Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Redundancy, Precariety and Surplus Populations

This post was contributed by Bryony Merritt of Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

The second round-table at Birkbeck’s Surplus symposium looked at issues within the UK. The panel consisted of human geographer, Danny Dorling (Sheffield), economist James Meadway (New Economics Foundation), philosopher Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths) and ethnographer Lisa McKenzie (Nottingham), chaired by arts activist and academic, Sophie Hope of Birkbeck’s Department of Media and Cultural Studies.

Danny Dorling began by saying that the UN estimate of a world population of 10 billion by 2050 is a good news story. Since 1492 Europe has seen a massive population increase, which has gone hand in hand with the spread of capitalism as more people offer bigger markets. However, having a large surplus population will become unsustainable as the population begins to decline. Danny argues that when the market ceases to grow, the current mode of economics will be unable to continue, noting that capitalism has not proven to be very resilient to slowing down.

Alberto Toscano stated that an absolute increase in population leads to an increased relative surplus population. By surplus population he referred to the unemployed or unoccupied. This surplus population should not be treated as a natural phenomenon, he argues, but as a politicized issue, as it is political and state practices which lead people to be expelled from the workplace. Adding to the paradoxes outlined in the first round-table, Alberto highlighted how we are creating an increasingly vast (potential) working population while simultaneously expelling this same population from the workforce. He later described how sometimes the surplus population is deliberately made invisible for profit, for example in the case of undocumented migrants who often work for lower wages and worse conditions.

Lisa McKenzie shared her research from the St Ann’s estate in Nottingham City Centre. She has spent the last three years working with young men from the estate and explains how the majority of them are unemployed, underemployed or ‘grafting’ (working in the underground economy) as a result of the decline of industry in the area and lack of employment opportunities. She wryly noted that while Marx wrote that “In communist society…society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”, one of the men in her study drove an Asda delivery van in the mornings and dealt drugs in the afternoon.

Following Lisa’s description of the sense of redundancy, and suspicions of a conspiracy by government and bankers among the men on St Ann’s estate, Danny said that unemployment levels are not a good barometer by which to measure success of a society. Our unemployment levels are lower than Spain’s only because our benefits are less generous. Low unemployment may simply be a measure of how willing that society is to force its citizen into unvalued, low-status work. Alberto took up this argument, saying that often the discourse of the Left is too close to the discourse of government, with job creation being seen as the holy grail.

James Meadway also continued on from Danny’s point, saying that although the UK’s unemployment may be lower than other EU countries’, underemployment has “gone through the roof” since the financial crash and will continue to get worse. Since the breakup of the post-war productive state, the UK has become a transfer state, he argued. And since 2008 the transfer has been working in the wrong direction, from the welfare state, towards the City of London.

Danny noted that in the 1960s the average (male) worker’s wage had never been higher and that the average banker’s wage was only six times that of the average wage, and only four times higher after tax. The current money surplus around the world “reeks of desperation”, he said and asked the panel and the audience what the best way to user in something better than what we’ve got might be, leading us into a lively discussion with audience members.

Listen to the podcast of the round-table.

Scarcity, Violence and the Global Political Economy.

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This post was contributed by Bryony Merritt, of Birkbeck’s External Relations Department.

In this round-table, part of the Surplus symposium, and chaired by Dr Alex Colas of the Department of Politics at Birkbeck, Sue Branford (Latin America Bureau), Anna Stavrianakis (Sussex University) and Eric Swyngedouw (Manchester University) looked at surplus and excess in agro-food systems, land-grabs, militarism and water.

Eric started the debate exploring the paradox of water, the most abundant biochemical component on the planet, lack of access to which is the number one cause of death. The scarcity of water does not exist in nature, and Eric argued that through the socially organised metabolism of nature (upon which the circulation of capital is predicated), natural products acquire social, economic and political significance: they become a commodity.

Just as water has become commoditised so has land, leading to an intensification of land-grabs, according to Sue Branford, who brought the audience’s attention to the focus on the global food system, under which up to 1 billion people go hungry. The system was imposed by the IMF on the developing world, obliging them to remove trade barriers and let multinational companies in before they could access money. This enabled the developed world to deal with the problem of surplus production by flooding the developing markets with cheap produce. It also opened the way for multinationals who, in countries such as Brazil where Sue spent many years, systematically bought all the local seed companies, obliging local farmers to purchase hybrid seeds, fertilizers and pesticides from them. Like Eric, Sue drew attention to the paradox that these changes created: productivity and world trade increased (leading to the vast variety of foods that we see in our supermarkets), yet mechanisation introduced by multinational companies meant that fewer labourers were needed and many previously agricultural areas, such as the Argentine Pampas, have become ghost towns, as the local people lose work and move away, often to urban centres in search of work.

A further paradox which has arisen from this situation is that as land-grabs have led to an increase in agricultural exports as land is turned to use for exportable crops such as soya (which the developed world purchases as animal feed to ensure a consistent supply of cheap meat for ourselves), developing countries have become increasingly reliant on imported food and vulnerable to the fluctuations in international market prices which means that sometimes staple foods are prohibitively expensive, leading to hungry populations.

Sue described the current situation as “corporate imperialism”, albeit that the national governments are sometimes working in alliance with the corporations to conduct land-grabs in other states, such as the ProSavanna project in which the governments of Mozambique, Brazil and Japan will work in partnership to provide food security for Mozambique. Sue drew a very clear distinction between food security and food sovereignty, claiming that in reality food security enhances the status quo, whereas food sovereignty gives local people control over which crops are grown, how they are distributed, and the structural changes which are necessary. It also challenges some of the established “truths” about development, such as that in developed countries less that 5 per cent of the population work in food cultivation. Sue explained that the current “If” campaign by a coalition of development NGOs, is (wrongly) focussed on food security rather than sovereignty, and has failed to consult with local people.

Anna Stavrianakis highlighted the significant role that the arms trade and military spending have played in the economic crisis, and contrasted this with the notable absence of proposed solutions to the crisis. Using the example of Greece, Anna explained that arms purchases were central to the creation of debt problems, with no other area of spending having contributed so heavily. Yet arms purchases have not been identified as a possible savings area under any of the proposed austerity measures. Anna claimed that military spending is inherently wasteful as it is research and development of new technologies subsidised with public money, and then allows the new technologies to be privatised by arms companies.

Looking at military spending globally, Anna questioned whether we are at the beginning of a global transition. In 2012, military spending fell for the first time since 1998, by 0.5 per cent in real terms. This was mainly due to cuts by countries in the global north. However, Anna suggests that this decrease in military spending will be offset by an increase in spending in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. China increased military spending by 7.8 per cent in 2012, although it is worth noting that in absolute terms it remains well below military spending by the US.

Summing up the round-table, Eric said that excess is how we sustain the behemoth of capitalism. Capitalism needs to continually move beyond its own boundaries. The current crisis has been caused by an excess of capital, rather than a lack of it.

Listen to the round table on podcast.

Monsters and Phantoms

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This post was contributed by Oyedepo Olukotun a student on Birkbeck’s MA History Of Art with Photography.

In Professor T.J. Clark’s talk Was Picasso a Woman? : Reflections on Nude, Green Leaves and Bust hosted by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on Friday June 7 to accompany the launch of his book Picasso And Truth: From Cubism To Guernica, it soon became clear that Picasso was not gender swapping but was casting himself as a woman artistically. Speaking even artistically, in light of statements Clark attributes to Picasso, the notion of the artist as a woman seemed far-fetched. “I would love to paint like a blind man who pictures an arse by the way it feels” or “Like any artist, I am primarily the painter of woman, and for me, woman is essentially a machine for suffering” did not lend credence to Picasso’s case.

Monsters and Phantoms

In light of the above statements Picasso’s terse “I am a woman” is soon sidelined. However, what proceeded to catch my attention in Professor Clark’s talk, which focused on Picasso’s Nude, Green leaves and Bust (1932) and Nude on a Black Sofa (1932), was Clark’s periodical refrain of “monsters and phantoms”. In Lecture 4 of his book, Clark embarks on an analysis of Picasso’s The Painter and His Model (1927) to explore the artist’s fixation with monsters. At a basic level Clark, in his capacity as a social art historian, aims to divorce Picasso’s art, one painting at a time, from a connoisseurial or biographical interpretation.

The transcendental truth that Clark reveals in Picasso’s paintings is the long tradition of art with the objectification of women. That Western art depicts women the way it does is a practice Picasso inherited from a deep-rooted tradition as the British Museum’s Ice Age art: Arrival of the modern mind exhibition has shown us. That this depiction is because he is artistically a woman and Picasso’s sexualised reasons for his stance made for fascinating and revelatory observation in Clark’s talk. Further on Picasso’s stance aligned with his depiction of women as monsters makes for an interesting juxtaposition in Clark’s book and talk.

Women as Monsters

The practice of depicting women as monsters may or may not have began with Picasso however it is not unique to him. In her article The MoMA’s Hot Mamas Carol Duncan points us in the direction of artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Willem de Kooning and Robert Heinecken who, among many, depict women as monstrous, grotesque, menacing and castrating. Duncan uses Picasso’s paintings as a prime example of this genre of women deprecating art; this would have met with the approval of the artist who, according to Clark, was concerned with posterity.

Clark, fascinatingly, traces for us the genealogy and journey of Picasso’s monstrous women and sets us up for the excitement of discovering the truth that transcends autobiography in art which would explain the root of the emotion that has led artists to depict women as monsters.

Racial integration in US cities

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This post was contributed by Mayur Suresh, an intern at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

How racially integrated are US cities today? Are they more integrated today than previously? An insightful presentation at Birkbeck by John Logan, Professor of Sociology at Brown University, paints a complex picture.

Using New York City as an example, Prof Logan argued that cities in the United States have always been segregated to some extent. While in the early 1900s only 1% of the city was African-American, other recent immigrant communities such as Russian Jews and Italians were confined to specific parts of the city. By the 1920s, poverty and the persistence of Jim Crow laws in the southern US forced many African-Americans to seek better lives in urban centres in the north. This “great migration” of the 1920s saw the creation of “black ghettoes” such as Harlem in New York city.

In the 1920s, New York City’s index of dissimilarity for African-Americans was about 0.7 (0 being the most integrated, 1 being the most segregated). This index hovered between 0.8 and 0.9 for most of the 20^th century, and this level of segregation of the African-American community continues today. The civil rights era and the passage of fair housing laws did little to change this level of segregation.

Prof Logan then compared this level of segregation of African-Americans with the Italian and Russian Jewish communities. In the early 1900s both these communities lived in specific areas – Italians in Greenwich Village and Russian Jews in Lower East Side. Many of the African-Americans who migrated to New York City were from different social classes – while some did blue collar jobs, others could be identified as middle class. Italians, by and large, performed manual labour and many dropped out of school. Similarly, the Russian Jewish population mostly did working class jobs, and came to be closely associated with the garment industry. Both these communities had higher indices of dissimilarity than African-Americans in the 1920s but the indices for both communities fell rapidly to about 0.3 by the 1990s. Prof Logan argued that both these communities were able to integrate rapidly by virtue of gradually being identified as “white”.

Moving on to segregation today and its relation to class, Prof Logan looked at the social and racial make up of neighbourhoods today. While it’s assumed that African-American people lived in African-American neighbourhoods because they were poor, what Prof Logan’s data shows is that racial segregation occurred regardless of class. Meaning that poor white people lived amongst other poor white people and poor African-American people lived in poor African-American neighbourhoods. Comparing the data across classes presents an even more complicated picture: the average poor white neighbourhood had less poor people than the average rich African-American neighbourhoods.

Switching to segregation in education, Prof Logan’s data showed that schools were even more segregated than neighbourhoods. The majority of African-American children went to African-American majority schools while the average white student went to white majority schools.

According to Prof Logan, the traditional model of viewing changes in racial composition of neighbourhoods has been the “Invasion and Succession” model: African-Americans enter a neighbourhood resulting in an exodus of white people (white flight) until there is a majority African-American population. Recent demographic data about immigration of Asian and Hispanic population reveals a different pattern. It was found that in neighbourhoods that start off as all white and into which Asian and Hispanic populations begin to settle, and then into which the African-American population migrated, there was no white flight. These neighbourhoods resulted in what was referred to as “global neighbourhoods” in urban areas. According to Prof Logan this is having an impact on the meaning of race for white populations in the United States today.