Weekly Picks – June 23, 2024
Credit (left to right): Agnes Jonas; E+ via Getty Images; Film4 / Access / Polish Film Institute / JW Films / Extreme Emotions / The New Inquiry.
This week’s collection:
- Climate, State, and Utopia*
- When Police Shootings Don’t Kill: The Data That Gets Left Behind
- The Sentimentality of Evil
- The Beekeeper in Kathmandu
- The Evolution of Empire
- Ghosts on the Water
*The new forum published this week in Boston Review. Responses can also be found at the link.
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
“Scanning the twenty-first-century political landscape in 2018, essayist Rana Dasgupta issued a provocation: “The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state.”
Dasgupta had in mind the global intensification of authoritarian politics, and the last six years have only exacerbated that trend. The same international system that failed to avert genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda is again allowing it in Gaza, Sudan, and with escalating risk in Ethiopia. Jair Bolsonaro has been voted out, but Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Narendra Modi remain in office, and Donald Trump may yet win again. Meanwhile, Western and Central Africa have seen so much political upheaval that analysts have begun referring to a stretch of territory spanning the middle section of the African continent as the “coup belt.” And the entire planet has already hurtled past the 1.5°C of warming that this same international system agreed to prevent eight years ago in Paris.
The response from the global left to this set of developments has been equivocal. One cluster of tendencies views the state with a skepticism ranging from pragmatic fatalism to ideologically inflected antipathy. These orientations are born of political traditions that view the state and the state system as at best an outsider’s system, if not a primary antagonist. These tendencies have found expression in the street movements of the past decade and a half, from Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the United States to the Brazilian Free Fare Movement and the Yellow Vest protests in France.
Another set of views takes the battle over state politics to be of central strategic importance, whether as an offensive measure to wield its apparatus for progressive policies or as a defensive tactic in a war of position with colluding capitalists and the insurgent right wing. This set of views is reflected in the usual organizational subjects of the left—above all, workers’ unions and labor parties, but also institutions such as workers’ associations and tenants’ unions—and it has found expression in the agendas of a range of popular political figures, from Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom to Lula da Silva in Brazil.
World-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein has described a “two-step” strategy favored by the radicals of the twentieth century: “first gain power within the state structure; then transform the world.” This perspective, too, finds a present-day analogue in the ubiquity of calls for climate justice that are addressed to “policymakers”—which is to say, state managers and those in their social orbit. What’s missing from this picture is the fact that states themselves, beyond corrupt individual politicians, have institutional interests in maintaining both private and state-owned fossil fuel capacity and consumption. As Fred Block argued decades ago, any serious analysis of the state must account for the structural constraints that prevent state politicians from acting against the interests of the capitalist class. Today, perhaps the most significant such constraint is the immense political power that fossil fuel interests have amassed over the last few generations. This power helps to explain the popularity of “all of the above” policies among political elites despite the clear imperatives from researchers that limiting climate change means phasing out oil and gas—not just phasing in wind and solar.
Whether to march in the streets with Extinction Rebellion, phonebank for candidates with the Sunrise Movement, or blow up pipelines, as Andreas Malm proposes, is a tactical question. But the strategic imperative must be clear: nothing less than the total defeat of the organized political interests of oil, gas, and coal producers is necessary to make any other climate justice goals even a remote possibility. In what follows, I’ll defend a twenty-first-century version of “two-step” politics: first dethrone fossil capital; then transform the world.”
2. When Police Shootings Don’t Kill: The Data That Gets Left Behind
“Julie Ward is no stranger to the realities of gun violence. She worked for almost 15 years as a nurse in hospitals and emergency rooms from Arizona to Oregon and Washington. In that time, she said, she probably treated dozens of people harmed by gun violence, including teenagers, adults, and first responders.
Those experiences led Ward to pursue a doctorate in health policy with a focus on gun violence prevention in the fall of 2019. But while working as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Ward was surprised to learn that there is no federal reporting requirement for police-involved shootings or use of lethal force.
“I couldn’t believe that coming from a health care background, where we have tons of mandated documentation,” said the public health researcher, who is now an assistant professor of medicine, health, and society at Vanderbilt University. “I know there are a lot of things that police need to document too, but it didn’t seem right that a major piece of government wouldn’t have such a basic reporting check.”
While efforts to document both gun-related homicides and fatal police shootings have gained ground in recent years, leading to more academic research, less is known about the cases in which people survive shootings by police officers. Victims may endure serious injuries, multiple surgeries, and long-lasting physical and mental complications.
Now, intriguing new research seeks to quantify the extent of those injuries. One recent paper, led by Ward, suggests that police shoot and injure about 800 people each year in the United States. Black and male victims were among those disproportionately injured. Other research has looked into the context of those nonfatal shootings and found they are more likely to happen in communities with high rates of violent crime, poverty, food insecurity, and mental health crises.
Still, the lack of high-quality, official federal data on police shootings remains a pressing concern, researchers say, and challenges efforts to hold police departments accountable. To add insult to these injuries: Some data show that many of the people injured by officers are not charged with crimes, raising the question of whether those shootings were in self-defense or the result of excessive force.
Police shootings may receive the most attention, but many civilians are injured and killed by other means too, such as George Floyd, who was killed in 2020 by a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on his neck. Alfreda Holloway-Beth, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, says it is important to study these injuries, too. “People are also dying from being manhandled, and choked out, and under duress in other ways,” said Holloway-Beth, whose research investigates injuries at the hands of police officers.
Firearm-related injuries and deaths, she said, are “literally the tip of the iceberg.””
“I think about The Zone of Interest (2023) while I am making my kids’ lunches, running their baths, folding laundry. Similar domestic routines make up much of the film’s action, the center of its study of how the institution of the family confers a mirage of humanity and morality onto its participants. Saturated in soft light, Broderie anglaise linen drying on a clothesline in the sunshine, the film shares an aesthetic with Julie Blackmon’s whimsical photographs of domestic life, and the Höss’s backyard recalls Esther Greenwood’s observation in The Bell Jar that a neighbor’s lawn is strewn with the “the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.” Toy cars, floaties, dolls, and bicycles.
These symbols of cherished childhoods and the good life secured by family-making are what we see instead of human suffering. Other than the fleeting glimpse of a striped pajama and the incessant smoke from incinerating bodies, the film depicts none of the horrific visual tropes of the Holocaust genre. Instead, we spend a languid summer with the Höss family. The husband, Rudolf, is a commandant at Auschwitz. The film focuses on the intimate life of his wife and children—bedtime stories, day trips to a local river, a visit from a grandmother.
Glazer has spoken about his interest in making a film specifically about quotidian Nazi life. As he explained, “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural,” Glazer told the New York Times. “I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”
Consequently, many have seen this film as an expression of what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil,” a concept she developed in her book-length analysis of Adolf Eichmann. The term refers to how bureaucracy normalizes evil and how following administrative protocol circumvents a critical engagement with the consequences of one’s actions. But such a characterization does not exactly apply to Höss, who is not a mid-level functionary but rather a principal architect of Jewish extermination, nor does it account for the film’s other protagonist, Hedwig Höss, the self-described “Queen of Auschwitz.”
Indeed, the notion that the “banality of evil” is the film’s primary concern overlooks its particular focus on family life itself as the structure that animates unspeakable malevolence. The film’s real subject is bourgeois domesticity, the mundane concerns of child-rearing, household management, class striving; it is about the way the private family becomes its own fortress and how its insularity, atomization, and privatization enable horrific violence.”
“Laxman shares with me the wisdom of his mother, who raised him on her own after his father passed away, when he was four, and there was no money and so no hospital… “Don’t worry so much about survival… Even an insect can survive! Life has seasons – it’s not always going to be summer, or winter, or monsoon, or drought,” she told him. “We should try to make life meaningful.”
He also inherited communism from his mother. Not just communism, he clarifies, but love for the commune. So he became a beekeeper. And then he organized the beekeepers – he’s the president of the Nepal Beekeeping Association. It took him years – the beekeepers didn’t want to talk politics – but he persevered and they grew to trust him, because he was a beekeeper too. I ask him to say more about bees and about communism.
“Of course! It’s the commune concept. Bees work without fees or charges. See how they serve agriculture – without laziness! They’re up early every morning to pollinate; this is what guarantees the yield.” He highlights two principle points we need to understand. “Number one: Communal society. We can learn this from the bees. Number two: How to manage ecology, and life, without any charge.” They aren’t just making honey for themselves and sharing it equally, he explains, they’re also helping the whole ecosystem. I agree enthusiastically – it’s so important to understand this, particularly with colony collapse disorder which threatens bees everywhere, alongside and not at all unrelated to the capitalist individualism which is unraveling human culture everywhere. Not just important, he says: “It’s compulsory! We have have to build an international network around bees. They have to be a key part of the ecosocialist concept and movement.”
And he goes on to tell a story. “A few years ago I lost 25 hives in one night. I inspected. One farmer had used pesticide on his mustard crop. My bees went there. Now, I can value my loss economically, personally: About $100 per hive, so I lost $2500. But how can we value the loss ecologically, socially? Each hive has 20,000 bees – that’s 500,000 bees gone; no longer pollinating, no longer guaranteeing the harvest… I’ve seen eight species of bee go extinct. Eight years ago I brought European bees from India… It hurts me. Not because I like to distinguish between European and native bees; but to see those species disappear… and I had to take out a loan… Anyway, we need to put bees on the agenda. Without preserving bees we can’t imagine agriculture. And can we imagine humanity without agriculture?””
“With the just-concluded G7 summit exposing the group’s diminished status, it is appropriate to ask where power lies in today’s world. The United Nations has 193 member states (the most recent, which joined in 2011, is benighted South Sudan), all of which are, as Secretary-General António Guterres put it in 2016, technically committed to “the values enshrined in the UN Charter: peace, justice, respect, human rights, tolerance and solidarity.” But while each gets one vote in the General Assembly, nobody would dare claim that each country carries equal weight.
Instead, the five permanent members of the Security Council – the United States, China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom – reign supreme, each wielding a veto over whatever the other 192 members might want. That is why Israel, owing to US support, can blithely ignore countless UN resolutions, and why Syria, owing to Russian and Chinese support, handily escaped sanctions for its use of chemical weapons a decade ago.
Owing to the disproportionate power they wield, the “Permanent Five” share an old, decidedly British sense of empire.
. . .
What this history shows is that empire is still very much with us. Though Americans, proud of throwing off the rule of King George III, tend to bristle at the idea, their own military, technological, and commercial power is as imperial and pervasive as Britain’s territorial dominance ever was. As James notes, we can thank the post-World War II Pax Americana for the mostly stable international relations that prevailed during the aptly named Cold War with the Soviets (and their own empire).
A perennial question, especially during periods of geopolitical upheaval, is not just how empires emerge, but how they fade. Though Britain and France still indulge their memories of empire, they have long since accepted being “middle powers” at best. Ever since the Suez crisis of 1956, when the threat of US sanctions forced Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw from Egypt’s Suez Canal, Britain has supinely followed America’s lead in international relations. (UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s refusal to send troops to Vietnam in the 1960s is the exception that proves the rule.) At the same time, France has sought comfort in the collective embrace of what became the European Union.
As for the other members of the Permanent Five, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is on a hopeless quest to reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union (the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, in his estimation) and recreate the empire of Peter the Great; and China already sees itself, with some justification, as wielding global influence to rival that of the American empire.
China’s pursuit of superpower status is born of not just current economic and political realities, but also its deep-seated resentment over the “century of humiliation” (1839-1949) that it suffered at the hands of European (and Japanese) imperial powers. Of course, similar sentiments also animate Putin’s revanchism, as well as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dismissiveness of diplomatic overtures from post-Brexit Britain. In William Faulkner’s oft-quoted words, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.””
“The Sargasso Sea, a warm, calm expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean, is bordered not by land but by four strong currents—a gyre. Vast mats of prickly brown seaweed float so thickly on the windless surface that Christopher Columbus worried about his ships getting stuck. The biodiverse sanctuary within and beneath the sargassum produces Anguilla rostrata, the American eel. Each female lays some eight million eggs. The eggs hatch as ribbonlike larvae that drift to the Gulf Stream, which carries them to the continental shelf. By the time they reach Maine, the larvae have transformed into swimmers about the length of an index finger, with the circumference of a bean sprout and the translucence of a jellyfish. Hence their nickname, glass eels, also known as elvers. The glass eel is barely visible, but for a dark stripe—its developing backbone—and a couple of chia seeds for eyes. “Ghosts on the water,” a Maine fisherman once called them. Travelling almost as one, like a swarm or a murmuration, glass eels enter tidal rivers and push upstream, pursuing the scent of freshwater until, ideally, they reach a pond and commence a long, tranquil life of bottom-feeding. Elvers mature into adults two to three feet in length, with the girth and the coloring of a slimy bicycle tire. Then, one distant autumn, on some unknown cue, they return to the Sargasso, where they spawn and die.
Maine has thirty-five hundred miles of coastline, including coves, inlets, and bays, plus hundreds of tidal rivers, thousands of streams, and what has been described as “an ungodly amount of brooks.” Hundreds of millions of glass eels arrive each spring, as the waters warm. Four hundred and twenty-five licensed elvermen are allowed to harvest slightly more than seven thousand five hundred pounds of them during a strictly regulated fishing season, which runs from late March to early June. Four Native American tribes may legally fish another two thousand or so pounds, with more than half of that amount designated for the Passamaquoddy, who have lived in Maine and eastern Canada for some twelve thousand years. Maine is the only state with a major elver fishery. South Carolina has a small one (ten licensed elvermen), but everywhere else, in an effort to preserve the species, elver fishing is a federal crime.
The elvermen sell their catch to state-licensed buyers, who in turn sell to customers in Asia. The baby eels are shipped live, mostly to Hong Kong, in clear plastic bags of water and pure oxygen, like a sophisticated twist on pet-store goldfish. They live in carefully tended tanks and ponds at aquaculture farms until they are big enough to be eaten. Japan alone annually consumes at least a hundred thousand tons of freshwater eel, unagi, which is widely enjoyed kabayaki style—butterflied, marinated, and grilled.
The American eel became a valuable commodity as overfishing, poaching, and other forms of human interference led to the decline of similar species in Japan (Anguilla japonica) and Europe (Anguilla anguilla). Those species are now red-listed as, respectively, endangered and critically endangered. The U.S. has not declared the American eel endangered, and fishermen want to keep it that way.
In March, 2011, just before elver season started in Maine, a tsunami in Japan decimated aquaculture ponds, driving the price of American glass eels from about two hundred dollars per pound to nearly nine hundred by the season’s closing day. The next year, the price reached one thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine dollars per pound, and soon topped two thousand. National Fisherman calls glass eels “likely the most valuable fish in the United States on a per-pound basis.” A recent issue of Marine Policy cited “unprecedented demand” for American eel. Only lobster outranks it in Maine.
During a favorable market and a hard elver run, a Mainer may earn a hundred thousand dollars in a single haul. Each license holder is assigned a quota, ranging from four pounds to more than a hundred, based partly on seniority. Even the lowest quota insures a payout of six thousand dollars if the price per pound breaches fifteen hundred, which happens with some regularity. Maine is the only place in the country where a kid can become eligible for an elver license at fifteen and win a shot at making more money overnight, swinging a net, than slinging years’ worth of burgers. Elvermen have sent their children to college on eels, and have used the income to improve their homes, their businesses, their boobs. This year, more than forty-five hundred Mainers applied for sixteen available licenses.”