tribes are scarce, and very few among the urban media are trained in the tribal language. Radio is the only medium suited to such a population. Unfortunately, All India Radio, which has programs in 146 dialects (http:/air.kode. net), has no news service in the tribal languages.43 This often poses serious barriers to their socio-economic development, as their grievances about government neglect and economic exploitation often remain unheard. In addition, certain factions (such as internal conflict by the Maoist insurgency) can exploit their frustration and isolation to violent ends. Over the past two decades, innovative new media

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forms have emerged to address hitherto excluded populations who speak dialects that are not part of mainstream mass media language. Technological convergence has helped to overcome existing regulations to favour local communities in gaining access to new media. The tribes of Chhattisgarh are among the most notable examples entering the media sphere. The innovative tech-tonic shift to the mobile phone, which is readily available, has been used to cater to their media needs through cgn et Swara, a unique cell phone-based networking system that allows the Adivasi Gonds, a community of tribes, to share local news.44 cgn et Swara was launched in 2000 by Shubhranshu Choudhary as part of the Knight International Journalism Fellowships, a program of the International Center for Journalists. The software underlying cgn et Swara is open-source and freely available from an online repository. The system was originally developed as a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is currently maintained with the support of Janastu, Microsoft Research India, and several volunteers. Choudhary has trained more than one hundred citizen journalists to produce audio news reports for cgn et Swara. A voice-based portal to share local news with both citizen journalists and tribes living in remote areas,45 cgn et Swara enables ordinary citizens to report and discuss issues of local interest. To use it, they call a phone number using any mobile (or fixed line) phone. Callers are prompted to press “one” to record a new message, and “two” to listen to messages that have already been recorded. Once a message has been recorded from the field, professionally trained journalists access the system using a Web-based interface, review, and verify the report. Approved reports are then made available for playback over the phone. cgn et Swara receives, on average, two hundred calls a day from local people hoping to access these reports. The reports can also be accessed on the cgn et Swara website. According to Choudhary, while the technology for building interactive voice services (ivr ) has been around for a long time, what distinguishes cgn et Swara is the ability for callers to contribute information to the system.46 Most ivr platforms are designed for callers to listen to messages, but on cgn et Swara, they can also record their own messages for others to hear. The platform also includes a moderator’s interface that enables privileged users to review the recordings, and optionally annotate or edit them, prior to making them public. In Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh, Choudhary

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discovered that over 80 per cent of the students had Bluetooth in their mobile phones which they used actively to share audio and video files, which the tribal children refer to as “Bultoo.”47 The cgn et Swara server can be easily replicated in many regions of India using languages of the tribes where no other mass media has been able to make their presence felt. For example, it can be used to engage and inform citizens of the Balrampur district, on the border of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, many of whom speak the Kuduk language. While 80 per cent of Balrampur’s gram panchayats (local administrative bodies) are connected by optical fibre cables under the Digital India project, there is broadband access but no content in the Kuduk language.48 Innovative communication media must continue to focus on the creation of content in the local languages of communities. The rise of the internet has also led to innovative media initiatives such as the one developed by the Tech Girls of Dharavi in Mumbai, which houses the largest urban slum in Asia. The Dharavi Diary program founded by Navneet Ranjan in 2014, started with a small group of fifteen girls, and now has more than two hundred children who build apps designed to solve problems faced by the slum community. The Tech Girls initiative is noteworthy for its inclusion of girls and children living in slums whose problems are hardly a part of elite ict applications. Using the open source developing tool, mit app inventor, they have developed several mobile apps to tackle everyday problems in their neighbourhood.49 The mobile app called “Women Fight Back,” developed by Ansuja Madiwal, a fifteen-year-old student, is aimed to help women in distress and features sms alerts, location mapping, distress alarms and emergency phone calls. Coding their way to the future, the Paani hai Jeevan app (Water is Life) developed by fourteen-year-old Fauzia Aslam Ansari, organizes water collection for each household by setting up an online queue that alerts people when it is their turn to get water. This avoids unnecessary fights for water among families queuing up at the local water source. Girls, who are the main water providers for families, can also save time rather than waiting at queues. Girls who save their time can then spend it finishing their homework or studies. A similar app allows users to report instances of child labour, a problem that widely affects girls of slum communities. The Tech Girls of Dharavi have also developed an app for undertaking cleanliness drives in their neighbourhoods (Clean and

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Green app), and learning basic Hindi, English, and maths for those who have no formal schooling through the Padhai (Study) app.50 These examples of grassroots communication innovations not only serve to build skills and entrepreneurship in local communities, but also help to creatively address the goals of sustainable development.

th e lo ng ma rc h to e q ua l i t y The various social movements working on different development opportunities and goals in livelihoods, environmental conservation, community health, and gender equality, seek to converge to face the challenges of unsustainable development policies and activities. The social movements described in this chapter, many of which are led by women, have been successful in utilising a wide variety of interpersonal communication channels and community media to promote dialogue, seek information, share knowledge, encourage participation and build the capacities of local communities to engage in sustainable development. The conventional top-down model of mass media communication has given way to a more equitable bottom-up community media, which gives voice to the needs and enhances the capacities of its community. It strengthens alliances, political, and social networks as it raises important issues related to local development.51 According to Jan Servaes, Communication for Sustainable Social Change (cssc&d ) should facilitate participation, make information understandable and meaningful, and foster policy acceptance.52 The community media initiatives outlined here have facilitated participation by giving a voice to diverse stakeholders, conveyed information in accessibly ways, and allowed community members to engage in decision-making. Those who were long neglected and silenced in traditional development processes, particularly women and tribal communities, have been awakened by people’s movements like the nba (the Struggle to Save Narmada River). Owing to networking with the nba , women in the local collectives or federations increased contact with the bureaucracy in the government offices. Women and tribal people who had a minimal role in the political sphere now regularly interact with government officials, network with national organizations, and take up leadership roles in their own communities and villages.53 Innovative forms of community media like cgn et Swara have made people’s participation meaningful by enabling them to exercise

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their right to communicate and discuss development information in ways that can be easily understood by the local community in their own language.54 The planning and production of community radio programs that focus on a whole range of gender issues, especially the flagship program of the government, Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (Save the Girl Child, Educate the Girl Child), including violence against women, help to raise the collective community consciousness on women’s empowerment and equality. Such community radio initiatives working for gender equality and towards sustainable development can also be found across Africa. The work of Uganda Media Women’s Association (umwa ) and Women’s Net (South Africa) are cases in point. The umwa runs Mama fm , one of the first women-owned community radio stations in Eastern Africa, to advocate for women’s rights by broadcasting educational programs and providing a platform for self-expression, acting as a tool for community participation and mobilisation in government policy and development programs such as decentralisation and universal primary education.55 International movements seeking justice for women, like the One Billion Rising campaign highlighting worldwide violence against women and the #MeToo campaign, have resonated in India, with women publicly narrating their experiences of violence, exploitation, and humiliation in a gender unjust society. The campaign also forced the former Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar to step down from the government, and played a prominent role in increasing the pressure on the government and judiciary to act against powerful men who have sexually abused women. The journey from survival to social justice for women, peasants and Indigenous communities has been an ongoing uphill struggle in many developing countries, including India. There are multiple challenges to social movements for equality and justice, as poverty and pseudoenfranchisement can often render communities powerless against change. Policy makers often ignore a world in which women and vulnerable populations are seldom leaders and doers and whose perspectives are absent or trivialized in the mainstream mass media. Community alternative media can enable capacity building through people’s participation and foster alternative models of sustainable development. There is an increasing trend of networking and interaction among broad social movements with similar interests and goals such as gender equality, human rights, environmental conservation, and

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climate change through converging media, as discussed in this chapter. Most notably, isolated, marginalized, and neglected communities have found a platform of expression in this new media environment, and through it, work to contribute to the growing discourse and action on the goals of sustainable development. Social movements have stirred the beginnings of a more inclusive and just development process – what Amartya Sen describes as “a momentous engagement with the possibilities of freedom.”56 no t e s 1 R. Prasannan, “Slow yet Sturdy India,” The Week, 13 December 2015, 85. 2 Ibid. 3 Kiran Prasad, “Gender Sensitive Communications Policies for Women’s Development: Issues and Challenges,” in Minding the Gap: Feminist Interventions in International Communication, eds. Katharine Sarikakis and Leslie Regan Shade (usa : Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Kiran Prasad, “Burdened by Shame: Women, Media, Culture, and Identity Crises in India,” in The Walk of Shame, eds. Mira Moshe and Nicoleta Corbu (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2013). 4 Jan Servaes, ed., Sustainable Development and Green Communication: Asian and African Perspectives (Virginia: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). 5 Kiran Prasad, “Communication Policy for Women’s Empowerment: Media Strategies and Insights,” in Handbook of Communication for Development and Social Change, ed. Jan Servaes (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2019). 6 undp , Human Development Report 2015 (New York: undp , 2016). 7 Staff reporter, “Sainath Details ‘Stunning Growth of Inequalities’,” Hindu, 17 November 2018, 3. 8 Ibid. 9 wef , Global Competitiveness Report 2016–2017 (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016). 10 undp , Human Development Report 2016 (New York: undp , 2017). 11 Ibid. 12 Shamika Ravi and Anuradha Sajjanhar, “Beginning a New Conversation on Women,” Hindu, 21 June 2014, 9. 13 International Institute for Population Sciences (iips ) and Macro International, National Family Health Survey (nfhs -3), 2005–06: India: Volume 2 (Mumbai: iips , 2007), 39. 14 Registrar General of India, Maternal Mortality Rates (New Delhi: Government of India, 2009).

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15 Jisha Krishnan, “Dying to Be a Mother,” The Week, 12 September 2010, 16–24. 16 unfpa , Global Nutrition Report 2016 (New York: unfpa , 2016). 17 Amba Batra Bakshi, “Depression after Childbirth a Silent Killer in India,” Every Life Counts, 12 July 2016, http://everylifecounts.ndtv.com/ depression-childbirth-silent-killer-india3673?pfrom=homeenvironment. 18 Ibid. 19 Registrar General of India, Maternal and Child Mortality and Total Fertility Rates (New Delhi: Government of India, 2011). 20 wef , Global Competitiveness Report 2016–2017 (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016). 21 K. Bharat Kumar, “‘Daughterly Guilt’ Haunts Indian Working Women,” Hindu, 21 March 2016, 14. 22 Registrar General of India, Census of India, Registrar General of India (New Delhi: Government of India, 2011). 23 Jayna Kothari, “Violence That Is Not Gender Neutral,” Hindu, 17 November 2017, 9. 24 International Institute for Population Sciences (iips ) and Macro International, National Family Health Survey (nfhs -3), 39. 25 Shagun Sabarwal, K.G. Santhya, and Shireen Jejeebhoy, “Women’s Autonomy and Experience of Physical Violence within Marriage in Rural India: Evidence from a Prospective Study,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 29, no. 2 (2013): 332–47. 26 Niranjan Saggurti, Shagun Sabarwal, Ravi K. Verma, Shiva S. Halli, and Anrudh K. Jain, “Harsh Realities: Reasons for Women’s Involvement in Sex Work in India,” Journal of aids and hiv Research 3, no. 9 (2011): 172–9. 27 Kiran Prasad, “Environmental Communication from the Fringes to Mainstream: Creating a Paradigm Shift in Sustainable Development,” in Sustainable Development and Green Communication: Asian and African Perspectives, ed. Jan Servaes (Virginia: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013): 95–109. 28 Ibid. 29 Vandana Shiva, “Food Meets Media: Opening Address, Media and Global Divides, iamcr World Congress, Stockholm, 2008,” Nordicom Review, vol. 30 (2009): 11–31. 30 Soumik Dey, “Cradle.Now.Grave,” The Week, 24 August 2014, 24–32. 31 S.N. Bhaumik, “Robbing the Poor,” India Today, 15 November 1996, 156–63; S. Basu, “Unknown Faces, Determined Minds,” Hindu, 27 July 1997.

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32 Prasad, “Gender Sensitive Communications Policies for Women’s Development.” 33 Kiran Prasad, “E-Governance Policy for Modernizing Government through Digital Democracy in India,” Journal of Information Policy, 2 (2012): 183–203; Kiran Prasad, “Environmental Communication from the Fringes to Mainstream.” 34 Payal Saxena, “The Protest Party,”The Week, 4 September 2011, 46–8. 35 P. Bidwai, “A Narrow-Minded Approach,” Frontline, 9 October 1998, 105–6. 36 Rahi Gaikwad, “Narmada Bachao Andolan Completes 25 Years,” Hindu, 25 October 2010, http://www.hindu.com/2010/10/25/stories/ 2010102556941500.htm. 37 Kiran Prasad, “Environmental Communication from the Fringes to Mainstream.” 38 Abhijit Mohanty, “Food Security, Courtesy Odisha’s Tribal Women,” 4 November 2014, http://indiatogether.org/eco-village-development-projectcommonsfood-security-in-tribal-odishaagriculture. 39 Kiran Prasad, Communication for Development: Reinventing Theory and Action, Volumes 1 and 2, (New Delhi: brfc , 2009). 40 Prasad, “Gender Sensitive Communications Policies for Women’s Development.” 41 Kiran Prasad, “Cracking the Glass Ceiling: Rural Women Making News in India,” Media Asia 33, no. 3–4 (2006): 229–34. 42 Sanghamitra Chakraborty, “Mother India,” Outlook, 1 November 2004. 43 Kiran Prasad, “Incredible India: Media Pluralism Amidst Unity in Diversity,” in Media Pluralism: Concepts, Risks, and Global Trends, eds. Peggy Valcke, Miklos Sükösd, Robert Picard (uk : Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Kiran Prasad, Media Law in India (The Netherlands: Kluwer Law International, 2011). 44 Keya Acharya, “The New Jungle Drums,” Hindu, 10 November 2013, 1; Subhranshu Choudhary, “cgn et Swara as Social Media,” (lecture at a national seminar on Social Media Interventions for Rural Development: Strategies and Approaches, 2013, National Institute of Rural Development, Hyderabad, 1–2 November 2012). 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Shubhranshu Choudhary, “Tech Tonic for the Heart of India,” Hindu, 15 January 2016, 11. 48 Ibid.

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49 Jayant Sriram, “Tech Girls and the Making of the Dharavi Code,” Hindu, 10 April 2016, 1, 12. 50 Ibid. 51 Jan Servaes, ed., Sustainable Development and Green Communication. 52 Ibid. 53 Kiran Prasad, “Environmental Communication from the Fringes to Mainstream.” 54 Kiran Prasad, “Communication of Inclusive Innovation for Sustainable Development in India,” in Communication, Culture and Ecology. Communication, Culture and Change in Asia, ed. Kiran Prasad (Singapore: Springer, 2018). 55 Christine Butegwa, “Re-Visioning Development Communication in Africa: A Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Development Communication, eds. Subhash R. Joshi and Kiran Prasad (New Delhi: The Women Press, 2009). 56 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, Random House, 1999).

8 Beyond the Pavement Lynx Sainte-Marie

Content note: with all issues relating to the bodies and lives of racialized people, it should be understood that we face a significant amount of structural oppression and violence. With that being said, I wanted to give a warning for mentions of intergenerational trauma, racial oppression, ableism, violence against Black bodies, anti-Blackness, isolation, the medical-industrial complex and colonization, and death and dying within activist communities.

On 18 December 2014, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (bipoc ) healers from all over Turtle Island came together via Facebook to create healing justice actions for an event called Healing Justice for Black Lives Matter Thursday. Created by Brown, queer, femme, crip, artist, activist and healer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, with the support of many other bipoc counsellors, diviners, poets, participants offering various forms of healing had the opportunity to donate their services with all proceeds to be given to the Black Lives Matter Ferguson Bail and Support Fund, supporting activists protesting state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies and the unjust killing of Michael Brown at the hands of police. People were asked to spread the word, to familiarize themselves with and centre Black queer feminism, as well as advise on various other ways of providing accessible, equitable healing services. Over 123 healers provided services that day and for sometime after, and over $27,602 was raised. On that day, eight months after my chronic pain began, six months after I bought my first cane, I lay in bed, thinking about my own

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relationship to healing. As a Black, nonbinary and genderfluid person of the Jamaican diaspora, who, for most of their life, has been sick, disabled, mad, and chronically ill, my relationship to healing has always been a complicated one. At that time, I stumbled over the word healer and scoffed silently at those who dared to proudly use it in front of me. But on this day, I began to ask myself the necessary questions that now inform my practice as an artist and community builder. Do we as racialized people have access to healing? Do we as poor, disabled, racialized people have access to healing? Can we be healers as people who are marginalized, racialized, criminalized, traumatized, who are constantly experiencing the effects of oppression in a multitude of ways? What does that look like? And can we heal together? So many questions. And I think that healing justice and practices of community care really seek to answer these questions in very practical ways and challenge us not only to be striving towards communities that purport self-care, but cultures of care that are intentional and sustainable. In her article “Black Bodies, White Terrorism: A Global Reimagining of Forgiveness,” award-winning international journalist Esther Armah, the creator of the term “emotional justice,” speaks to the decades of [intergenerational] trauma she has witnessed within African and African diasporic communities as a Black woman. She says, “Black folks are globally committed to notions of justice, due to our intimate relationships with injustice.”1 This quote resonates with me, as I too began the work that I do because of the violent experiences I face at the intersection. But I often do this work alone; a nonacademic, without degrees and trips overseas, underpaid – or not paid, really – through the pain, the ache, and worry. But the question that really stuck with me then and now was this: who is healing our healers? As activists, artists, and people who are in these justice movements to seek change and strive for liberation, decolonization, all of these really huge overhauls of society, who is supporting us? Where do we seek healing and tenderness? Can we even ask or expect these things as community leaders? And can our movements inherently provide these things for us? And for the answers to these questions, I am honoured and humbled to speak from my own experience and to share the words and brilliance of other activists and healers, all of whom are bipoc femmes and/or women.

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Tanuja Jagernauth, an immigrant woman of colour, artist, activist, herbalist, and organizer based in Chicago, describes healing justice in an interview for the blog Organizing Upgrade! She says: “The way I understand it, healing justice acknowledges and addresses the layers and layers of trauma and violence that we have been living with and fighting for generations. And, it asks us to bring collective practices for healing and transformation into our work. It recognizes that we have bodies, minds, emotions, hearts, and it makes the connection that we cannot do this work of transforming society and our communities without bringing collective healing into our work.”2 The term healing justice was created by the organizers of the 2010 United States Social Forum (ussf ), an event that focuses on community organizing, anti-oppression, and liberation strategies in justice movements. Cara Page – a Black, queer woman, organizer, artist and the executive director of The Audre Lorde Project in Brooklyn, New York – was one of the organizers at the forum in June 2010. She speaks to her experiences in her article “Reflections from Detroit: Transforming Wellness & Wholeness.” In the article, she defines healing justice as “a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene in generational trauma and violence and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.”3 This definition excites me for a number of reasons: for one, Cara uses the term “framework” when describing healing justice, in that it is something that can and should be applied to our justice work, not something that is inherent to the work itself. Two, the acknowledgment that generational trauma and violence can affect our bodies in a variety of ways. Lastly, “holism” – a concept drastically different from the ways the medical-industrial complex that we have inherited via colonization has taught us about our bodies. Many healing traditions that are indigenous to us as bipoc – from yoga to ancestor worship – understand this concept. That all of our parts are affected when we experience violence and trauma. So, when we speak about healing, we need to speak to healing the whole because the whole is affected. So, what about self-care? When I have spoken about healing in our movements, people are often really quick to stress the importance of self-care. The Good Lorde, Audre, says “caring for myself is not self-indulgent. It is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”4 Self-care is radical, especially in Black communities where

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many of us are taught that we should be taking care of the world before ourselves, especially those who society pushes a tremendous amount of emotional labour on because of cis-heteropatriarchy (i.e., women, femmes, queer and trans people, child caregivers, etc., etc.). And in theory, it is an amazing concept, especially if we were all on the same playing field. But the concept of self-care does not exist in a vacuum. And neither do we. As an educator, I have created and facilitated workshops and trainings in more than a dozen cities in provinces across Canada – from universities and colleges to nonprofit organizations and grassroots spaces. In early 2016, I created the workshop Beyond the Pavement: Healing Justice and Cultures of Care in bipoc Activist Communities as a way to get fellow racialized agitators to start thinking critically about healing and care in their communities. I have since facilitated this workshop in stolen Attawandoron, Annishnaabe, Haudenosaunee, Métis land (Guelph, ON), stolen Migmaw territory (Halifax, ns ), Treaty 6 (Edmonton, ab ) and, of course, Toronto – in closed spaces for bipoc community members only. And in one section of the workshop, I ask participants the following questions about how they engage in self-care: • • •

What does self-care look like for you? How often do you engage in (intentional, planned) self-care? Are you not engaging in self-care? Why not?

As expected, most participants become uncomfortable. Many feel the same way I did when I prepared and answered these questions myself – guilty. Why? Because self-care as a concept without community care often breeds oppressive, shame narratives in our bipoc activist communities. Spectra, the queer, Afrofeminist, Nigerian writer and social commentator behind the blog Spectra Speaks, expresses her frustration with this shame narrative in her blog post called “Response to ‘An End to Self Care’: How About ‘An End to the Activist Martyr Complex?’”: “An hour nap turns into an hour obsessing over what things I ‘really’ need to do for others, because activist spaces have made it okay to model their ‘transformational spaces’ after a non-sustainable, unhealthy system of ‘accountability’ that not only guilt trips people into feeling bad about having to tend to their recovery, or their lower capacity due to disability, but literally whips

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them back to work under the falsehood of promised rejuvenation ‘if done right.’ No. This is not okay.”5 As a Black disabled person, I am often told I must take care of myself and at the same time, told that I am lazy and “not doing enough” if self-care comes at the expense of my (community) work. These statements have been made to me by people inside and outside of justice movements, white or racialized, movements that many of us assume should know better but still labour under the same colonized, capitalistic, ableist notions as the rest of the world. So, what do we do? We work more and care less, for ourselves and others. Yashna Maya Padamsee, a first-generation South Asian immigrant queer femme healer-warrior and yoga teacher, speaks to the limitations of self-care in an article called “Communities of Care, Organizations for Liberation” on her blog Naya Maya. She says, “self-care, as it is framed now, leaves us in danger of being isolated in our struggle and our healing. Isolation of yet another person, another injustice, is a notch in the belt of Oppression. A liberatory care practice is one in which we move beyond self-care into caring for each other. You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”6 I have often felt this way as well, that self-care on its own breeds isolation and, Yashna continues, “isolation of yet another person, another injustice, is a notch on the belt of Oppression.”7 Self-care doesn’t push back hard enough against the oppressive systems we are fighting because it is still trapped under the same rhetoric of healing that colonization has taught us – that healing is an individual process and that we should be healing ourselves by ourselves. Yashna goes on to speak about disability justice and how it is “mightily leading the way in showing us that we don’t have to keep doing our work in the same way nor do we need to do it alone.”8 This, to me, is not surprising, considering that disability justice and healing justice are movements that both centre the bodies, histories, and healing modalities of multi-issue, disabled bipoc . In fact, many healing justice spaces and collectives all share similar if not the same principles as each other, including the Healing Justice Practice Space during the yearly Allied Media Conference (amc ) in Detroit, Michigan. Healing justice spaces are interested in implementing healing justice and community care practices that politicize healing, honour our collective self-determination, and challenge allopathy as the only means of accessing care and striving for sustainability in our movements.

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Because let’s face it – our leaders are dying. Of trauma, stress, burnout – both outside and inside our movements. And more and more racialized folks are becoming disabled because of the violence that comes with racial oppression. Police brutality. Environmental racism. ptsd . We have and always will be the experts of our own healing, regardless of what most doctors would say. In Beyond the Pavement, we create our own healing justice principles. We do not focus on “cures” and “rehabilitation,” but reclamation and dreaming, calling upon the old and foreseeing new stories and ways of knowing for our bodies. I talk about “Crip Science” and the ways disabled people are masters at strategizing and navigating their worlds. How empowered I felt as a spoonie who did most of their organizing and hustling from bed. How it affirmed to me that even though I could not make it to all the rallies and protests, chanting, shouting and stomping, I was still a creator and a healer, generations of my ancestors’ wisdoms and intuitions already embedded in my body. That I am still brilliant and resilient and worthy of love, sweetness, and care. Nearing the end of the sessions, I ask participants to take ten minutes in groups to conjure their ideal healing space or practice. Who would it benefit and centre? What sort of healing would you offer and why? How would you know if the people involved (including yourself) were being cared for? I challenge them to be critical and work together. Pool your emotional, physical, and financial resources! Are you creating things that require someone (oftentimes, yourself) to push themselves to the limit with minimal access to support? Are you reaching out to the most marginalized of us and supporting them in taking on leadership roles? Whether or not you know of them, are you honouring the work of your ancestors and their healing ways? The workshop ends. The participants pack up, thinking of events and spaces – online and offline, in the city and outside the concrete – informed by their conversations. Phone check-ins; emotional labour three ways; those with more access to resources supporting those whose phones will soon cut off. Writing, drawing, and crafting meet ups, where everyone brings whatever tools or supplies they have access to, or they just bring (or are brought) themselves. Massage circles for those who cannot afford massage therapy and who have complicated relationships to touch. Online Skype vigils without the streetlights and heavy traffic noises. As for me, my visions touch on

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an old wound. And I silently dream of intergenerational diasporic dinners, where young, disabled, queer, Jamaican youth can cook and eat accessible meals together with Jamaican Elders who will love them up. Who are deep and kind. Who have survived. I limp home. I post a pic on Instagram. I think about that time almost two years ago when bipoc healers came together to support each other in the name of Black lives and in the spirit of Black Queer Feminist Magic. I write about how “I want to envision new ways of healing, new strategies of care and love that hold all of us – all of our bodies, all of our traumas, all of our genders, all of our histories.” And that “we’re healing each other. Everyday. Even when we can’t take it to the street, even when we are sick & tired. Anywhere we are.” Thank you. no t e s 1 Esther Armah, “Black Bodies, White Terrorism: A Global Reimagining of Forgiveness,” Gawker, 4 July 2015, https://gawker.com/black-bodieswhite-terrorism-a-global-reimagining-of-1715637306. 2 Tanuja Jagernauth, “Jagernauth: Just Healing,” Organizing Upgrade: Engaging Left Organizers in Strategic Dialogue, 31 October 2010, http://archive.organizingupgrade.com/index.php/modules-menu/ community-care/item/91-jagernauth-just-healing. 3 Cara Page, “Reflections from Detroit: Transforming Wellness & Wholeness,” Incite!, 5 August 2010, https://incite-national. org/2010/08/05/reflections-from-detroit-transforming-wellness-wholeness/. 4 Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: And Other Essays (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1988). 5 Spectra, “Response to ‘An End to Self Care’: How about ‘An End to the Activist Martyr Complex?’,” Spectra Speaks, 2012, http://www.spectraspeaks.com/2012/10/response-to-an-end-to-self-care-community-carehow-about-an-end-to-the-martyr-complex/. 6 Yashna Maya Padamsee, “Communities of Care, Organizations for Liberation,” Naya Maya, 19 June 2011, https://nayamaya.wordpress. com/2011/06/19/communities-of-care-organizations-for-liberation/. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

9 The Immaterial Commons: Sustaining Intersectional Horizontalism through Affective Digital Labour Sandra Jeppesen, Jaina Kelly, and the Media Action Research Group (MARG)

i ntro duc t i o n With the global rise of alt-right populism, it is increasingly important to support and sustain alternative media that counters oppressive speech based on race, class, gender, sex and other differences. At the same time, media activist-researchers have found that activist media is not perfect in this regard – it also tends to amplify some voices while silencing others.1 This highlights the importance of intersectional approaches to media activism that can account for differential access and capacities, while also amplifying the strengths and voices of intersectional media makers.2 These intersectional media projects depend on economic resources; however, noneconomic or immaterial resources are also critical to sustaining alternative media.3 In this chapter, we propose the concept of an immaterial commons consisting of affective digital media labour practices produced by and supportive of grassroots media and social movements. We map out our argument by first introducing our methodology and conceptual framework followed by a critical analysis of three immaterial digital labour practices: transformative empathy, holding space, and healing justice. We argue that the immaterial commons, though not without its own challenges, is crucial to creating intersectional horizontality in movement and media activism.

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meth o d o l o g y This research was undertaken by a horizontal intersectional feminist collective in Canada called the Media Action Research Group (marg ), formed in 2013. marg members are students, media activists, social movement participants, faculty, and community members. We have developed a Participatory Communicative Action Research methodology, as activist-researchers co-researching with and as media activists within networks that use communication as a method of transformative action for social justice. We create and disseminate activist media for multiple audiences, circulating texts and video on our website (mediaactionresearch.org), supporting media projects with infrastructure and labour, facilitating workshops on media activism, creating activist tools, and organizing conferences. In 2014–15 we invited media activists (in Toronto, Ottawa, Halifax, Vancouver, Victoria, and Montreal) to participate in focusgroup workshops to discuss challenges, successes, and future directions for media activism. Our outreach targeted people engaged in grassroots feminist, lgbtq +, antracist, anti-capitalist, and anticolonial media projects. To facilitate participation in the workshops, we provided food and drinks as well as funds for transportation and child or dependent care, and a small stipend in recognition of the contribution of time and expertise. The workshops were facilitated based on activist practices and processes, including a check-in round, a go-around so that each person had space to respond to each of the four questions posed, a facilitated discussion, and a check-out, with optional informal social time before and after. The workshops were audio recorded, and we developed working documents through analyzing them in NVivo. The working documents were shared with and validated by research participants, then used to develop research and interview questions on three dimensions of activist media: collective movement memory; anti-oppression media practices; and material and immaterial resources. We wrote a paper on autonomous journalism practices from an anti-oppression perspective based on the workshops.4 In addition to questions regarding challenges and inspirations, we asked participants what they would want back from our research process. Many said a conference would be beneficial. In response, we contributed to the organization and facilitation of the Alternative Media Assembly at the People’s Social Forum in Ottawa 2014. We

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Table 9.1 | Global media activists, interview participants by country Country

Number of participants

uk

8

Sweden

4

Denmark

3

Iceland

3

Greece

19

Spain

7

Italy

9

Brazil

10

Mexico

7

Canada

16

Japan

3

Total

89

also organized the Media Activism Research Conference at Lakehead University, Orillia in 2016 with approximately one hundred international participants, including discussion panels, participatory workshops, and hands-on skill-shares. We received a sshrc Connections Grant for this, and thus were able to pay participant travel costs and a presentation stipend, as well as providing food and billeting, and organizing on-theme social and artistic events in the community. We then conducted eighty-nine semi-structured interviews with global media activists in eleven countries (see Table 9.1). Below we discuss our findings with a strong emphasis on the words and expressions of our research participants in the interviews.

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marg engages explicitly in a politicized intersectionality and has grounded our research in intersectionality practices and conceptual frames from the beginning, based on five pillars: intersectional feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and lgbtq + liberation. th eo reti cal fr a m e wo r k The research presented here generates a meeting point among the literatures on intersectionality, the commons, and affective digital labour. Intersectionality

Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw originally coined the term “intersectionality”5 to account for the inter-related impacts of race and gender on Black women. Since then, the concept has been expanded to include class, sexuality, disability, lgbtq +, colonialism, and more. Intersectional identities can be experienced differently in different times and contexts conferring advantages and disadvantages.6 Beyond identity, intersectionality refers to interlocking structures of oppression and privilege, as explained by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge: “Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences. The events and conditions of social and political life and the self can seldom be understood as shaped by one factor. They are generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways. When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other.”7 Intersectionality describes and can be used to challenge both the personal or micro impacts of oppression and privilege on people’s lives, and the structural or macro impacts of the organization of power in society. Critiques have emerged, cautioning that white-dominated feminism tends to engage in a depoliticized intersectionality consisting of “routine declarations of commitment to equity and diversity” that permit institutions to “accumulate value through good public relations and ‘rebranding’ without the need to actually address the underlying structures that produce and sustain injustice.”8 In terms of our methodology, both marg collective members and our research

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participants in our interviews, focus groups, and workshops have self-identified with these intersectional commitments. Our work originated from and is grounded within an intersectional analysis of politics, practices, content, and structures within autonomous media activism, and we purposefully work with people engaged in intersectional media projects. The Commons

The commons refers to collectively available resources, such as shared common land, libraries, community gardens, or makerspaces.9 Key to grassroots activists, commons are “organizational practices based on shared commitments to diverse political struggles, shared ethical principles and alternative social norms.”10 Many of the practices articulated by our participants do not produce material resources, but rather they make intangible contributions to the common good of movement and media- activist networks. Therefore, we propose a new term to describe this type of commoning: the immaterial commons. A key function of the immaterial commons is the creation of horizontal organizing practices with an attentiveness to power dynamics based on intersectional anti-oppression practices.11 Autonomous media projects are “collectively rather than individually oriented, challenging individualism, and re-orienting toward community, caring, compassion, mutual understanding, and respect.”12 These affective practices are crucial to the immaterial commons that supports digital media activism. The immaterial commons is therefore a shared set of intangible inputs, processes, or outcomes collectively held for the common good and available to local and global communities. While the commons is said to be accessible to all people equally, our research reveals that the commons, like other resources, may be asymmetrically available to, or produced by, individuals or groups across intersectional axes of oppression and privilege. Affective Digital Labour

A key generative practice in the intersectional immaterial commons is affective digital labour. Affective labour is a form of work that has emotional effects as a core component of its processes and impacts.13 It requires the management of emotions of the self and others in

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exchanges generative of sociality such as intimacy, care, active listening, empathy, mental health support, or conflict mediation. Affective digital labour thus occurs when affective practices enter the realm of digital media. Affective digital labour is typically immaterial in that it does not produce commodities, or produces only the informational or cultural content of a commodity, and not the product itself.14 Media activists engage in affective digital labour as they produce content and mobilize social movements through social media, hashtag activism, blogs, podcasts, videos, data activism, and algorithmic interventions.15 We therefore use the term affective digital labour to indicate engaged sociality fundamental to the production of digital media. This can be generative of coherence and cohesiveness in the production of media with political content and horizontal organizational processes. It can also sometimes detract and distract from these objectives, leading to controversies over content or to organizational fragmentation, with the two often related. Three forms of affective labour have arisen in our findings. Transformative community empathy is a process in which community members mutually support each other through an intentional practice of empathy that “promotes listening rather than distancing or looking at speakers as ‘others.’ It requires self-reflexivity and potential transformation of one’s own assumptions.”16 It starts with witnessing, understanding, and caring for another person and results in being changed by the process through self-reflexivity and transformative action. Sometimes this takes place through “holding space” for someone. Holding space is the willingness “to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome.”17 It may mean sitting with someone while they feel down or process emotions, accepting behaviours outside their norm for a time, or providing support for that which they themselves have articulated a need. Transformative empathy and holding space can be practices of healing justice. Healing justice is defined by Black Lives Matter as a process of “healing individual and community trauma while organizing to make real change in Black lives.”18 In healing justice, community healing

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from intergenerational trauma is integrated into community organizing for social justice. Social justice objectives within a traumatized community can be better achieved if healing practices are integrated into the foundational practices of liberatory social movements. These three types of affective labour take place increasingly in the digital realm as social-justice media-activists create content and networks in digital spaces. The practices are inherently intersectional, with responsibility and accountability disproportionately taken on by and recognized to be a particular strength of individuals who identify as women and/or Black, Indigenous and/or People of Colour (bipoc ), and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and so on (lgbtq +). The and/or used here indicates that these identities, and the systems of oppression that structure them, are intersectional. These practices contribute to the digital commons that supports social movement and media-activism work.

affec ti ve d i gi ta l l a b o u r i n t h e i mmateri al com m o n s What has emerged from our interviews is the foundational importance of affective digital labour for media activists within collective projects and the broader social movements, communities and networks in which they are active. Below we explore several ways in which participants discussed the importance, impacts and challenges of this kind of work. Intersectionality and Its Challenges

We have found that affective digital labour within autonomous media activism is frequently intersectional in terms of contributions and impacts. Women, bipoc , and lgbtq + are disproportionately performing affective labour within media projects, including the positive affect of passion and relationship building discussed above, and the negative affect of experiencing sexism, genderism, racism, homophobia, colonialism, ableism, and ageism intersectionally. Experiencing discrimination adds a layer of emotional processing that can drain the capacity to do digital labour on individual and group levels, thereby reducing the volume of intersectional media content the group produces.

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For example, marg has found that women in activism circles that are organized horizontally and claim anti-oppression politics can still experience patriarchal power dynamics silencing their voices. In the UK media project Strike!, female members mentioned they were criticized for performing politics incorrectly when they introduced feminist ideas into the conversation. This resulted in an internal struggle that was exhausting, leading women and their male allies to feel burned out by the emotional labour required to combat the silencing. Concerns around the gendered affective labour that women perform to counter male domination were also raised by bipoc and lgbtq+ participants as related to racialized and heteronormative dynamics in the performance of immaterial labour. Emotionally challenging experiences in movements, including the emotional labour of calling out oppressive dynamics or defending oneself against violent verbal attacks, can lead to high levels of affective digital labour potentially leading to burnout for women, bipoc , and lgbtq + individuals and their allies. Participants in Calais Migrant Solidarity also mentioned the struggle against burnout: “We’re really bad at burning out as a group. A lot of people suffer from mild mental health issues because of their time spent in Calais, which means often there’s only a specific group of people who end up being there and involving themselves in the blog and in activism in general. So that means, specifically, mostly able-bodied men with great health, mental health. And so, we’re quite bad at supporting people, and there have been some incidences where people, mostly people that self-identify as female, have suffered greatly because of our inability to support them.”19 No Borders Iceland similarly mentioned the affective labour created by the constant deportation of friends, revealing how the emotional stakes of media-activist and movement work can be quite high. These racialized and gendered dynamics, experienced by those most negatively impacted by affective digital labour, draw attention to the intersectional axes of gender, race, global location and documented status. Moreover, this reveals how the source of negative affective labour originates both within groups and externally. Attacks from the state occur through police violence, deportations, threats, and racist or white supremacist policy. Attacks can also come from populist violence in the streets and in the digital sphere. On one hand, digital media activists face the emotional strain of online misogynist, racist, heterosexist, and transphobic trolling. Intersectional feminist

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media collective Burnt Bras in Athens, Greece noted they faced an “incredible barrage of beratement and threats and … attacks, and silencing and mansplaining and everything.” The group also observed that the gendered expectation regarding labour in other contexts reduces their ability to perform media-activist tasks: “It’s not just about us working, it’s about [the fact] that women are expected to put in free labour and emotional labour that also restricts both your time and your energy levels that you can spare to do online activism.” On the other hand, in the face of such threats and violence, positive affective labour strengthened the content and viability of their media-activist projects. Online magazine AzMina in Brazil emphasized the importance of affective labour to their sustainability: “Social media is a very draining environment, and we get a lot of violence there, so we have to be very emotionally supportive of each other, and this happens, and it’s beautiful.” Responding, deleting, debating, and blocking these attacks, and discussing how best to engage with trolls adds hours of emotionally draining affective digital labour to already jam-packed schedules. But it also creates beautiful feelings of mutual support. This mutual support can also take place across lines of privilege and oppression through solidarity practices. For example, male activists involved in Researchgruppen in Stockholm explicitly supported women facing violent online attacks by taking on affective labour. Their Antifa research work was male dominated; however, when women joined the collective, they were attacked by fascists with sexually violent threats. When Antifa men spoke to the fascists, they were able to transform the threats into generative dialogue, with some eventually leaving their fascist groups. Ultimately, the men carried the burden of the affective labour of responding to threats, demonstrating how allies can use their privilege to mitigate the effects of online trolling and street violence against marginalized groups. Value-Based Networks

Related to intersectionality is the immaterial practice of building value-based networks – networks of like-minded individuals, groups and projects with shared intersectional political values and related practices. These networks extend beyond media production labour, in which affective skill sharing, mentorship, and capacity building

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are key,20 to include social relationships, mental health supports, and collective well-being. In grassroots movements, media and other organizations, “emotional resources and communicative skills have become increasingly important.”21 For many media-activist groups, local value-based networks extended to international and cross-border solidarity. For example, groups in Iceland, Canada, the UK, and Brazil all mentioned that they have organized dinners and social events for immigrants, refugees, women, and/or lgbtq +, gatherings that provide emotional, mental health, and friendship support, including immaterial resources such as access to local knowledge and value-based networks. These value-based networks can provide fundamental resources for survival of both the media-activist projects, individuals within the projects, and individuals in the broader networks. At the same time, immaterial networks are not perfect, often because they are invisible and hard to access. Some research participants found that informal or friend networks were not equally accessible to everyone, while others did not have the capacity or skills to provide the affective labour required to support someone, which can be a one-way street. For example, participants in Dublin mentioned that networking at the pub after a media-activist working meeting would reinforce existing social hierarchies and could be anxiety provoking. Others noted that going to the pub excluded people who preferred not to be in alcohol consumption spaces. Other research participants noted that generosity and compassion were not always extended beyond social hierarchies or friend groups to the broader network. People outside the network had experienced or witnessed harsh treatment through call-out culture and felt like they were walking on eggshells. Valid political reasons behind charged confrontational encounters can sometimes be used to disguise abuses of power based on personal dislikes or informal hierarchies based on having “the correct politics.” This can result in a power struggle where individuals attempt to establish themselves as the most oppressed, a practice referred to by intersectional anti-racist feminist scholars as “the race to innocence”22 or the “oppression Olympics.”23 This can happen, for example, when oppressions are put forward as competing rather than intersectional and inter-related. However, we need to be careful not to cater to “white fragility,” which denotes that people experiencing white privilege can be unable to cope with discussions of racism or colonialism.24 The affective labour in attempting to confront

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some of these issues in digital media projects can lead to fragmentation and burnout. As this intensifies with the advent of social media becoming a common feature of digital media-activist networks, individuals may withdraw from movements. Collective Self-Care

Alternatively, to maintain healthy participation within movements, they may develop activist strategies for self-care that range from individualized to collective. Some activists discussed relaxation and regeneration through yoga, hot baths, massages, meditation, and other forms of self-care typically assigned to women. Ana María Hernández Cárdenas and Nallely Guadalupe Tello Méndez argue, “for many activists and women human rights defenders, having a moment of rest is a privilege in the situations they have to deal with. This is why we suggest they reflect on how necessary it is to take time to relax, let off steam, renew their energy and regain strength.”25 Self-care of this kind is both personal and collective because organizations can establish frameworks for individual self-care. At the same time, many research participants noted that, while they may be important moments for rest and regeneration, massages and yoga classes can be individualized, middle-class, capitalist technologies of the self. As the Upping the Anti editorial collective argues: “In general terms, the capitalist strategy hasn’t changed: increase exploitation in the workplace, push the responsibility of care into the private sphere, continue to invisibilize the labour of social reproduction and subsistence, and then introduce markets that will commodify and provide care services if you can afford them. In this way, self-care becomes a burden for some and a privilege for others.”26 Activists therefore approach self-care collectively, focusing on communal or shared practices of mutual care. In the Spanish Indignados movement, collective responsibility was taken for the well-being of participants camping and protesting in the squares: “You had all the sun coming down, and there were always people organizing, passing down the water bottles, buying some solar cream [sunscreen], so everyone would be drinking water and not burn. One of the committees was first aid and mental health, then there was another committee that was more like relaxing massages.” As Rushdia and Gray-Donald argue, “collective care refers to seeing members’ well-being – particularly their emotional health – as

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a shared responsibility of the group rather than the lone task of an individual.”27 It is thus important to think beyond mainstream discourses of commercialized self-care to focus on mutual aid practices of collective self-care that can sustain individuals, projects, and the broader community. From this discussion regarding the need for collective self-care in the context of affective digital media labour, three key practices emerged: transformative community empathy, holding space, and healing justice. transformative community empathy Transformative community empathy is a key affective digital practice that creates shared empathy across intersectional differences. It breaks down barriers in media-activism spaces between the professionalism of production and the intimacy and care of friendship. In Brazil, community radio collective Radio Capitolina noted, “we are all friends at some point, and because we are feminists, we do understand each other’s issues, we do have a lot of empathy for everyone’s lives, and this is something that we do.” She noted they had an internal Facebook group: “we share everything, from doubts that we have about sex or relationships, or we put a lot of job offers there, we share interesting texts that we’ve read somewhere else. So that actually created a community.” Similarly, in Sweden, an activist mentioned that empathy was created through the fact that “a lot of the connections and a lot of resources were based on friendships and prior relations to people.” Burnt Bras in Athens also talked about how crucial the empathy in friendships and community supports was as an intangible resource. The relationships of empathy described by these and other groups interviewed were seen as fundamental to their media activism, transformative to their everyday lives, and pivotal to the sustainability of their projects. Like other affective digital practices described here, transformative community empathy can be better understood through an intersectional lens: “We need to be careful that the responsibility of care and relational work within groups doesn’t fall solely on women – especially women of colour – who take it on in addition to gritty organizing work. Within many groups, women tend to fight for the health of a group, sometimes to the detriment of their personal well-being, while men – especially white men – leave the group when things get tough.”28

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Conversely, we have also found that people in dominant groups across race, gender, sex, and class may fight to keep a media project from addressing intersectional power dynamics, forcing marginalized individuals to leave the group due to burnout from the additional affective tax of being attacked and having their intersectional political concerns silenced. Women of colour noted that it was sometimes easier to leave and start their own media project than to stay in a group dominated by white males and engage in the exhausting process of attempting to establish empathy and care relationships for the health and well-being of all involved. The importance of developing empathy across intersectional axes of oppression and privilege was a recurrent theme in our mixers, interviews, and workshops. Feminist male allies would support female and trans colleagues in challenging misogynist, transphobic, transmisogynist, or misogynoir trolling. Similarly, anti-racist white allies engaged in affective labour in support of racialized and Indigenous colleagues including not just writing about issues such as Black Lives Matter, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two Spirit (mmiwg2s ), or migrant and refugee rights, but also supporting refugees’ communicative needs in the border camps in Calais or Reykjavik, making multilanguage handouts on women’s refugee rights to distribute in camps in Athens, and providing digital space to report racist attacks in Europe when local racist police forces refused to take action or further threatened immigrants and refugees with violence. holding space While transformative community empathy provides immaterial resources as supports, holding space can also provide a transformative opportunity through sitting with, listening to and witnessing another person’s expression of experiences of trauma and oppression. Community members holding space for someone will set aside the desire to find a solution for them and instead make the space for that person to explore their own deepest and most complex feelings. “When people feel that they are held in a deeper way than they are used to, they feel safe enough to allow complex emotions to surface that might normally remain hidden.”29 Holding space is an important practice in media-activist spaces, where people are not only reporting daily on trauma, but also potentially experiencing trauma in their own lives. For example, to experience sexual

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assault and also observe a high volume of conversations about it in #MeToo, or to experience racialized police brutality and witness the digital livestreams and testimonials of #blm requires a tremendous amount of affective digital labour. Digital media movements recognize this compounding of trauma through digital labour and focus on creating and holding space for media and movement activists in moments of trauma, which may also lead to interactions, dialogues, and relationships that engage in holding space for people over longer periods of time. An activist with XNet mentioned specific ways in which they hold space for each other: “we do have an alarm button: ‘I have this super crappy day today and I’m too stressed I need a break.’ The rest will be like okay, [this person] needs a break, today don’t stress them, and tomorrow. So yeah, we take care of each other like that.” The collective does not attempt to resolve the person’s problems but holds the space open for them to work it through, knowing their work will be taken up by others, and there will be no pressure or demands on them for the time being. Similarly, Strike magazine in the UK said many of them were facing burnout when their own collectively “self-exploitative” demands were pressuring people to put in more hours than they had the capacity for. To address this, they changed their production policy to allow people to set boundaries around work hours. Both XNet and Strike! therefore honour people’s mental health needs and are attentive to holding space for each other in taking time away from their media activism projects to recharge. The space being held is a space for peace and quiet. Conversely, some projects provided the space to engage in discussions, which is another form of holding space. Burnt Bras in Athens has a chatroom where they create space for each other to discuss anything at all: “the chatroom we have to talk to each other really helps … the biggest thing is that we are a group, we have strong bonds, we support each other and that has been the biggest help to keep this going. It has been a source of energy for all of us.” Another Burnt Bras member says, “having a space to talk about all the micro-aggressions you face in everyday life and you don’t have to spend the energy to silence yourself about those things … for me it has been really helpful. It really has changed the energy level that I have.” The space for discussion counters the affective labour required for self-silencing around topics of gender oppression in other contexts. Whether through stepping back and stepping

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up, reducing digital media-activist work productivity demands, or hosting digital informal discussion safe spaces, holding mutually supportive space for one another increased activists capacity to continue their media-activist work. healing justice Collective empathy and holding space can be thought of as practices within a healing justice framework. For people with intergenerational experiences of oppression or violence such as anti-Black racism, colonialism, sexual or physical abuse, poverty and homelessness, war and genocide, among others, the weight of those traumas is carried into organizing spaces. Healing justice is the process where affective practices of community healing are integrated into antioppression social justice work and this healing work is understood as integral to the movement. The healing justice framework emerges from intersectional spaces such as Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement, therefore it is important to understand healing justice as intersectional: as a Burnt Bras member mentions: “You see all these struggles being repeated and then you get the chance to read or talk about capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and all these things and then you realize that it’s not just you, you’re not alone, you’re not the only one that is experiencing all these things. And being able to speak about your experiences with people who have gone through the same thing and you can connect on a different level. I think it’s really liberating.” Discussing intergenerational and intersectional experiences and political structures allows media projects to explore paths toward social justice in the same moment that they are supporting one another in healing from the associated traumas. To take an example, a group in Italy called Smaschieramenti has developed an intentional practice of healing justice through a structured process of self-discovery linked to political consciousness. It is based in what Paolo Freire called “conscientização,” a coming to critical consciousness as a political subject. They instituted a double focus on political consciousness and taking personal responsibility toward collective healing: “It’s called auto-inchiesta, self-inquiry. Which is a thing that was born back in the 70s from … working class movements, which is a sort of a way to have consciousness raising but at the same time with very clear questions because you want to focus on political processes … to bring the discrimination

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to an end.” Their group focused on unmasking intersectional masculinities within racialized and gendered class structures in society from a political perspective. Unmasking and unmasculinizing or healing from toxic masculinity was integrated into their collective trans-feminist media activism and anti-capitalist political organizing which took on an intentionally intersectional framework. Self-reflection on a political level can be emotionally healing for activists, and discussions of personal issues can contribute to the politics of movements and media, as shown in these brief examples. The discussions provided empowering spaces of healing for media and movement activists working toward social justice. Healing justice, in turn, can make a vital contribution to the immaterial commons in supporting and sustaining intersectional grassroots movement media projects over the long term.

co nc lusio n s In our interviews with media activist groups around the globe, when we asked participants about immaterial resources, we found that almost all of them mentioned some form of immaterial affective digital labour. This included everyday practices such as sharing a passion for media activism, creating networks, and instituting collective self-care. Three key practices of collective self-care clearly emerged: transformative community empathy, holding space, and healing justice. While some types of participation were filled with contradictions, potentially leading to burnout, the three modes of collective self-care discussed here seemed successful in mitigating negative affect and emotions, and also in creating positive experiences for movement and media activists. Although our research focused on media-activist projects for the most part, these projects and practices are connected to social movements, and thus, we propose that they can be useful in grassroots and other social movement projects more broadly. The participants were predominantly engaged in media projects that support and are rooted within social movements. In terms of affective expression, they emphasized internal collective-oriented communication and support as a key objective, rather than uncontrolled individualized emotional expression, which can happen to the detriment of the group. Participants with this focus had noted several positive impacts such as improvements in confidence, strength, energy levels, belonging, collective cohesiveness, and mutual support.

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meth o d o lo gi cal re f l e c t i o n s marg’s research process has also contributed to the immaterial commons. In workshops, interviews, and other events, the discussions that we have had with activists provided the space for generative dialogues and reflections on otherwise unspoken issues. When research participants shared stories of affective digital labour with us, voicing experiences that had caused them individual or collective stress or anxiety, they often told us afterwards that they felt better for talking about it, they wanted to write about an issue raised, or that our conversation was a springboard for further collective discussions. This is one of the things we find very inspiring about doing this work, contributing to our collective empathy and sustainability as well. Some participants said they lacked the time or space to process often painful experiences in their day-to-day lives, imagining that they were the only ones experiencing oppression, or thinking that it might be unsafe to bring up self-reflections in digital spaces for fear of backlash. marg ’s small-group interviews and workshops offered a space and time where self-reflection was not only encouraged, but also listened to and appreciated, with the researcher playing the role of active listener, holding space for the participants. The process of discussing affective digital labour facilitated personal transformation for researchers and participants together, and motivated groups to further develop collaborative practices and contribute together to the immaterial commons. In the Copenhagen workshop on immaterial resources, for example, participants identified the need to share material and immaterial resources in their broader networks and scheduled a subsequent meeting in which to do so autonomously. Participatory Communicative Action Research can thus cause an immediate catalyst reaction in movements and media activism without having to wait for formal research dissemination, which is something that motivates us to continue to do this kind of research-activism work. no t e s 1 Todd Wolfson, “Democracy or Autonomy? Indymedia and the Contradictions of Global Social Movement Networks,” Global Networks 13, no. 3 (2013): 410–24, https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12030; Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy

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18 Black Lives Matter, “Healing in Action: A Black Lives Matter Toolkit for Healing Justice & Direct Action, Black Lives Matter,” 2017, https:// blacklivesmatter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/blm _HealinginAction1-1.pdf. 19 All participants in this research, conducted in the uk , Greece, Brazil, Sweden, Spain, and Italy, have been anonymized. 20 Sandra Jeppesen and Kamilla Petrick, “Toward an Intersectional Political Economy of Autonomous Media Resources,” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 10, no. 1–2 (2018): 8–37. 21 Johanna Oksala, “Affective Labor and Feminist Politics,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (2016): 281–303, 284. 22 Mary Fellows and Sherene Razack, “The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women,” Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, 335 (1998), https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/274. 23 Rita Kaur Dhamoon, “A Feminist Approach to Decolonizing Anti-Racism: Rethinking Transnationalism, Intersectionality, and Settler Colonialism,” Feral Feminisms 1, no. 4 (2015): 20–36, http://www.feralfeminisms.com/ rita-dhamoon/. 24 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston, ma : Beacon Press, 2018). 25 Ana María Cárdenas Hernández and Nallely Guadalupe Tello Méndez, “Self-Care as a Political Strategy,” Sur: International Journal on Human Rights 14, no. 26 (2017): 171–80. 26 Upping the Anti Editorial Committee, “Who Cares? The Politics of Care in Radical Organizing,” Upping the Anti, 18, 2018, http://uppingtheanti.org/ journal/article/18-editorial. 27 Mehreen Rushdia and David Gray-Donald, “Be Careful with Each Other,” Briarpatch Magazine, 29 August 2018, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/ articles/view/be-careful-with-each-other. 28 Ibid. 29 Heather Plett, “What It Really Means to Hold Space for Someone,” Uplift Connect, 18 May 2016, https://upliftconnect.com/hold-space/.

10 Indigenization: Carrying Indigenous Knowledge into the Academy David Newhouse

Before all words are spoken, we send greetings to the universe and all living things. We give thanks for the rising of the sun and the light and life that it brings. We give thanks for another day of life.

I start with words of thanksgiving. Traditional Haudenosaunee protocol requires that we begin with an act of thanksgiving to remind us of the nature of the universe, its structure and functioning, the roles and responsibilities of all aspects of it, and to foster an attitude of humility and respect. I also acknowledge the original inhabitants of the land, and their descendants, who have lived for millennia, and whose way of life has changed significantly over this time. We are all part of a long line of human and nonhuman inhabitants of the land. Universities have their origins close to nine hundred years ago. They, like the original inhabitants of North America and other parts of the globe, have survived the ages and have been transformed, often by forces that they have been unable to resist. The contemporary university has its roots in the Scottish Enlightenment, a period of intense intellectual and philosophical debate that emphasized the primacy of reason as the way to knowledge, truth, progress, and the good life. Unfortunately, universities and the knowledge created within them have played significant roles in the colonization of Indigenous people, specifically in Canada. Today, Canadian universities have the opportunity to play a central role in alleviating the inequities they helped to create. Some universities have apologized

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for their part in colonization and most are taking steps, through the process of indigenization, to ensure that they are seen to be contributing to the Canadian national project of reconciliation. The project of indigenizing universities in Canada is a unique effort and one that requires careful thought and action. In pursuing this project, we are confronted with a myriad of questions: what does indigenization mean? What does an indigenized university look like and how does it act? Can we extend traditional Indigenous practices to scholarly endeavors? Can we create norms and methods of scholarship that are appropriate to Indigenous intellectual traditions? How do we bring Indigenous knowledge to the university? Indigenization is occurring in the period of history marked by an interest in reconciliation. We live and work in the period after, what I call, the Long Assault, a 115-year period of history stretching from the late 1850s and continuing until the withdrawal of the White Paper1 in 1971. The effects of this assault, characterized by the 2015 Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission2 as “cultural genocide,”3 are evident in the lives of Indigenous peoples. The impact is seen in the continuing poverty of Indigenous peoples, the loss of languages as a result of the practices of Indian residential schools, racially motivated violence by police forces, high levels of incarceration, and loss of land as well as an erasure of many aspects of Indigenous history. I characterize the current period, starting in 1971, as the Great Healing. Indigenous peoples are in the process of creating a political place of dignity and respect within the Canadian federation through the self-government movement, treaty and land claims processes, and the healing movement. It’s a period of intense political, social, and cultural resurgence and reimagination. Reconciliation is a large national project that challenges and requires change in every part of Canadian society. It requires an examination of the ways in which Canada and its institutions have treated, and, in many cases, systematically excluded Indigenous peoples and their knowledge from consideration. It is a messy, complicated, multigenerational project that requires a willingness to experiment and try new things. It is also an emotional and egochallenging process that asks us to examine our attitudes, values, and beliefs about Indigenous people and the country and to develop new ones, and, more importantly, to act differently than we have in the past. Reconciliation is ultimately about creating a new Canada,

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a Canada that treats Indigenous peoples with respect and restores dignity to all of our lives. Universities have an important role to play in this large national project. The university response to reconciliation comes through the process of indigenization. Like reconciliation, indigenization is a complex process that involves a wide variety of activities: recruitment of Indigenous students; creation of new or revitalized academic programs; creation of Indigenous student services and spaces; hiring of Indigenous faculty and staff; the appointment of Indigenous people to new senior academic positions and the involvement of Indigenous faculty in existing governance structures; and the creation of new governance structures that bring Indigenous representation and voice to the table. In many universities, these activities are articulated together in Indigenous strategic plans. All of these activities are important and should result in new academic cultures and greater relevance of academic programs to Indigenous peoples and our communities. Yet in my view, there is one critical aspect that must also be part of indigenization efforts but that will require the most effort and the greatest change for universities; that area is Indigenous knowledge (ik ). Indigenous society in Canada has been undergoing profound changes since the 1970s. These are driven by a strong desire for self-governance, that is, bringing the structures and processes of everyday life back under Indigenous stewardship. A key aspect of self-governance is the desire to bring ik to the forefront and to use it as the basis for collective social and political action. Simply put, Indigenous people want to use their own theories, understandings, concepts, and ideas as key informing elements for education, social policy, political action, health care, and child welfare, to name a few. Indigenous leaders and educators are not rejecting the knowledge that universities create but simply want the university to acknowledge and accept the knowledge that they bring to the table. Doing so, they believe, will result in the creation of Indigenous institutions that behave in ways that support Indigenous goals and objectives. If universities are to support this strong desire to bring ik to the table, they must create a place for it within their programs and faculties. Based on my experience at Trent University, this means bringing Indigenous people who have high levels of ik into the university as faculty members. It means addressing recruitment and hiring

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processes as well as the central processes of performance evaluation, tenure, and promotion. Bringing ik and ik scholars into the university is not an easy process. It involves much challenging discussion and debate – processes that are, ostensibly, at the very heart of universities themselves. To begin with, we need to understand Indigenous knowledge.

wh at i s i nd i geno u s k n ow l e d g e ? ik is the knowledge that Indigenous communities have developed over generations: it includes theories of the universe and how it works; the nature of human beings and others; the nature of society and political order; the nature of the world and how to live within it; human motivation, among many things. This knowledge has been transmitted from generation to generation, thought about, discussed, refined, discarded, reinforced, and subject to constant analysis and testing. It has not been static. ik shows how to live in a world of continual change, for it is based upon a foundational philosophical tenet: the world is constantly in the process of transformation and movement. Hoping for stability and certainty in the material world leads to suffering. We live in a world in which we, as human beings, are the last created and the most dependent upon other forces for our survival. We are at once powerless and powerful; our bodies are powerless, but our minds are powerful. All ik must past a strict truth test: does it help us to survive? One of the central aspects of modern Indigenous societies is the desire to use ik as a key, informing basis of contemporary life. This is not to say that other kinds of knowledge are not useful or helpful. It is, however, to place Indigenous knowledge in a position of centrality or primacy. To ignore other knowledges would be inconsistent with traditional teachings about what it means to be an educated person. In fact, many Indigenous Elders insist that we learn and engage with the knowledge of others. We can interpret the Guswentah, the two-row wampum4 that signified the relationship between Haudenosaunee5 and various European settlers in the early arrival period in a way that supports this view. The Guswentah consists of two rows of purple beads, separated by three rows of white beads. It looks like two purple parallel lines on a bed of white. The separateness and parallel nature of the two rows has been used as an argument for the creation of a state of complete separateness from

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each other. We canoe alone, so to speak. But, in my view, the two rows denote a relationship and dialogue between nations and cultures; the three white rows signify the ethics of that dialogue: respect, honesty, and kindness. There is much to be said for noninterference in national political affairs but not much in favour of other aspects of separateness. Not engaging with the knowledge of others, or denying the knowledge of others, is inconsistent with a Guswentah philosophy of engagement. In fact, respectful engagement is required in order to live well with all inhabitants of the world. Learning, reason, and oratory have always been marks of an educated person in Haudenosaunee society, as has a facility to speak languages other than one’s own. Learning the other’s knowledge is also considered important, as significant as learning the knowledge of one’s own society and culture. The highest compliment that one could make of an Iroquoian person is to say that they are “of good mind.” “The Good Mind” is the consciousness ideal postulated by Haudenosaunee philosophical thought. What does it mean to be of good mind? A good mind is balanced between reason and passion, ever negotiating the dance between the two. A good mind is always thinking of how to foster peace between peoples, the world, and all of its inhabitants. The idea of balance between reason and passion is central here. Haudenosaunee philosophers do not conceive of a separateness of mind and body; there is no Cartesian statement “I think therefore I am” that animates Haudenosaunee philosophy. Reason, the ability to think rationally and to express it well in words, and passion, or feelings, are related and mutually influential. A balance between both is deemed necessary for the good life. Passion on its own, especially anger, is seen as destructive. The founding story of the Iroquoian confederacy conceives of a time when humans were ruled entirely by passion; there was constant war, brother fought brother, cousin fought cousin, blood was everywhere. Such was the effect of passion. Iroquoian philosophers contend that “passion drives reason from the table.” On the other hand, they assert that reason alone leads to sterility and is equally destructive. Reason robs one of passion, forcing one to look with coldness and distance at human beings and the world. Our minds are made up of reason and passion. Neither can be denied, nor should they be denied. We ought to act with reason tempered by passion. The central ceremony of Iroquoian life is the condolence ceremony, given by the Peacemaker6 and practiced by

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Hiawatha.7 Its purpose is to bring reason back to the table: “With this feather, I wipe the obstructions from your eyes so that you may see again, from your ears so that you might hear again, from your throat so that you may speak again. Grief has driven reason from the table and impaired our ability to see, hear and speak.” This is a symbolic return to “the Good Mind,” a mind balanced between reason and passion. Indigenization must mean building educational institutions that explore and transmit Indigenous ideas, ideas like “the Good Mind.” This has proven to be somewhat difficult, mostly due to the single mindedness of many adherents to the Enlightenment project. Enlightenment universities favour reason over passion. Indigenous knowledge does not argue against reason, or against science, or against a desire for objectivity. It simply contends that reason is not enough. The idea of “the Good Mind” sustained Indigenous communities in the past and can continue to sustain us into the future. Bringing ideas that animate the Haudenosaunee Guswentah, the condolence ceremony, or the Anishinaabe medicine circle8 or bimaadiziwin9 into universities requires scholars who are knowledgeable about them. In Indigenous traditions, this means that the teachers of ik ought to be Elders. Trent has had Indigenous Elders as members of the faculty since 1975: Fred Wheatley, who taught Nishnaabewin and Anishinaabe culture and Chief Jake Thomas, who taught Mohawk language and Iroquoian culture. Both were tenured faculty members, appointed without the usual academic credentials, but on the basis of their cultural knowledge and Indigenous credentials. More recently Trent has brought in Elders Shirley Williams, who teaches Nishnaabewin, and Edna Manitowabi, who teaches a course appropriately called Indigenous Knowledge. Shirley became the first professor in Canadian history to become a full professor on the basis of ik . Trent also created a chair in Indigenous Knowledge now held by a Mohawk faith keeper, Skahendowaneh Swamp, who carries Haudenosaunee knowledge. In order to bring Elders into the university as faculty, we have to grapple with the idea of Indigenous scholarship and with the criteria that we would use to appoint Indigenous knowledge holders to tenured faculty positions. At Trent University, the Collective Agreement bargained between the Trent University Faculty Association and Trent’s administration requires each department to adopt written standards for tenure that interpret the university criteria of “high

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quality in both teaching and research.” We defined three categories of scholars: conventional scholars, those who possess standard academic credentials; traditional Indigenous scholars, those who hold high levels of Indigenous knowledge; and dual-tradition scholars, those whose scholarship is informed by both ik and an academic discipline. Individuals are asked to choose one of the streams upon appointment. Tenure and promotion decisions are made based upon the chosen stream. Within the Chanie Wenjack School of Indigenous Studies at Trent, we propose a clear definition of Indigenous knowledge as: Knowledge of the language and traditional customs, rites, rituals, histories teachings of a particular group of Indigenous people or peoples. Most people will have acquired this knowledge though active and lengthy participation in particular cultural structures and processes and a careful study and reflection of the philosophical underpinnings of them. In many cases, they will have studied with a knowledgeable and well respected Elder. And, we define Indigenous knowledge scholarship as: “Scholarly activity that … leads to the generation of new knowledge about or within the particular field or a new field about which the candidate is knowledgeable.” We position ourselves as deeply interdisciplinary, do not specify degree requirements, and define scholarship quite broadly as “the generation and transmission of knowledge with both academic and practical outcomes.” Examples of scholarly activity include everything from the publication of books and peer-reviewed articles to written and oral reports prepared for community and government institutions, to creative works of art, fiction, performance, and multimedia. At Trent, our processes of faculty evaluation rest on the widely accepted idea of peer review but extend the peers to a group usually not considered by the university. In the case of Traditional Indigenous Scholars, highly regarded Elders from the cultural group of the person under consideration are given standing in the evaluation of Indigenous knowledge scholarship. When bringing ik into the university, we learned that the historical structure of university courses based upon reading, reflection, discussion, and writing are not well suited to teaching ik . Teaching ik

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requires a hands-on experiential approach, an apprenticeship of sorts, consistent with Indigenous approaches to learning. The teaching has to engage both reason and passion. At the undergraduate level, we have created courses that provide this experience in a natural environment and that focus upon the teachings of a particular group away from the university. We have learned that a pan-Indigenous approach does not make sense and causes more confusion among students than it solves. Accordingly, we separate Anishinaabe ik from Haudenosaunee ik , for example. At the graduate level, we also provide an opportunity for extended study with Elders. We put in place a “Bimaadiziwin/ Atonhetserio”10 study option where students have an opportunity to spend a term working with an Elder and learning in depth from him or her. This option occurs away from the campus, under the leadership of the Director of Studies, an Elder himself. The inclusion of this option is important to our academic mission. Approximately half of the students in the PhD program have chosen this option. We also found that learning ik was different from learning about ik. The task of learning ik requires a mindful presence and a keen understanding of self, as well as an ability to reflect. Learning ik is, in my view, akin to studying the humanities. It requires not just knowledge of content but also knowledge of one’s own values, perspectives, and attitudes and a willingness to explore them. Learning ik is transformative. It changes students in ways that are unexpected. It makes them keenly aware that they are living in an interconnected world; that the world is alive; that there is an animating energy or spirit; and that we are only a small part of the universe. Learning ik teaches humility, gratitude, and forgiveness, an awareness of the cycle of life and death, and how to begin to live in a powered universe. This is akin to the knowledge that one gains from studying the humanities. Designing and offering ik at Trent has shown us that we cannot ignore our own behaviour. Given the interwoven nature of knowledge and spirituality, how ought we to behave? How should our students behave? Studying ik , in the views of the Elders we are working with, requires a high level of commitment, a sense of humility, and most importantly an open and honest heart with a desire to use the knowledge for the betterment of humankind. Self-aggrandizement is not part of the package. Learning from Elders, we have had to learn how to question differently. Within the university, everything is open to probing, to

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questioning, to examination through the use of reason, and so the Elders and Indigenous knowledge holders have also been subject to examination, to challenge and to constant questioning. Here, the challenge was not that these kinds of questioning were taking place. After all, there is a long intellectual tradition of debate within Indigenous societies. The challenge was that they sometimes occurred in a climate of disrespect or what many interpreted as disrespect. How does one question an Elder? In the academy, we ask professors questions all the time; we ask direct questions, and we expect direct answers. A lack of understanding is often interpreted as a problem in explanation, a problem of telling rather than a problem of listening. Elders, on the other hand, respond to questions with stories, fully expecting the student to answer their own question; this can be a problem when students just want answers. Designing and offering ik at Trent, we have had to teach how to respond and relate to one another in a new way. Bringing ik holders into the academy has also meant that we have had to think about the expectations for a professor who is an ik holder. The university academic culture requires that we demonstrate that we are active and productive scholars, producing a steady stream of research, transmitting it through teaching and writing, and getting grants. Our work is expected to result in “net new knowledge.” Given this, we had to conceptualize the work of Elders as research. Land-based activities became a form of research and field work; participation in ceremonial activities became field research; leading ceremonies became a type of seminar or workshop participation or keynote address. At the early stages, we felt that it was necessary to describe these activities in language that our peers could understand. Our purpose was to make the rules of knowledge creation visible and to educate our peers and ourselves about these processes. We confronted many practical questions implementing ik . What knowledge can we bring into the academy? All except ceremonial or sacred knowledge. Who can learn it? All who desire and who come to learn it with an open heart and a sincere desire to learn. How do we evaluate their learning? In the standard way, through written papers and oral presentations. Students make presentations in the presence of Elders who then question them on what they learned. What type of grades should we give: pass or fail or letter

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grades? This matter is still not resolved. Those who argue for pass or fail speak of the difficulty of evaluating degrees of ik knowledge; those who argue for letter grades point to the widespread use of grades in scholarship and awards evaluation processes. We formulated our responses to questions like these through dialogue and discussion, not just with ourselves as academics but with Elders and community members. For us, the university is not an ivory tower, distant from everyday life and concerns but, rather, is an important part of everyday life. What we do within our universities affects the lives of people in our communities. We do not undertake our work for our own egos but with and for our communities. It makes sense, then, to have them involved. At the Chanie Wenjack School, our advisory councils, the Aboriginal Education Council and Indigenous Studies PhD Council, provide guidance and advice. As in any community, there is diversity of opinion and Trent is no exception. We might describe our efforts as an effort to come to one mind, to use a Haudenosaunee metaphor again. Practically speaking, bringing ik into the university involves adjusting our tenure and promotion processes, our notions of scholarship and research, as well as what we expect from students and professors. It involves conversations with faculty associations, colleagues, administrators, communities, Elders, and students. But bringing ik into the university requires more than intense dialogue and debate. It requires the creation of an atmosphere that supports a broad definition of “inquiry,” and accepts the interrelatedness of reason and passion, the notion of truths rather than “Truth” and, above all, believes that Indigenous people have something to offer beyond opportunities for research into social problems. Bringing ik into the university will not destroy or diminish it. The foundation of the modern university on the ideal of reason still holds, although ik brings a different kind of rationality to the table. ik challenges us to make the university relevant to the larger social and political projects of reconciliation and decolonization. As its own form of knowledge activism, ik can work to empower universities and all those who work and study there to begin addressing the inequities created by the Long Assault.

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no t e s This paper is based upon presentations made to the caut Forum on Equity, April 2019, the Indigenous Graduate Student Forum at Simon Fraser University in November 2018, and earlier talks at the University of Sudbury Ethics Project in 2007. 1 The Government of Canada, “The White Paper 1969,” indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca, 2009, https://indigenousfoundations. arts.ubc.ca/the_white_paper_1969/. In 1969, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his Minister of Indian Affairs, Jean Chrétien, unveiled a policy paper that proposed ending the special legal relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state and dismantling the Indian Act. This white paper was met with forceful opposition from Aboriginal leaders across the country and sparked a new era of Indigenous political organizing in Canada … To this end, the white paper proposed to: Eliminate Indian status; Dissolve the Department of Indian Affairs within five years; Abolish the Indian Act; Convert reserve land to private property that can be sold by the band or its members; Transfer responsibility for Indian affairs from the federal government to the province and integrate these services into those provided to other Canadian citizens; Provide funding for economic development; Appoint a commissioner to address outstanding land claims and gradually terminate existing treaties. 2 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc ) was founded in 2008, with a five-year mandate supported by a trc Secretariat (a federal government department). The trc presented its summary of their findings in June 2015. Their mandate states: “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has a mandate to learn the truth about what happened in the residential schools and to inform all Canadians about what happened in the schools. The Commission will document the truth of what happened by relying on records held by those who operated and funded the schools, testimony from officials of the institutions that operated the schools, and experiences reported by survivors, their families, communities and anyone personally affected by the residential school experience and its subsequent impacts.” To read more about the objectives and goals of the trc , see “About Us,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, http://www.trc.ca/about-us.html. 3 As stated in The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report, cultural genocide is: “[T]he destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in

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cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred, and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated or destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.” See The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Canada: Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication, 2015), 1. 4 From ancient times to the present, onikó:lha’, or Wampum – a sacred substance that many believe has a healing presence – attests to the truth, importance, and significance of a message … wampum was a symbolic material linked to the Peacemaker’s founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. When beads were collected into strands or woven together as belts, the wampum stood for the authority of a spoken message … . Any statement not accompanied by wampum was likely to be false or trivial. A very important message, such as a treaty, required a large amount of wampum often in the form of a belt. The words of the message were so closely associated with wampum that, after being “read into” the shell fabric, the words could be recalled by viewing the wampum object. Wampum also, therefore, was a memory aid. See Wampum: Memorializing the Spoken Word, https://www.oneidaindiannation.com/wampummemorializing-the-spoken-word/. 5 The Haudenosaunee are a confederacy, described as: “People of the long house. The confederacy was founded by the prophet known as the Peacemaker with the help of Aionwatha, more commonly known as Hiawatha … The confederacy, made up of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, was intended as a way to unite the nations and create a peaceful means of decision making. Through the confederacy, each of the nations of the Haudenosaunee are united by a common goal to live in harmony. Each nation maintains its own council with Chiefs chosen by the Clan Mother and deals with its own internal affairs but allows the Grand Council to deal with issues affecting the nations with the confederacy.” See “Who We Are,” Haudenosaunee Confederacy, https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/who-we-are/. 6 The Peacemaker was sent by the Creator to spread the Kariwiio or good mind. With the help of Aiionwatha, or Hiawatha, the Peacemaker taught the laws of peace to the Haudenosaunee. Travelling from community to

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community they both succeeded in persuading the Chiefs of each nation to join in the Great League of Peace and founded the only government with a direct connection to the Creator. See “Confederacy’s Creation,” https:// www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/confederacys-creation/. Hiawatha (Haionwhatha) was “one of the people who had accepted the good words of the Creator and decided to help with the Peacemaker … While grieving, Hiawatha found words that would help console others who lost loved ones. He devised a method to remember these words by stringing purple and white freshwater clamshells together on strings. Hence the first wampum was made.” See “History,” Onondaga Nation: People of the Hills, https://www.onondaganation.org/history/ According to F. David Peat, on the medicine wheel, “the four directions are pictured as spokes … and refer not only to the transformation of the seasons but also to the movement from birth to death; to health and of healing; to the dynamics of the individual psyche; to the concept of justice; to the meanings of sacred colours; to the history of a group; to the tasks that must be carried out by the different peoples of the earth, and to a host of other teachings.” See F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Universe (Grand Rapids: Phares Press Inc., 2002), 162. Lawrence W. Gross describes bimaadiziwn as the “‘good life,’ as defined by the Anishinaabe. […] [B]imaadiziwin governs human relation … stressing the type of conduct appropriate between individuals, and the manner in which social life is to be conducted. Bimaadiziwin also covers the relationship with the broader environment. So, for example, it teaches the necessity of respecting all life, from the smallest insects on up. Bimaadiziwin, however, does not exist as a definitive body of law. Instead, it is left up to the individual to develop an understanding of bimaadiziwin through careful attention to the teaching wherever it can be found. This makes the term quite complex, and it can serve as a religious blessing, moral teaching, value system, and goal in life.” See Lawrence W. Gross, “Bimaadiziwin, or the ‘Good Life,’ as a Unifying Concept of Anishinaabe Religion,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 26, no. 1 (2002): 15–32, 19. A study option within the program, “Pimadiziwin/Atonhetserio,” is defined as “the good life.” Graduate Ross Hoffman states that “this option allows a student to work closely with an Elder over an extended period of time. Afterwards the student is expected to present their experience in both oral and written form.” 250–1. See Ross Hoffman, “Open Arms, Open Hearts, Open Minds – Welcomed Once Again,” American Indian Quarterly 27, no. 1–2 (2003): 249–51.

pa r t f o u r

Reason and Passion – Final Reflections

11 Reducing Inequality: An Essential Step for Development and Well-Being Kate Pickett

Inequality is emerging as a central issue for the post-2015 development agenda and the establishment of sustainable development goals. Inequalities in income and wealth cause economic instability, a range of health and social problems, and create a roadblock to the adoption of pro-environment strategies and behaviour. Social and economic inequalities tear the social fabric, undermine social cohesion, and prevent nations, communities, and individuals from flourishing.

th e i mpac t o f i n e q ua l i t y Social and economic inequality increases the power and importance of social hierarchy, status, and class.1 As a result, a long list of problems further down the social ladder – in poorer neighbourhoods for instance – are much more common in societies with larger income differences between rich and poor.2 Although the impact of inequality tends to be most severe lower down the social ladder, outcomes are worse even among the better off, because inequality damages the whole social fabric – increasing social divisions, status in insecurity and status competition.3 Indeed, it is because a large majority of the population – not just the poor – are affected by inequality that the differences in the performance of more and less equal societies are so large. The scale of the differences varies from one health or social problem to another, but they are all between twice as common and ten times as common in more unequal societies compared to more equal ones. Although in the rich, developed countries, income inequality is related to indicators of health and social well-being, levels of average

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Index of health and social problems

Worse

Portugal • United Kingdom • Greece New Zealand Ireland • • • • Austria France Austria • • Denmark Germany • • Canada Italy • • Spain • • Belgium Switzerland • • Finland • Norway • The Netherlands • Sweden • Japan

Better Low

Income inequality

High

Figure 11.1 | International inequality index

income (gdp per capita) are not. Reducing inequality is the most important step these countries can take to increase population well-being. In the developing and emerging economies, both greater equality and improvements in standards of living are needed for populations to flourish. A large and well-established body of evidence shows that very large income differences within countries are damaging. Analyses include both cross-sectional research and studies of changes in income distribution over time. There is a particularly large body of evidence linking greater inequality to worse population health; hundreds of studies show us that life expectancy is longer, and mortality lower, in more equal societies,4 rates of infant mortality, mental illness, and obesity are two to four times higher5 and, in both developing and developed countries, hiv infection prevalence rises with inequality.6 There is also substantial evidence linking greater equality to better social relationships within societies – levels of social cohesion, including trust and social capital, are higher in more equal countries.7

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Indicators of women’s status and equality are generally better8 and rates of both property, crime, and violence, especially homicides, increase as income differences widen.9 Inequality wastes human capital and human potential. The unicef Index of Child Well-Being is significantly higher in more equal societies,10 educational attainment is higher, fewer young people drop out of education, employment, and training, and fewer teenage girls become mothers.11 Notably, social mobility is restricted in very unequal societies – equality of opportunity is shaped by equality of outcomes.12 In addition to its impact on health and social outcomes, greater equality is also linked to economic progress and stability. Poverty reduction, and hence development, is compromised by income inequality.13 In rich and poor countries, inequality is strongly correlated with shorter spells of economic expansion and less growth over time14 and with more frequent and more severe boom-andbust cycles that make economies more volatile and vulnerable to crisis.15 As an International Monetary Fund report put it – reducing inequality and bolstering longer-term economic growth may be “two sides of the same coin.”16 Greater equality has an important role to play in the necessary worldwide transition to sustainable economies. Inequality drives status competition, which drives personal debt and consumerism17 and, of course, consumerism is a major threat to sustainability. Stronger community life in more equal societies also means that people are more willing to act for the common good – they recycle more, spend more on foreign aid, score higher on the Global Peace Index,18 and business leaders in more equal countries rate international environmental agreements more highly.19

r educi ng i ne q ua l i t y Income differences can be reduced via redistribution through taxes and benefits, or by reducing differences in pretax incomes. The international evidence suggests that greater equality confers the same benefits on a society whether it is achieved through one of these approaches or the other.20 In general, top tax rates, which in many countries – including the US – were over 80 per cent in the 1970s, have been reduced dramatically and there is room for more progressive taxation to be restored.

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Dealing with tax havens and other methods used by rich individuals and large companies to avoid tax is crucial; the amount of money lost by developing countries to tax havens exceeds all international development aid.21 This not only increases global inequality but also means that a higher proportion of public expenditure has to be funded by taxpayers in lower income groups. In many countries, taxation has ceased to be significantly redistributive. Forms of economic democracy, such as employee ownership, employee representation on boards, employee share ownership, mutuals, and cooperatives tend to reduce the scale of income inequality and help equality to become more embedded in a society – these are more long-lasting cultural changes than can be achieved through tweaks to the tax code. These forms of business institutions also provide a more stable basis for community life and perform well in ethical terms.

marki ng prog r e ss Given all that we now know about the effects of inequality, it seems clear that we should both monitor inequality and commit to realistic but courageous targets to reduce it. A core objective of the post-2015 development framework and the sustainable development goals should be to reduce inequality within countries.22 The frameworks should include a top-level goal to reduce inequalities, including income inequalities in particular. This should be in addition to disaggregated indicators and targets in every other goal to ensure equitable progress across different social groups towards agreed development objectives. An inequality target could be based on Palma’s ratio of the income share of the top 10 per cent of a population to the bottom 40 per cent. In more equal societies this ratio will be one or below, meaning that the top 10 per cent does not receive a larger share of national income than the bottom 40 per cent. In very unequal societies, the ratio may be as high as seven.23 A potential target could be to halve national Palma ratios by 2030, compared to 2010, and dramatically reduce the global Palma ratio, which is currently thirty-two. Prioritising the need to tackle inequality in this way will ensure that economic and development strategies are truly inclusive and can drive human progress towards sustainability and well-being.

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s o urces fo r furth er i n f o r m at i o n Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity (asap ) www.asap4all.org The Equality Trust www.equalitytrust.org.uk no t e s 1 R.G. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, 2010). 2 R.G. Wilkinson and K.E. Pickett, “Income Inequality and Social Dysfunction,” Annual Review Sociology, 35 (2009): 493–512; R.G. Wilkinson and K.E. Pickett, “Income Inequality and Population Health: A Review and Explanation of the Evidence,” Social Science & Medicine 62, no. 7 (2006): 1768–84; R.G. Wilkinson and K.E. Pickett, “The Problems of Relative Deprivation: Why Some Societies Do Better Than Others,” Social Science & Medicine 65, no. 9 (2007): 1965–78. 3 Wilkinson and Pickett, “Income Inequality and Social Dysfunction,” 493–512. 4 Wilkinson and Pickett, “Income Inequality and Population Health,” 1768–84; S.J. Babones, “Income Inequality and Population Health: Correlation and Causality,” Social Science & Medicine 66, no. 7 (2008): 1614–26; R. De Vogli, R. Mistry, R. Gnesotto, and G.A. Cornia, “Has the Relation between Income Inequality and Life Expectancy Disappeared? Evidence from Italy and Top Industrialised Countries,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 59, no. 2 (2005): 158–62; N. Kondo, G. Sembajwe, I. Kawachi, R.M. van Dam, S.V. Subramanian, and Z. Yamagata, “Income Inequality, Mortality, and Self-Rated Health: Meta-Analysis of Multilevel Studies,” British Medical Journal, 339 (2009): b4471; R. Ram, “Further Examination of the Cross-Country Association between Income Inequality and Population Health,” Social Science & Medicine 62, no. 3 (2006): 779–91; S.V. Subramanian and I. Kawachi, “Income Inequality and Health: What Have We Learned so Far?,” Epidemiologic Reviews, 26 (2004): 78–91. 5 R.G. Wilkinson and K.E. Pickett, “The Problems of Relative Deprivation: Why Some Societies Do Better Than Others,” 1965–78; S. Hales, P. Howden-Chapman, C. Salmond, A. Woodward, and J. Mackenbach, “National Infant Mortality Rates in Relation to Gross National Product and Distribution of Income,” Lancet 354, no. 9195 (1999): 2047; K.E. Pickett and R.G. Wilkinson, “Inequality: An Underacknowledged Source

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of Mental Illness and Distress,” British Journal of Psychiatry, 197 (2010): 426–8; A. Offer, R. Pechey, and S. Ulijaszek, Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); K.E. Pickett, S. Kelly, E. Brunner, T. Lobstein, and R.G. Wilkinson, “Wider Income Gaps, Wider Waistbands? An Ecological Study of Obesity and Income Inequality,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 59, no. 8 (2005): 670–4. P.K. Drain, J.S. Smith, J.P. Hughes, D.T. Halperin, and K.K. Holmes, “Correlates of National hiv Seroprevalence: An Ecologic Analysis of 122 Developing Countries,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 35, no. 4 (2004): 407–20; M. Over, “The Effects of Societal Variables on Urban Rates of hiv Infection in Developing Countries: An Exploratory Analysis,” Confronting aids : Evidence from the Developing World (Brussels and Washington: European Commission and World Bank, 1998). F.J. Elgar, “Income Inequality, Trust, and Population Health in 33 Countries,” American Jounral of Public Health 100, no. 11 (2010): 2311–5; F.J. Elgar and N. Aitken, “Income Inequality, Trust, and Homicide in 33 Countries,” European Journal of Public Health 21, no. 2 (2011): 241–6; I. Kawachi, B.P. Kennedy, K. Lochner, and D. Prothrow-Stith, “Social Capital, Income Inequality, and Mortality,” American Journal of Public Health 87, no. 9 (1997): 1491–8; B. Rothstein and E. Uslaner, “All for All: Equality, Corruption, and Social Trust,” World Politics, 58 (2005): 41–72; E. Uslaner, The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level; I. Kawachi, B.P. Kennedy, V. Gupta, and D. Prothrow-Stith, “Women’s Status and the Health of Women and Men: A View from the States,” Social Science & Medicine 48, no. 1 (1999): 21–32. F.J. Elgar and N. Aitken, “Income Inequality, Trust, and Homicide in 33 Countries,” European Journal of Public Health 21, no. 2 (2011): 241–6; M. Daly, M. Wilson, and S. Vasdev, “Income Inequality and Homicide Rates in Canada and the United States,” Canadian Journal of Public Health-Revue canadienne de criminalogie 43, no. 2 (2001): 219–36; F.J. Elgar, K.E. Pickett, W. Pickett, W. Craig, M. Molcho, K. Hurrelmann, et al., “School Bullying, Homicide, and Income Inequality: A Cross-National Pooled Time Series Analysis,” International Journal of Public Health 58, no. 2 (2013): 237–45; H. Krahn, T.F. Hartnagel, and J.W. Gartrell, “Income Inequality and Homicide Rates: Cross-National Data and Criminological Theories,” The Sociological Quarterly, 17 (1986): 303–13;

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10

11

12

13

14

15 16 17

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P. Fajnzylber, D. Lederman, and N. Loayza, “Inequality and Violent Crime,” Journal of Law and Economics, 45 (2002): 1–40; C.C. Hsieh and M.D. Pugh, “Poverty, Income Inequality, and Violent Crime: A MetaAnalysis of Recent Aggregate Data Studies,” Criminal Justice Review, 18 (1993): 182–202; H. Rufrancos, M. Power, K.E. Pickett, and R. Wilkinson, “Income Inequality and Crime: A Review and Explanation of the Time – Series Evidence,” Criminology and Sociology (in press). K.E. Pickett and R.G. Wilkinson, “Child Wellbeing and Income Inequality in Rich Societies: Ecological Cross-Sectional Study,” British Medical Journal, 335 (2007): 1080. R.G. Wilkinson and K.E. Pickett, “The Problems of Relative Deprivation: Why Some Societies Do Better Than Others,” 1965–78; K.E. Pickett and R.G. Wilkinson, “Child Wellbeing and Income Inequality in Rich Societies: Ecological Cross-Sectional Study,” 1080; A. Siddiqi, I. Kawachi, L. Berkman, S.V. Subramanian, and C. Hertzman, “Variation of Socioeconomic Gradients in Children’s Developmental Health across Advanced Capitalist Societies: Analysis of 22 oecd Nations,” International Journal of Health Services 37, no. 1 (2007): 63–87. Wilkinson and Pickett, “The Problems of Relative Deprivation,” 1965–78; J. Blanden, How Much Can We Learn From International Comparisons of Intergenerational Mobility? (London: Centre for the Economics of Education, 2009). R.H. Wade, “Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality?,” World Development 32, no. 4 (2004): 567–89; P. Edward and A. Sumner, The Future of Global Poverty in a Multi-Speed World (Mimeo, 2013). A. Berg and J.D. Ostry, “Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin?,” International Monetary Fund, 2013; J.E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2012). Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality. Berg and Ostry, “Inequality and Unsustainable Growth.” Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level; R.H. Frank, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); R.H. Frank and A.S. Levine, Expenditure Cascades: Cornell University Mimeograph (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2005); T. Kasser and R.M. Ryan, “A Dark Side of the American Dream: Correlates of Financial Success as a Central Life Aspiration,” Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 65, no. 2 (1993): 410–22; M. Iacoviello, “Household Debt and Income Inequality, 1963–2003,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 40, no. 5 (2008): 929–65.

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18 Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level. 19 R.G. Wilkinson, K.E. Pickett, and R. De Vogli, “Equality, Sustainability, and Quality of Life,” British Medical Journal, 341 (2010): c5816. 20 Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level. 21 J.S. Henry, “The Price of Offshore Revisited,” Tax Justice Network, 2012, http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/front_content.php?idcat=148; N. Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (London: Bodley Head, 2011). 22 K. Pickett, et al. Letter to the UN High Level Panel, 2013, http://post2015. org/2013/03/21/letter- from-leading-academics-addressed-to-high-levelpanel-says-put-inequality-at-the-heart-of-post-2015/. 23 J.G. Palma, “Homogeneous Middles vs. Heterogeneous Tails, and the End of the ‘Inverted-U’: It’s All about the Share of the Rich,” Development and Change 42, no. 1 (2011): 87–153.

Dear Fetid Mass (On Diversity) David James Hudson and Lisa Baird

Diversity. The Secretary of Defense invites you to attend the Transgender Day of Visibility Celebration in the Pentagon Auditorium. All are welcome. We see you. Diversity. A billboard shows handsome brown men in stylish clothes made by companies whose factories collapse on brown families. Diversity. A bistro with a rainbow flag in the window sells artisanal cheese in a revitalized neighbourhood with working class roots. Diversity. A Fortune 500 company observes culturally relevant holidays, bottles groundwater, and sells it back to locals, the tap water poisoned. Inclusion.

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Diversity. The major banks trot out rainbow mortgages, subprime for Pride. Diversity. A weapons manufacturer does not tolerate microaggressions in the workplace. Diversity. The downsizing firm is Black owned. The chief of police marches at Pride. The minister of war is brown, badass, and fetishized. Diversity. A city council acknowledges unceded indigenous land while the mayor, the landowners, the businesses nod on, the symbolism a comfort. Diversity. The board of directors of this international mining firm, that pharmaceutical giant, this petrochemical company are all committed to gender pay equity. Diversity. The hippest city in a five-decade long occupation welcomes all orientations. Imperial queerness means tourist dollars. (Take that, BDS.) Diversity. The first female Prime Minister. Diversity. The first Black female billionaire. Diversity. The first gay— Diversity. The first—

Dear Fetid Mass (On Diversity)

Diversity. The first gay Silicon Valley ceo . Diversity. That famous—that inspiring— Diversity. Successful— Diversity. That decorated— That decorated brown sniper. The first Black president. Diversity. We will not mistake you for justice. Dear fetid mass— Dear centuries-high steeples of capital, fissured and thrashing, swaying on foundations of the carbonized, compacted unmarked remains of our ancestors in wretched earth, We will not celebrate boardrooms of more diverse oppressors feasting on the handcrafted bounties of minimum-wage empires, guarded by multiracial, multigendered lines of riot cops, the friendlier, more inclusive death squad, the heads stuffed in Goldman sacks slung, the equal opportunity mass graves, the vile smiling corporate eulogies of trickle-down inspiration. We know you. We know you thieve our names. We know you eviscerate our living histories. We know you reduce our existence to a talented tenth.

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We know your game and its scheming sponsors. We reject your moves to settle. We will find power in the interstices between our bodies and our labours, our scrappy desires, our complicated homes in earthmovers, dissected neighbourhoods and the tattered lies of tattered maps written by 21st-century colonizers. We will find our names in our entangled struggle against the cracking static state violence of profit over people and land. No, Diversity, glossy sheen on disaster capital flows, on sacrifice zones, business-as-usual shelf-ready brand— We will not mistake you for justice.

Contributors

benjamin anderson is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University where he researches the labour process and political economy of craft industries. In addition to his research, he also serves as a lecturer in sfu ’s Labour Studies Program. lisa baird is a writer and community acupuncturist. Her poetry has appeared in various journals including Arc, Rattle, and Plenitude. She is a contributor to the Lambda award-winning anthology The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Healthcare (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) and to gush : Menstrual Manifestos for our Times (Frontenac House, 2018). Her first book of poetry, Winter’s Cold Girls, was published by Caitlin Press in fall of 2019. Find her online at www.lisabaird.ca. michael berghoef is professor of social work and chair of the Social Work Department at Ferris State University. He is a past Carnegie Political Engagement Scholar and has been involved in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, the Political Engagement Project, the American Democracy Project, Academic Service Learning, and Shoah genocide studies programming since the inception of those initiatives at Ferris State University. enda brophy is associate professor in the School of Communication and an associate in the Labour Studies Program at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce, and has translated

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numerous works by Italian scholars, including Gigi Roggero’s  The Production of Living Knowledge: Crisis of the University and The Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America.

debayudh chatterjee is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research lies at the crossroads between counterculture, progressive politics, and critical theory. james compton is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His research interests lie in the areas of political economy of communication, media spectacles, journalism studies, and university governance. He is author of The Integrated News Spectacle: A Political Economy of Cultural Performance (Peter Lang 2004), and co-editor, with David Skinner and Mike Gasher, of Converging Media, Diverging Politics (Lexington Books 2005). He is a past president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (caut ) and is a former president of the University of Western Ontario Faculty Association (uwofa ). greig de peuter is associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is co-author, with Nicole Cohen, of New Media Unions: Organizing Digital Journalists (Routledge, 2020). He collaborates on the research project Cultural Workers Organize. nick dyer-witheford, a professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1999) and Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London: Pluto Press, 2015), and has also written on the video and computer game industry, the uses of the internet by social movements, and theories of technology. Two recent books are co-authorships: with Svitlana Matviyenko, Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press 2019), and, with Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James Steinhoff, Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Pluto Press 2019).

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247

giada ferrucci is a PhD candidate in media studies at Western University. Her doctoral research focuses on the intersections between social movements, environmental activism, and access to information in Latin America. amanda grzyb is associate professor of information and media studies at Western University, where her research focuses on state violence, genocide, and social movements. She is currently the project director for Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador, a collaborative, community-based research initiative that documents and commemorates the history of the Salvadoran Civil War (1980–92): www.elsalvadormemory.org. Her previous publications focus on documentation and commemoration of the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and state violence in Sudan. max haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media, and Social Justice at Lakehead University and co-director of ReImagining Value Action Lab (r ival ). His latest book is  Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts. bernie hammond is professor emeritus of sociology at King’s University College (London, Ontario). As a scholar-activist, his interests range from the sociology of health and illness to the political sociology of Central and South America. In the early 1980s, he established the Centre for Social Concern, a development education centre that focused on local and global issues of social justice. In 2000, he developed a new four-year ba program in Social Justice and Peace Studies that incorporates experiential learning locally and globally. Bernie now divides his time between Canada and Central America and he continues to engage in international solidarity work. alison hearn is associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, at the University of Western Ontario in Canada and current chair of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (caut ). Her research focuses on the intersections of digital media, promotional culture, the credit economy, and emerging forms of labour. She has published widely in journals and edited volumes

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such as Social Media + Society, Journal of Consumer Culture, International Journal of Communication, and The Media and Social Theory. She is co-author, with Liora Salter, of Outside the Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research.

david james hudson is a writer and performer, as well as an associate librarian and library and information studies scholar at the University of Guelph. His writing has been published in journals such as Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies and Journal of Information Ethics, as well as collections including Topographies of Whiteness (Library Juice Press, 2017), Information Ethics and Global Citizenship (McFarland, 2017), and Greening Libraries (Library Juice Press, 2009). He can be found online at www.davidjameshudson.ca. sandra jeppesen researches with autonomous media and social movements from an intersectional feminist, queer, trans, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and decolonizing perspective. Co-founder of the Media Action Research Group (marg ), and former member of the Collectif de Recherche sur l’Autonomie Collective (crac ) in Montreal, she is associate professor in media, film, and communications at Lakehead University Orillia, Canada, where she has held the Lakehead University Research Chair in Transformative Media and Social Movements (2016–19). jaina kelly is a 2018 graduate of the Lakehead University BSc in Media Studies. She is passionate about writing, mental health, and social justice. At Lakehead she worked with the Media Action Research Group researching care in feminist grassroots social movements. ann larson is a co-founder of the Debt Collective, a membership organization that offers resources and a platform for collective action to people in debt. She is co-author of Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition  (Haymarket) and has written about debt and higher education for such publications as the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed., and Public Seminar. She holds a PhD in English from the City University of New York.

Contributors

249

dimitri lascaris is a lawyer, journalist, and activist based in Montreal, Quebec. After graduating from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1991, he began his law career at the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. In 2004 he joined Siskinds llp , one of Canada’s leading class action law firms. There, he co-founded and led Canada’s largest and most accomplished team of securities class action lawyers. In 2016, Dimitri retired from Siskinds in order to devote himself to journalism, activism, and pro bono legal work. He has been a correspondent of The Real News Network, and has served on the boards of numerous public-interest organizations. In Canada’s 2015 federal election, Dimitri ran as a candidate for the Green Party of Canada (gpc ). media action research group (marg) is an intersectional feminist collective that researches with grassroots media activists to co-produce knowledge toward transformative social change. ainhoa montoya is senior lecturer in Latin American studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her research focuses on postconflict violence and conflicts over natural resources in Central America, and has been funded with awards from the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy. Montoya has also acted as an expert witness in asylum appeal cases in the UK involving Salvadorans. She is currently a co-editor of the Bulletin of Latin American Research and the Journal of the Society for Latin American Studies. david newhouse is associate professor in the School of Business and chair in the Chaneie Wenjack School of Indigenous Studies at Trent University. He is Onondaga from the Six Nations of the Grand River community near Brantford, Ontario. His research interests are focused on the way in which Aboriginal traditional thought and western thought are coming together and creating modern Aboriginal societies. His current exploration examines Indigenous ideas about the future and the manner in which these are given political and social expression. kate pickett, frsa ffph, is professor of epidemiology, deputy director of the Centre for Future Health, and associate director of

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Contributors

the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, all at the University of York. She is co-author, with Richard Wilkinson, of the bestselling The Spirit Level (2009) and The Inner Level (2018).

kiran prasad is professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Sri Padmavati Mahila University (Tirupati, India). She was Commonwealth Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for International Communication Research, Institute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds, UK and Canadian Studies Research Fellow at the School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Canada. She is the youngest ever recipient of the State Best Teacher Award from the Government of Andhra Pradesh, India and has published twenty-three books including Communication, Culture, and Ecology: Rethinking Sustainable Development in Asia (Springer Singapore, 2018) and Gender and ict s: Future Directions in Bridging the Digital Divide (2016). panagiotis sotiris works as a journalist in Athens and has taught social and political philosophy at various Greek universities. A long-time activist in the Greek anti-capitalist Left, he is also a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism. His books include A Philosophy for Communism. Rethinking Althusser (Leiden: Brill, 2020) and the edited volume Crisis, Movement, Strategy: The Greek Experience (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019). lynx sainte-marie, an Afro+Goth poet, is a Black, disabled and chronically ill, queer, nonbinary and genderfluid misfit of the Jamaican diaspora, living in Toronto, stolen Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat land. A multimedium artist, activist, and educator, Lynx works to challenge and disrupt dominant structures like ableism, cis-heteropatriarchy, anti-Blackness, and racism.

Index

affective digital labour, 20–1; collective self-care strategies, 208–9; definition and forms of, 202–4; healing justice and, 212–13; holding space practice, 210–12; immaterial commons and, 198, 202; negative and positive experiences, 204–6, 214; transformative community empathy and, 209–10; value-based networks, 206–8 Agrarian Reform Law (Honduras), 73–4 Agricultural Modernization Law (Honduras), 74, 75 agriculture: export crops (Honduras), 73–5; sustainable (India), 176–7, 180 Ahmad, Muzaffar, 59 Akbar, M.J., 186 algorithms, 114, 115, 142, 156; Facebook’s, 112; racially encoded, 18, 103, 106 alternative media, 172, 186, 198; rural women’s use of, 181–2; for tribal communities, 182–4 Althusser, Louis, 36–7, 39, 40

alt-labour, 141, 148, 159, 160. See also Working Artists and the Greater Economy (w.a.g.e. ) Ama Sangathan (Women’s Federation), 180 Ambedkar, Bhim Rao, 54, 58, 59, 60, 66; Marxist ideology and, 55–7 Anderson, Benjamin, 18 Anishinaabe, 223, 225, 230n10 anti-austerity activism, 3, 6, 38, 115 anti-capitalism, 20, 44, 47, 102, 201, 213 anti-colonial activists, 20, 106, 116 anti-corruption campaigns, 177–8 anti-dam movement (India), 178–9 anti-imperialism, 104, 106–7 anti-oppression practices, 193, 199, 202, 205 anti-racism, 20, 44, 207, 210 Armah, Esther, 192 art institutions, 19, 139, 141; Canadian government-funded, 148; nonprofit, 140, 143–4, 145, 147–8, 149, 159, 160; w.a.g.e. -certified, 149–52

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artists: assistants of, 157; debt, 116; employment status of, 141; fees, 145–8, 150, 155–9; money struggles, 140; nonpayment to, 141–5, 149, 157; royalties, 154; as workers, 144, 153, 160 Art Workers Coalition (awc ), 142 Arvidsson, Adam, 112 audits, 115–16, 177 austerity, 3, 6, 8, 106, 109; in Greece, 29–32, 46; management in universities, 11, 12–13, 15. See also anti-austerity activism automotive industry, 5, 7, 8–9 autonomous movements, 39, 40, 65, 202, 204. See also sovereignty Azad, Rohit, 68 Badiou, Alain, 34 Bagul, Baburao, 57 Bahujan Samaj Party, 61, 70n29 bailout programs, 5–6, 30 Baird, Lisa, 21–2 Balibar, Étienne, 33, 34, 39, 50n30 Bandyopadhyaya, Jayantanuj, 63, 70n30 banks, 103, 104, 110, 112, 241; bailout of, 5–6; foreclosures, 129, 132 Bengal. See West Bengal Berghoef, Michael, 17 Berne, Jasper, 117 Bhartiya Janata Party (bjp ), 62, 63, 65, 68 Bilge, Sirma, 201 bimaadiziwn (“good life”), 223, 225, 230nn10–11

Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (bipoc ), 191, 192, 193–4, 195, 197 Black bodies, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197 Black Lives Matter, 3, 6, 109; healing justice for, 191, 203, 212 Bowers, Ann, 128 Brahmins, 56; Hindu Right, 17, 66–7, 68; oppression by, 64, 66 Brazil: Azmina, 206; Radio Capitolina, 209 Brophy, Enda, 18 Brown, Michael, 191 Buddhism, 56 cabildo abierto (consultative assembly), 83 Cáceres, Berta, 79 Calais Migrant Solidarity, 205, 210 capitalism, 40, 55, 58, 172, 212; digital, 18, 100, 102; empire and debt and, 104–6, 108, 109, 110, 113; financial, 5–6, 7, 16, 18, 114–15; global, 101, 105, 107, 116–17; Greek, 29–30, 38; platform, 112; racial, 99, 101, 102. See also anti-capitalism capitalist accumulation, 17, 42, 43, 44, 105 care work, 4, 16, 19–20. See also self-care carfac , 146, 148, 153 Carlos Escaleras National Park, 81–2, 85–6 caste: communism and class struggles and, 58–62; decline of left parties and, 63–7; Marx’s interpretations of, 54–5, 63; roots of, 68n1

Index Castells, Manuel, 6 Catalogue of Inalienable Public Forestry Patrimony (cppfi ), 85–6 Ceibita’s Permanent Surveillance Committee (coviperce ), 83, 84, 88 cgnet Swara, 183–4 Chakma, Amit, 13–16 Chakraborty, Shyamal, 65–6 Chakravartty, Paula, 108, 113 Chambal Media, 182 Chatterjee, Debayudh, 17 Choudhary, Shubhranshu, 183–4 class struggles, 33, 39, 51n30, 106; caste and, 17, 55, 56, 58–62, 63–4. See also working class C-Libre, 89 Clinton, Hillary, 127, 135, 137n7 Coca-Cola, 179 collective, the, 20, 37, 48, 202, 206; identity of, 30, 32, 33; ingenuity of, 38, 40, 45; self-care and, 21, 195, 208–9, 213; transformation of, 34, 35. See also Debt Collective collective action theory, 142, 145 College for All Act (US), 135–6 colleges, for-profit, 126–7, 130, 132, 134. See also Corinthian Colleges Collins, Patricia Hill, 201 colonialism and settler colonialism, 44, 58, 113, 195; debt and capitalism and, 102–3, 104–7, 109, 111, 117; white fragility and, 207. See also decolonization commons: definition of the, 202; immaterial, 20, 198, 202, 204, 213, 214; reclaiming the, 180

253

Communication for Sustainable Social Change (cssc&d ), 185 communism, 40–1, 45. See also Communist Party of India (Marxist) [cpi (m )] Communist Party of India (Marxist) [cpi (m )]: caste and class struggles, 60–2, 63–4, 65; Dalit criticism and support, 55, 56–7; decline of, 67, 68 community-based media, 20, 172; development of mobile apps, 184–5; interactive voice services (ivr ), 183–4; participation in, 185–6; radio and newspapers, 181–2, 186 consumerism, 114, 235 Cooperation Jackson, 116 cooperatives, 22, 74, 116, 159, 236 Corinthian Colleges: board, 127; closure, 131; for-profit model, 126–7; Heald College branch, 131–2; student debt strike, 19, 128, 129–30, 133–4, 136 Cornell, Lauren, 149 Cottom, Tressie McMillan, 132 covid-19 pandemic, 22 cpi(m ). See Communist Party of India (Marxist) [cpi (m )] credit, 102, 104, 106, 109, 112, 130 creditworthiness, 18, 103, 106 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 201 criminalization, 79, 90–1, 108, 192; of environmental defenders, 18, 73, 84, 87–9 crowd, fear of the, 34, 35 cryptocurrencies, 103, 110, 111, 116

254

Index

cultural capital, 145, 157 cultural genocide, 219, 228n4 cultural revolution, 63–4, 65 Dalits: Bahujan term for, 70n28; decline of left parties and, 66–7; Harijan term for, 59, 61, 69n25; Marxist ideology and, 55–7, 62; oppression, 17, 58; resurgence in West Bengal, 64–5; total population, 65 Dange, S.A., 56 dark matter, 141, 144, 148, 157, 160 Dayen, David, 132 Dean, Jodi, 33, 144 debt: artists and, 116, 142; cancellation or relief, 19, 126–7, 129–31, 134–6, 137n7; collection companies, 112, 130; crisis in Greece, 29–31; empire and digital technologies and, 18, 104–15; farmers and, 177; global capitalism and, 107–8; increase in personal, 6, 235; intersecting connections, 99–104; movements and resistance, 104, 115–16. See also Debt Collective Debt Collective: Corinthian Colleges campaign, 129–32; founding and purpose, 19, 115, 126–7; US policymakers and, 135–6 DebtFair.org, 116 debtfare, 108, 109, 110 decolonization, 21, 43–4, 103, 113, 227 Defense to Repayment, 127, 133, 134 Deleuze, Gilles, 36, 37, 44

democracy, 29, 33, 47–8; economic, 22, 236; in Greece, 31; in Honduras, 91, 95n38; in India, 56, 61, 62, 63, 68; participatory, 36, 41 Democratic party (US), 128, 134, 135 Department of Education (US), 127–9, 130–2, 134–5 developing countries, 171, 180, 181, 186, 234, 236; internet access, 112. See also Global South DeVos, Betsy, 135 Dharavi Diary program, 184 digital technology: debt and platform capitalism and, 99, 100, 103, 110, 111–15; global financial system and, 6, 109, 110–11; labour platforms, 148, 152, 155–9; media activism and, 203, 204, 211–12; mobile apps, 114, 184–5; social movements and, 104. See also algorithms Dinant Corporation, 74 disability justice, 195 disabled people, 20, 191–2, 195–7 discrimination, 212; caste, 54, 64, 66, 67; gender, 132, 172, 174, 204–5. See also racism displacement, 7, 89–90, 178 dispossession: accumulation by, 72; debt and, 18, 101, 176 diversity, 22, 57, 175, 201, 241–4 dominant class, 39, 51n35 Duncan, Arne, 128–9 economic growth, 8, 235; in India, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176 eco-village development, 180–1

Index educational attainment, 175 emotional justice, 192 emotional labour, 102, 194, 196, 202, 205–6 empathy. See transformative community empathy empire: colonialism and debt and, 104–10, 117; digital technologies and debt and, 111–13; intersecting connections, 99–100, 102–4 entrepreneurialism, 43, 100–1, 106, 111, 113, 185 environmental defenders: forced displacement of, 89–90; Guapinol community blockade, 84–5; of natural resources in India, 178–81; violence and deaths, 79, 87–9 environmental impacts, 80, 81 equality and emancipation, 29, 32, 35, 37, 40, 45; conditions of labor and, 42; in Greece, 38 European South, 29, 32. See also Greece; Spain European Union (eu ), 38, 43; Greece and, 30–1, 41 Eurozone, 30, 31, 38 exceptionality and deexceptionality, 19, 144, 147, 157, 160 exploitation, 38, 42, 55, 144, 182; class, 60, 62, 66; debt and, 105, 107; of forests and natural resources, 178, 180; labour, 108, 110, 113, 208; oppression and, 33, 35, 44, 114, 115; self-, 157, 211 extractive industries, 3, 104; in Honduras, 18, 75, 76, 79–81, 88

255

Facebook, 112, 114, 191, 209 Facussé, Miguel, 74, 82 Fairwork Foundation, 152 farmers: subsistence, 73, 75; suicides in India, 173, 177, 180; women, 180 far right, 32, 43; Sangh parivar, 63, 70n35 fascism, 63, 206 feminism and feminists, 101, 106, 114, 115, 207; Black, 191, 194, 197, 201; empathy and, 209, 210; intersectional, 199, 205–6 Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 108, 113 Ferrucci, Giada, 17 financial crisis (2008), 4–6, 17, 18, 29, 30, 102; consumer debt and, 108, 109; foreclosures, 128, 129, 132; impact in London (on ), 8–9; subprime mortgage meltdown, 101, 103, 114 financial sector, 5–6, 100, 109, 110, 111–12. See also banks food security, 180–1 foreign investment, 79, 95n38 forest protection, 85, 178, 179, 180 Foucault, Michel, 143 Fraser, Nancy, 6 Free Basics, 112 Gago, Verónica, 109 Gandhi, Mahatma, 59, 69n25 Ganguly, Debjani, 56, 58, 62 gdp, 234; Honduras’, 73, 80; India’s, 173 gender inequality: affective labour and, 205–6; care work and, 209– 10; in India, 171, 173–5, 185, 186 General Mining Law (Honduras), 80–1, 85–6, 94n38

256

Index

gig economy, 3, 18, 100, 115, 159 global citizenship, 43 global economic crisis. See financial crisis (2008) globalization, 43, 65, 105, 171, 172 Global North, 101, 105, 113 Global South, 3, 101, 103, 105, 115–16 good encounters, organizing, 37 “good mind” philosophy, 222–3 Goudge, Justice Stephen, 15 Graeber, David, 107, 114 Graham, Mark, 148 Gramsci, Antonio, 35–7, 46–7, 52n46 Gray-Donald, David, 208 Great Recession. See financial crisis (2008) Greece, 36, 37, 38, 41; Burnt Bras in Athens, 206, 209, 211; economic and political crises, 29–32, 46 Green Revolution, 176 Gross, Lawrence W., 230n10 Grzyb, Amanda, 17 Guapinol community (Honduras): Camp in Defense of Water and Life blockade, 17–18, 84–5; criminalization of residents, 87–8, 91; displacement, 90; ilp conflict overview, 72–3, 81–4; international support for, 88–9 Guapinol River, 81, 83–4 Haiven, Max, 18 Hallward, Peter, 38, 50n24 Hamelink, Cees, 111 Hammond, Bernie, 17 Hardt, Michael, 34–5

Haudenosaunee: knowledge and philosophies, 218, 221–3, 225, 227; Peacemaker’s founding of the Confederacy, 229nn5–7 Hazare, Anna, 177–8 healing justice, 4, 16, 19, 20–1; definition, 193, 203–4; for Indigenous peoples, 219, 230n9; intersectional spaces of, 212–13; self-care and, 192, 194–5, 203; workshops, 191, 194, 196–7 health care, 3, 21, 22; women in India and, 174, 175. See also mental health; well-being hegemony, 31, 36–7, 47, 62 Hernández, Donald, 79 Hernández, Juan Orlando, 76–8, 79, 82 Hernández Cárdenas, Ana María, 208 Hiawatha (Haionwhatha), 223, 229nn6–7, 230n8 Hindu society, 60, 70n25, 182; Right, 17, 65, 66–7, 68; Sangh parivar, 63, 70n35 historical bloc, 35–7, 42, 44, 47 Hoffman, Ross, 230n11 holding space, 21, 198, 203, 210– 12, 213, 214 holism, 193 Home Affordable Modification Program (hamp ), 128, 129 homelessness, 10–11 homeowners, 5, 128, 129, 132, 134 Honduras, 17–18, 90–1; drug trafficking, 88; extractive industry and mining laws, 18, 75, 76, 79–81, 85–6, 88, 94n38; gdp , 73, 80; land conflicts and reforms, 73–5; poverty and state

Index violence, 72–3, 89, 91; protected areas, 81, 82, 85–6; Zelaya coup and postcoup government, 75–8. See also Guapinol community (Honduras) horizontality, 34–5, 47, 198, 205 housing market, 9 Hudson, David James, 21–2 human capital, 100, 101, 127, 133, 235 Human Development Index (hdi ), 173–4 human rights, 80, 86, 88, 178, 208; violations, 18, 73, 78–9, 82, 89, 90, 92n1 identity: artist, 160; caste, 56, 58, 61; collective, 30, 32, 33; intersectional, 201, 204; of nation and people, 42–3; politics in India, 60, 66, 67; progressive, 143 imperialism and neo-imperialism, 99, 102, 104–7, 108, 113 imperium, 34–5, 37, 50n21; capitalist, 105, 106 incarceration, 108–9, 219 income inequality: differences within countries, 3, 21–2, 233–5; distribution by race, 5; in India, 173, 175, 176; in London (on ), 8; reducing, 235–6; in Toronto, 9 India: animal imagery of, 171–2; Balrampur district, 184; call centre workers, 112; communism and caste struggles, 54–62; Human Development Index (hdi ), 173–4; income and gender disparities, 172, 173–6; Kerala state, 69n24, 179; Lok

257

Sabha elections, 64, 65, 68; Punjab agriculture, 176–7; right and left-wing politics, 62–8; rural radio and newspapers, 181–2; slums, 184; social and environmental movements, 20, 176–81 Indian Act (Canada), 228n2 Indian Labour Party (ilp ), 56 indigenous knowledge (ik ): description of, 221–3; implementation at Trent University, 21, 220–1, 223–7, 230n11 Indigenous peoples, 101, 107, 113–14, 194, 242; act of thanksgiving, 218; bimaadiziwn concept, 230nn10–11; founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, 229nn6–7, 230n8; “good mind” philosophy, 221–3, 225, 227; of London (on ), 7–8, 10; medicine wheel, 230n9; reconciliation, 109, 219–20, 228nn3–4; rights movements, 3, 6, 79; scholars and Elders, 223–7, 230n11; self-governance, 220; White Paper (1969), 228n2 infant mortality, 21, 80, 234 information, right to, 20, 172, 176, 177–8 ingenium, notion of, 40 Institute of Contemporary Art (ica ) (Philadelphia), 149–51 Institute of Forest Conservation (icf ) (Honduras), 85, 86 intellectualities, 36, 46–7 interactive voice services (ivr ), 183–4 International Monetary Fund (imf ), 30, 31, 113, 116, 235

258

Index

internet access, 112, 184 intersectionality, 47, 201, 204, 206, 207; healing justice and, 212–13; transformative community empathy and, 209–10 Inversiones Los Pinares (ilp ): Guapinol community resistance, 72–3, 81–5; intelligence investigations, 88; international opposition, 88–9; mining licences, 81, 85–6 Iroquois. See Haudenosaunee Jagernauth, Tanuja, 193 jan sunwayis (public hearings), 177 Janu, C.K., 176, 179 Jeppesen, Sandra, 20–1 job placement statistics, 132 Joseph, Miranda, 108 journalists, 89, 182, 183 justice movements, 186, 192, 193, 195. See also healing justice; social justice; social movements Karat, Brinda, 67 Karat, Prakash, 64 Kelley, Robin D.G., 107 Kelly, Jaina, 20 Khabar Lahariya (newspaper), 182 Kumar, Raj, 57 laboratory metaphor, 47 labour, 5, 9, 51n30, 175, 208; artistic, 140, 146, 147, 153, 154, 160; condition of, 42; division of, 45, 47, 54–5, 58; justice, 19, 139; organizing and organizations, 19, 140–1, 146, 153, 160; outsourcing, 112; standards, 140, 150–2, 159, 160; strikes,

56, 59. See also affective digital labour; Working Artists and the Greater Economy (w.a.g.e. ) Laclau, Ernesto, 32–3 land ownership, 18, 72, 73–5, 242 Larson, Ann, 19 Lascaris, Dimitri, 17 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 105 left politics, 47, 48, 63; of Dalit intellectuals, 57; decline in India, 66–7; in Greece, 17, 31–2, 41, 46; in Honduras, 75; radical, 36, 39; in Spain, 31, 32; in West Bengal, 57–8, 64–5, 69n17. See also Communist Party of India (Marxist) [cpi(m) ] lgbtq+, 199, 201, 204–5, 207 liberalism, 19, 43, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134–5 Libertad y Refundación party (Libre), 77, 79 loans, 74, 103, 106, 108, 112; microcredit, 113; mobile lending apps, 114; payday stores, 110; student, 101, 127, 128, 129, 131, 134 Lobo, Porfirio “Pepe,” 76–7, 78, 79, 80 London (on ), 7–11 Lorde, Audre, 193 Lordon, Frederic, 34–5 Lorenz, Chris, 15 Lorey, Isabell, 144 Lowe, Lisa, 108 Lower Aguán Valley (Honduras): Guapinol-ILP conflict, 17–18, 81–5, 90, 92; land cultivation and conflicts, 73–4, 79 Lucchese, Filippo de, 40

Index Magri, Lucio, 52n45 Mahila Mandals (MM), 180 mainstream media, 172, 177–8, 181–3, 185, 186 Malik, Suhail, 152, 155 malnourished children, 174 Manitowabi, Edna, 223 Manuel, Arthur, 109 manufacturing sector, 7–9 marriage, 174 Marx, Karl, 40, 50n30, 54–5, 102 Marxism, 55–7, 59, 61–2, 66. See also Communist Party of India (Marxist) cpi(m) ] mas (Bolivia), 46 masculinity, 213 masses, the, 34, 41, 181 Maternal Mortality Rates (mmr ), 174 Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (mkss ), 177 McAlevey, Jane, 146 Media Action Research Group (marg ): affective digital labour, 202–6; collective self-care strategies, 208–13; immaterial commons concept, 20, 202, 213, 214; intersectionality analysis, 201–2; methodology and research participants, 199–200, 214; value-based networks, 206–8 media activism. See communitybased media; Media Action Research Group (marg ) mental health: burnout, 205, 210, 211, 213; depression among women (India), 174 meritocracy, 6, 7, 128 #MeToo movement, 186, 211, 212 Micheletti Bain, Roberto, 76, 78

259

migrants, 43, 44, 103, 210; arrivals in London (on ), 9–10; Mexican labourers, 112 militarization, 73, 76, 84, 88, 91 mining licences (concessions), 80, 82, 85–6, 95n38; ilp s, 72, 73, 75, 81, 86 mining sector: Canadian corporations, 80; Guapinol-ilp conflict, 17–18, 81–6; rise in Honduras, 80–1, 94n38; Vedanta operations in India, 179–80 Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (Honduras), 73, 82, 84 Minor, Robin, 132 Mitchell, Ted, 128 mobile phones, 183–4; apps, 114, 184–5 Montoya, Ainhoa, 17 Morgan, Julie Margetta, 136 Movement of the Squares (Greece), 30 Mukherjee, Shipra, 59 Mutual Aid Network (Madison), 116 Namboodiripad, E.M.S., 59, 61, 69n24 Narmada Bachao Andolan (nba ), 178–9, 185 Nasralla, Salvador, 77 National Front of Popular Resistance (Honduras), 78 National Mortgage Settlement, 129 National Party (Honduras), 76 National Security and Defence Council (Honduras), 76 Negri, Antonio, 34–5 neo-imperialism, 99, 101, 102

260

Index

neoliberalism, 22, 38, 65, 105, 113, 132; agenda in Honduras, 18, 74, 76–7, 78; austerity and universities, 11–12; debt and, 108, 109; progressive, 6–7; reforms in Greece, 30, 31; urbanism and, 10 Ness, Immanuel, 141 networks, value-based, 206–8 New Democracy Party (Greece), 31 Newhouse, David, 21 New Public Management (npm ), 11–12, 15 newspapers, production of, 182 New York City, 19, 151, 154; Artists Space, 149, 153, 154; Model Alliance, 152; moma , 142; New Museum, 145, 149, 160 Nigam, Aditya, 60 Nirantar (Delhi), 182 Niyamgiri Hills (India), 179–80 Nkrumah, Kwame, 116 No Borders Iceland, 205, 210 Obama administration, 128, 129, 132, 135, 136 obesity, 234 Occupy movements, 32, 34; Wall Street, 6, 115, 139 Odisha state (India), 179, 180 Omvedt, Gail, 57 Opium Wars, 108 oppression, 103, 107, 177; caste, 17, 57, 61–6, 68n1; competition and, 207; exploitation and, 33, 35, 44, 114, 115; Marx on, 54; privilege and, 201, 202, 206; racial, 20, 191, 192, 196; selfcare and, 194, 195; of women,

176, 205, 211. See also antioppression practices organization for equality, 100–1, 116 Organizing Equality conference (2017), 3–4, 10, 13, 16, 22 Padamsee, Yashna Maya, 195 Page, Cara, 193 Palmer, Bryan, 8 palm oil production, 73–4 parrhesia, 143–5 Patkar, Medha, 176, 178, 179 patriarchy, 114, 115, 194, 205, 212 Peasants’ and Workers’ Party (Bengal), 58–9 people, the: creation of, 36, 45, 48; identification of, 42–3; notion of, 17, 32–3; postnational and decolonial version of, 43–4; as a process, 41–2; two moments of, 34–5 Pérez, Lenir, 82 Peuter, Greig de, 19 Pickett, Kate, 21–2 Plachimada struggle (India), 179 political consciousness, 212 political organizing, 17, 39–40, 46–7, 126, 202, 213; Indigenous, 228n2 political parties, significance of, 52n45; Gramsci on, 46–7, 52n52n46; social movements and, 45–6. See also left politics popular power, 39, 91 populism, 7, 32, 198 Poster, Winnifred, 112 poverty, 5, 113, 171, 172, 235; in Honduras, 72, 77; of Indigenous peoples, 219; women and, 175, 186. See also income inequality

Index power dynamics, 202, 205, 207, 210 Prasad, Kiran, 20, 21 Prasannan, R., 171–2 privatization, 91, 105, 109; in Greece, 29–30; of land or property, 18, 72, 74, 78, 228n2; of telecommunications networks, 111 privilege, 22, 201, 202, 206, 207 proletariat, 51n30, 52n45, 58, 59 pro-people politics, 16, 17, 68 property developers, 10 protected areas, 81–2, 85–6 queer people, 20, 191, 193–5, 197, 242 race and racialization: algorithmic encoding and, 18, 103, 106; capitalism and, 99, 101, 102; debt and, 102–3, 106, 108–10; “financial inclusion” and, 113–14; healing justice and, 192–5; health and well-being and, 209–10; income inequality and, 5; intersectionality and, 201; London (on ) and, 8, 10; oppression and violence, 20, 191, 192, 194–6, 211 racism, 8, 10, 18, 44, 101; empire and colonialism and, 104–5; in Europe, 43, 210 radical politics, 30, 32, 34, 48, 66 radio broadcasting: in Africa, 186; in Brazil, 209; in rural India, 181–2 Rajan, K. Varada, 65 Ranadive, Bhalchandra Trimbrak, 61–2, 70n31

261

Rancière, Jacques, 33 Raunig, Gerald, 143 reconciliation. See Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc ) refugees, 9, 43, 44, 90, 207, 210 reparations, struggles for, 107, 108 Research Gruppen (Stockholm), 206 Responsibility Center Management (rcm ), 11–12, 15 right-wing politics. See Bhartiya Janata Party (bjp ); far right Robando, César, 89 Roy, Ananya, 110, 113 Roy, Aruna, 176, 177 Rushdia, Mehreen, 208 Rushton, Philip, 8 Sadao, Amy, 149–50, 151 Sainte-Marie, Lynx, 20, 21 Samaddar, Ranabir, 64 Sandberg, Sheryl, 114 Sanders, Bernie, 135–6 San Martín mine (Honduras), 80 Sardar Sarovar Dam (India), 178–9 Sattler, Peggy, 14 Sauter, Daniel, 155, 157–8 Savarna leaders, 58, 59 Schneider, Tim, 150–1 Sears, Alan, 47 self-care: collective, 21, 208–13; community care and, 192, 193–5 self-reflection, 203, 213, 214, 225 Sen, Amartya, 187 settler colonialism. See colonialism and settler colonialism sex ratios, 174–5 sex workers, 175–6 Shah, Chirag, 14, 15

262

Index

Sher, Jonathan, 14 Shiva, Vandana, 176, 179 Sholette, Gregory, 141, 161n14 singularities, 36 Smaschieramenti (Italy), 212 Smith, Joseph A., 129, 133–4 social debt, 104, 108, 109 social hierarchies, 7, 207, 233 socialism, 47, 52n45, 61 social justice, 23, 172, 176, 186, 204, 244; media activists and, 212–13 social media, 6, 203, 206, 208. See also Facebook social movements, 7, 17, 32, 67, 143; debt resistance, 104, 115– 17; healing justice and self-care in, 4, 16, 20–1, 191–5, 203–4, 213; for labour rights, 141; media and, 181–7, 198, 203, 205–6, 213; #MeToo campaign, 186, 211, 212; networking, 186–7, 206–8; political parties and, 45–6; reactionary movements and, 99; women activists in India, 20, 172, 173, 176–81, 185. See also Black Lives Matter; Debt Collective; Occupy movements social reproduction, 38, 109, 208 socio-economic inequality, 99, 102, 160, 201; impact on health and well-being, 21–2, 233–5; in India, 17, 172, 182. See also caste; income inequality solidarity, 4, 20, 23, 31, 44, 107, 182; artists and, 140, 145, 149, 151, 155, 157, 159–60; grassroots forms of, 116; media activists and, 206, 207

Sortiris, Panagiotis, 16–17, 18 Soskolne, Lise, 140, 145, 147–8, 153, 160; on institutional certification, 149–51; on wagency , 155, 156, 158–9 Soto Bonilla, Ramón, 79 sovereignty, 34–5, 90; for Indigenous peoples, 44, 219, 220; limited and popular, 30, 38, 39 Spain, 208; Podemos of, 32, 33 Spectra, 194 Spinoza, Baruch, 34, 40 Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo), 151 state power, 39, 63, 72 state repression, 18, 72, 76, 78, 90–1 Streeck, Wolfgang, 6 Strike! magazine, 211 structural inequalities, 18, 29 student debt: Corinthian Colleges strike, 19, 115, 126–33; regulations, 134–5; Sanders’s campaign for, 135–6; women and, 109–10 subalternity, 17, 18, 31, 32–3, 36, 37, 43–4 suicide, 66, 173, 174, 177, 180 Supreme Court: of Honduras, 76–7, 80, 81; of India, 179 sustainable development, 187, 235; in Africa, 186; in India, 176–7, 179–81, 185; UN goals for, 171, 172, 173, 233, 236 syriza (Greece), 31, 36, 46 taxation, 22, 104, 144, 235–6 Tech Girls of Dharavi, 184–5 telecommunications, 111, 112, 181–5 Tello Méndez, Nallely Guadalupe, 208

Index Teltumbde, Anand, 55, 56 Thomas, Chief Jake, 223 Tocoa municipality (Honduras), 73, 89–90; defamation of Catholic Church, 87–8; mining concessions and protected areas, 81–2; Municipal Committee for the Defence of the Public and Common Goods (cmdbcp ), 82–5, 89, 90–1 Toronto, 9, 10 transatlantic slave trade, 103, 107, 108 transformation processes, 34, 41–2, 44, 47–8 transformative community empathy, 20, 203, 209–10, 212, 213, 214 trauma, experiences of, 197, 203, 210–11, 212; intergenerational, 191, 192, 193, 204 Trent University, 21, 220–1, 223–7 tribal communities (India): media access and innovations, 181–4, 185–6; social and environmental movements, 172, 178–80, 185; sustainable livelihoods, 180–1 Trump, Donald, 7, 32, 90, 134, 135 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc ), 219, 228nn3–4 Uber, 110 Uganda Media Women’s Association (umwa ), 186 unemployment, 5, 9, 42 unions, 8, 67, 115, 140–1, 153, 160; freelancers, 156, 159; loss of bargaining power, 5; Scavenger’s Union of Bengal, 59

263

united front, 45–6, 63 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (sdg s), 171, 172, 173, 233, 236 United States, 101, 106, 108–9, 115; asylum seekers, 90; debt collection companies, 112; higher education regulation, 132, 135–6; income inequality, 5 United States Social Forum (ussf ), 193 unity: imaginary, 47; of labour, 42, 58; in struggle, 32, 44 universities: austerity management and revenues, 11–12; Greek, 16; origins and role in colonization, 218–19; reconciliation and indigenization, 21, 219–21, 223–7 University of Western Ontario (uwo ), 3, 7, 8, 10; financial crisis and austerity, 11; research cluster program and Chakma scandal, 12–16 University of Western Ontario Faculty Association (uwofa ), 13, 14, 15 urban-rural divide, 172, 177, 182 Vedanta corporation, 179–80 Venezuela, 36, 75; psuv in, 46 violence: environmental defenders and, 79, 84, 87–9; gendered forms of, 109, 115, 172; Indigenous peoples and, 219; intergenerational trauma and, 193; media activists and, 205–6; racial, 191, 196, 210; social, 114; state, 17–18, 72–3, 78–9, 90–1, 244; territorial expansion and, 103; against women, 174–6, 186

264

Index

wampum belt, 229n5, 230n8; Guswentah, 221–2 Warren, Elizabeth, 130, 136 water resources, 179, 184, 241; mining and, 80, 81, 82, 84, 89, 91, 95n38 wealth, 22, 110, 114; extraction, 103, 113; Indian billionaires, 173; redistribution of, 5–6, 99, 100, 148; in Toronto, 9 welfare, 10; debtfare transition, 108, 109, 110 well-being, 21, 172, 174, 233–4, 236; collective, 207, 208; gender and race and, 209–10 West Bengal, 55; Dalit resurgence in, 64–5; Left regime in, 57–8, 65–6, 69n17 Western University. See University of Western Ontario (uwo ) Wheatley, Fred, 223 white supremacy, 8, 205, 212 Williams, Shirley, 223 women: activists in India, 20, 172, 176–80, 185; artists, 142; debt and, 109–10; emotional labour, 102, 206; empowerment, 171, 186; governance model, 180–1; maternal deaths, 174; media outlets for, 181–2, 184–5; oppression of, 176, 205, 211; self-care/care work and, 208, 209; socio-economic participation of, 114–15; violence against, 174–6, 186; in the workforce, 175 Working Artists and the Greater Economy (w.a.g.e. ): certification program, 148–52, 154; fee system, 145–8; focus on

nonpayment and parrhesia ethos, 142–5; founding and purpose, 139–41; launch of wagency , 139, 155–9; organizational form and policy, 152–5, 160; overview of, 19 working class, 43, 45, 68, 135, 241; demands of, 33; in London (on ), 8; movements, 51n30, 58, 212; unity, 58 World Bank (wb ), 18, 72, 74, 105, 113, 116 world markets, 6, 100, 101, 102 XNet, 211 Zelaya, Manuel, 18, 75–6, 77, 80