The human consequences of the bitification of atoms go far beyond my bourgeois consumption. This shift, or what is could simply be called digitalization, when paired with their very material transportation systems or networked communication technologies, combines to form a powerful force that impacts local and global democracies and economies.

What are the local and political economics of granularity in the space shared between the fiduciary and the communicative? To understand the emergent political economy of the practices and discourses unifying around mobile media and digital money we need a shared language around the issue of granularity.

Granularity

Granularity is the reduction of symbols to binary-type simplicity such as lines of computer code or small economic integers. Granularity means to break down money or media into symbolic and quantitative units for digital delivery and reconstitution. Granularity and networks are what gives bit-based media and money its mobile advantage over its cousins–film stock that needs to be “bicycled” to theaters and precious metals that need to be stored in fortified treasuries. Granularity is the physical principle that allows the discourses of money and media to meet. With granularity come two conflicting social worlds –the financialization as well as the democratization of media and money.

More philosophically, the media/money verisimilitude reveals the already tenuous analytical separation of thought and action, discourse and practice, and rationalities and tactics.

Financialization and Democratization of Money/Media

Digital money and mobile media, in a state of fine granularity, are symbolically opened for innovative as well as manipulative financialization and potentially wide democratization. Granularity, by refining things into ever-smaller units, increases the opportunities for access to previously closed systems. On the one hand, this can be empowering as peer-to-peer media and financial transactions can increase and, for a time, transpire under the radar of regulators and speculators. On the other hand, media/money granularity can also result in “flexible accumulation,” the post-nation manufacturing of information/financial/mathematical tools such as seen in the derivatives market that is increasingly difficult to regulate, litigate, or access if you are a citizen.

Digital Money as Democratizing

The granularity of digital money can create opportunities for access by materially poor people to small investment-able capital. This form of capital democratization is dependent upon new technologies and networks. Digital money, largely a numerical system within ornate cultural contexts, is easily made granular and digitally shared via phone or internet from person to person, micro-lender to person, and employer to person. Such transactions on unregulated communication networks has democratized new forms of money sharing, saving, and transfer.

While it isn’t popular in the United States, mobile granular financing has exploded in Kenya. For instance, Vodaphone affiliate Safaricom started m-Pesa, a mobile money transfer in Kenya in 2003. M-Pesa has 12 million users out of 17 million mobile phone users representing 70% of the mobile market in Kenya and 21% of the Kenyan GDP flows through the system, wrote mPay Connect founder Menekse Gencer in 2011. It works and it’s profitable for Vodaphone shareholders. And yet its commercialization balances any breathless optimism about m-Pesa’s democratizing impact.

This democratization of capital provides an opportunity to re-acquaint ourselves with the overbearing symbology that is money. It also invites us to reconsider basic issues of financial autonomy and agency. How will mobile money challenge, magnify, or articulate with local customs? As digital currencies evolve will they be pegged to national or international banks? How will they be regulated and by whom? How are they insured and what backs their legitimacy? As these pragmatic questions are answered and applied digital money will likely move further from democratization and nearer to financialization.

Financialization of Digital Money

Few have bank accounts but the 1.7 billion materially poor people will have a cell phone in 2012. This phone can be used to make calls, many can take photos and videos, upload them to the internet, and, increasingly, receive and give money. Even before this form of digital money there were banks micro-lending. Following CK Prahalad’s claim that the collective material wealth at the bottom of pyramid can make development profitable, a number of microfinance organizations went into non-profit “business.” Kiva, who started in 2005, the same year as YouTube, is the most recognizable microlender for Westerners. Kiva founders were inspired by a talk by Muhammad Yunus at Stanford. Yunus, of course, started Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the first microfinance organization. Kiva, Grameen, Yunus and the following, Banco Compartamos, are all vigorously successful and have all claimed to alleviate poverty. Such philanthrocapitalism is rich with contradictions. The World Bank, for instance, is the largest micro-lender in the world. The problematic financialization of granular money is evident in Banco Compartamos that started as a non-profit micro-lending bank to materially poor Oaxacans, took a shot at becoming private in an IPO, raised a billion dollars, and made its shareholders wealthy. Yunus was outraged by the high interest rates and simple bald privatization of the now profitable banco.

While the granularity of digital money can create capital access and capital democratization, it can also create access for corporate financialization. By financialization I refer basically to commercial or market tactics and discourses; of tacking profit generating financial instruments onto each grain of digital money and a charge onto each node it its circuitous pathway through the technological and social network. This is an important facet of “flexible accumulation” which refers both to the global mobility of capital as well as the instrumentalization of social life.

Mobile Media Democratization

The democratization of digital money is spiritually linked to the tactical and discursive interventions of local entrepreneurs who “hacked” into public systems –satellite television, electricity, water– that had been privatized. My research into the history of cable and satellite “guerrilla television” producers reveals how techniques and rationalities are mobilized by marginalized producers to gain access to systems of media power closed by economic or political power. The process goes something like this. A disruptive network communication technology evolves out of tinkerer communities (radio, cable television) or large-scale federal investment (satellite, internet). The indigenous or local innovators are either responsible for the technology, as in the case of radio and cable television, or adapt to exploit it like early internet hackers, public access television producers, and phone phreaks. Examples include TVTV, a psychedelic television producer community who created an opening on cable television in the 1970s and Deep Dish TV, a progressive producer collective who exploited inexpensive satellite rents to distribute their anti-war message. They used their policy discourse and interventionary practices to exploit an opening in an otherwise closed system. These opening can provide the context for the democratization of (capital) production. These examples of media democratization are from the pre-digital phase, how does granularity impact media democracy as well as the financialization of media?

Mobile Media Financialization

Granularity impacts two forms of media financialization: personalization and fragmentation. The obsession the Google founders Page and Brin have with artificial intelligence is dutifully documented by Nick Carr in The Big Switch. They hope to know enough about each of us through recording our search records to be able to recommend consumer solutions to life. This they call personalization, the individualization of search. This ‘give-them-what-they-appear-to-like’ mentality includes searches we do on politics as Eli Pariser explains, keeping us in homogenous “filter bubbles.” Just yesterday it was reported that Google’s personalization ambition has been branded as “Search,  Plus Your World” to honor how they merge their search data with the person data we freely give them on their fledgling social network Google+. The point is that every granular piece of personal data has a price. It is on these grains of identity that Google and Facebook hang their future business plans.

Google is financializing another stream of granular data, the video clip. Beginning back in 2007, I began documenting the transformation of amateur to professional YouTubers. By the end of 2011, this transformation is now complete and YouTube is fully prepared for the convergence of broadband home entertainment by creating the Partner program, buying Next New Networks, and recently enshrining 100 top video producers. Many of the professionalized channels are vloggers whose work is not granular in the traditional sense of the term (micro-payments or lines of code) but it is granular in reference to the lengthy documentaries, over-cooked television talk shows, and studio call in shows of the past. They are short and often include ever more granular clips. Ray William Johnson, the most subscribed and viewed YouTube celebrity built his business around making fun of little clips. Kind of like America’s Funniest Home Videos for tweens. Taken as a whole, from the semi-famous vloggers making almost a million dollars a year from revenue sharing with Google to the one-hit wonder who uploads an addictively watchable cat video and who make a few thousand dollars for Google and herself, granularity is part of the financialization as well as democratization of visual media.

Possible Social Consequences

What are the possible global and local impacts of the theory that granularity is turning money and media into objects easily interchangeable, financialized, and democratized? In essence I am concerned with the manufacturing and exploitation of desire, the commercialization of bio-politics, and the death of democracy. I worry about the emergence of a corporation capable of exploiting the verisimilitude of money/media and developing financial/media instruments that can control and monetized the smallest units of both symbolic systems. I worry about the capacities of these money/media corporations to manufacture ubiquitous entertainment environments that can extract financial rewards based on phenomenologically inconsequential but altogether quantifiable granular units of sensual attention. I worry about the media, which includes journalism, being colonized by financial interests to such a degree that there is no media (and no journalism) without a financial product immediately inscribed in its metadata. That would negate any democratization granularity would produce.

And yet, I have faith in the rationalities and techniques of the indigenous innovators, phone phreakers, “guerrilla television” producers, and hacktivists to intervene in this worrisome future.

This post is largely inspired by Anke Schwittay’s excellent 2011 article, “The financial inclusion assemblages: Subjects, technics, rationalities” in Critique of Anthropology 31[4]:381-401.

]]> http://savageminds.org/2012/01/11/digital-money-mobile-media-and-the-consequences-of-granularity/feed/ 1 http://savageminds.org/2011/05/31/regarding-japan-part-2-affective-loops-and-toxic-tastings/ http://savageminds.org/2011/05/31/regarding-japan-part-2-affective-loops-and-toxic-tastings/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 06:37:54 +0000 Eleanor http://savageminds.org/?p=5440 Eleven weeks have passed since the earthquake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan.  Although bodies are still being found amidst the wreckage, the rest of the world has long since moved on.   The media waves of shock, horror, heroism, heartbreak, and heart-warm continue to push and pull us through a relentless series of events: from Libya to Tuscaloosa, Kate and William to Bin Laden, Donald Trump to Strauss-Kahn.

The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it.  Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?

In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet.  Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”.  In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks.

Why have we let the situation in Japan recede into the background of other “big news”?  Massumi and others suggest that this “post-shock pre-posturing” increasingly delegates collective response to the national security apparatus, obscures the structural causes of “natural” disaster (Katrina as well as Fukushima illustrate this point well), and feeds the increasingly centralized global economy which capitalizes on the instability created by the very disasters it helps potentiate.

While I discussed responsibility and resistance in relation to mass-mediated affect in my last post, here I want to offer another mode of response: stepping out of the affective loop.  While feeling with others in the context of suffering is perhaps the only appropriate response when faced with the immediacy of another’s pain, undoing the social causes of suffering requires a continuously engaged critical perspective. I’d like to offer that the ongoing events in Japan are terribly important to us right now in an unfolding global context.

What’s perhaps most important about the aftermath of the disaster was not what happened in the first two weeks, but what is happening twelve weeks out.  Not only does the US public need to step out of the media-driven affective whirlpool, but we need to step back into the global conversation about energy sustainability and the political, social, economic, and environmental disasters brought about in the effort to maintain the current levels of profit.

The meltdowns at Fukushima temporarily unmask the social and environmental dangers always present in nuclear power.  Likewise, the uprisings in the Middle East reveal the grave economic disparities and instability generated in oil-based economies.  We mustn’t let these revelatory and revolutionary moments pass away.

As proposed by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis in a letter addressed to Japan, the “international capitalist power-structure” is terrified that the disempowered will seize upon the explosive political potential of these moments.  Their letter suggests that if disaster capitalism runs on an ever-present low-level threat perception, its leading industrial sector—energy—runs on the public’s perception that everything is fine and dandy:

Company men and politicians are aware that the disaster at Fukushima is a tremendous blow to the legitimacy of nuclear power and in a way the legitimacy of capitalist production. A tremendous ideological campaign is under way to make sure that it does not become the occasion for a global revolt against nuclear power and more important for a process of revolutionary change. The fact that the nuclear disaster in Japan is taking place in concomitance with the spreading of insurrectional movements throughout the oil regions of North Africa and the Middle East undoubtedly adds to the determination to establish against all evidence that everything is under control.

Claims like these and others (insert link) about “ideological campaigns” in the name “global revolt” may be motivated by a romantic view of political agency. But the history of nuclear power in the US and Japan suggests that Federici and Caffentzis are right to expose the neoliberal interests that inform the framing of recent events.

Historically, the nuclear-friendly PR machine (with Eisenhower and the “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the helm) played a huge role in Japan’s acceptance of nuclear power.  Of course it did.  How in the world, we might ask, would a country like Japan—the only country ever gutted by a nuclear weapon—come to accept nuclear powered energy at the behest of the very country that dropped the bomb??

Historian Peter Kuznick answers precisely this question and explains the process of propaganda and acceptance in a recent essay.  Putting Japan’s nuclear history Pointo perspective, Kuznick writes: “their nuclear program was born not only in the fantasy of clean, safe power, but also in the willful forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal.”  While the human scale of suffering and loss initiated in northeastern Japan will always remain incomprehensible, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown are being fashioned at this very moment into historically comprehensible events. The social, political and economic stakes in these repertoires of fantasy and forgetting are high.

Most blatantly, perhaps, we find these repertoires rehearsed in mainstream media stories about Fukushima.  Last week President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao visited Japan to speak with Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a tripartite summit in order to discuss Japan’s handling of the nuclear crisis and foster trade relations.  The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s most widely circulated paper, and one with long-held stakes in the nuclear industry…from the time it conspired with the CIA to promote nuclear development in Japan in the 1950s up until the present day) wrote:

Kan was particularly enthusiastic about realizing the visit by the three leaders to a quake-hit area… Some in the government expressed anxiety over security for the leaders. But Kan said: “The sight of us three eating produce from Fukushima Prefecture will definitely be reported overseas. That’d be the best protection we can get against harmful rumors,” and the plan went forward.

Kan links “security” to “protection … against harmful rumors” and asserts that foreign press coverage will provide the protection. One must assume that these “rumors” consist of statements about the ongoing harm by radioactive materials to people in the area of Fukushima and the hazards of all forms of nuclear energy more broadly.  By using the term “rumor” Kan is delegitimizing these claims, while simultaneously taking them seriously enough to situate their threat within the discourse of national security.  Regarding the stakes at play in controlling this information dissemination, Japanese scholar Yoshihiko Ikegami writes:

The government calls the information shared on the internet “rumors” and repeatedly urges the public not to believe them. In addition, a public advertising organization called Advertising Council Japan is airing a TV commercial asking people not to believe rumors and not to buy-up. (The head of the organization is the president of TEPCO.) The commentators in news programs single-mindedly repeat similar messages.

These widespread attempts to dismiss information circulating in the public sphere as “rumors” has led some anti-nuclear activists to re-appropriate the term in explicit calls for revolution.

The linking of rumor and revolution, however, is probably not the most pertinent point about Kan’s statements.  By shifting the role of “security” from that of protecting individual human bodies (Lee and Wen) to that of protecting the nuclear industry—and by exposing these same bodies to potentially poisonous produce—Kan’s statements foregrounds the devaluation of human life that Federici and Caffentzis attribute to capitalism: “What we are witnessing, most dramatically, in the response to the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, especially in the US, is the beginning of an era in which capitalism is dropping any humanitarian pretense and refusing any commitment to the protection of human life.”

If supporting Japan and Fukushima means eating poisoned produce, it is because maintaining current economic trajectories and the continued use of nuclear energy has become more important than the well-being of individual bodies.

At the time of the meeting between the three leaders, the Japanese government had raised acceptable levels of yearly radiation exposure for children from 1 mmSv (the limit set by the WHO) to 20mmSv and was failing to pay for removal of contaminated topsoil at schools.  Children were regularly being exposed to levels of radiation allegedly higher than Chernobyl and traces of radioactive material were being found in the breast milk of women as far away as Chiba and Ibaraki.

Like those displaced by the tsunami, many of the 80,000 evacuees from the 20km radius around Fukushima lacked adequate shelter and provisions.  What’s more, if human life has been undervalued, non-human animal life even more so.   Evacuees were not allowed to take their animal companions with them when they evacuated.  Despite appeals that intensified during the weekend of the summit (and continue thousands of cats and dogs, and ten thousands of farm animals have been starving to death.  Meanwhile, according to prejudices (with historical precedent) about nuclear contamination, people with license plates from Fukushima are being refused service at gas stations and turned away from hotels. Coding discrimination as “reputation damage,” the government is able to claim that supporting the people of Fukushima means ignoring exposure and buying their products rather than worrying over their exposure and accepting them into our communities.  (Japanese Political scientist Chigaya Kinoshita writes about these dual modes of containment in an essay about the uglier aspects of civil society.) In the midst of all this, the three leaders chewed their veggies and posed for the press.

On cue, as if obliging Kan’s earlier statements and this perverse show of solidarity, the first paragraph of the New York Times’ brief coverage of the meeting reads: “The leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea publicly munched on farm produce grown near the stricken Japanese nuclear plant on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Japan’s recovery efforts.”  Nowhere mentioning that this was the fourth in a series of annual meetings since 2008 intended to foster economic relations between the three countries, the article eventually continues, “Before entering the shelter, a converted gymnasium, Mr. Kan steered the group to a table displaying strawberries, cucumbers and other produce grown in Fukushima Prefecture. The leaders, who did not appear to have been surprised by the photo op, smiled and nibbled gamely. “Very delicious,” Mr. Wen said.”

The tone of the Times’ article seems slightly bemused as it acceptingly acknowledges, along with the Chinese and Korean leaders, that this was a highly choreographed theatrical spectacle. What’s troubling in such a tone, however, is the implication that an acknowledgement of posturing somehow exempts the reporting from any responsibility to analyze the scene—both what it stages and obscures.

Why doesn’t the New York Times explain exactly how munching on cucumbers displays solidarity with the people who can’t get the government to clear away debris, rescue their animals, and remove dangerous dirt from children’s playgrounds? Of course these are the very things obscured in the staged scene.  The Times seems to capitulate to the regime of “everything’s fine” that ensures Kan’s “security”.  No matter how ironic the tone, this article portrays solidarity as participating in an anti-panic business-as-usual patriotism, exactly the sort critiqued by Kinoshita in the essay mentioned earlier. While catastrophe and panic were appealing headlines in the initial weeks of the disaster, now in the moment’s fading half-life, they seem to have no place.

Addendum:

Since writing this piece the New York Times has just published an article that exposes the government’s exploitation of poor rural towns and the means through which it makes them financially dependent on nearby reactors.  Although this coverage finally starts uncovering the secrets silence hides, the emphasis on “a lack of widespread grass-roots opposition in the communities around [Japan’s] 54 nuclear reactors” fosters the impression that there isn’t much in the way of anti-nuclear activism taking place in Japan.  Hopefully, the New York Times will start covering the massive demonstrations (of scales rarely seen in contemporary Japan) like the one on April 10^th that brought more that 17,500 people onto the streets of Tokyo.  Cries of protest from the public have brought a halt to development of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant, and forced the government to revoke the change in acceptable radiation levels for children.  Until these stories earn headlines in mainstream media, I ask you to find projects like Japan – Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus which is translating critical essays by Japanese activists and intellectuals about the ongoing situation in Japan.

As the contours of the disaster accrete into what is undoubtedly a pivotal event, the larger frameworks within which meaning hinges are highly contested.  How the disaster, now officially called the Great East Japan Earthquake, gets spun will depend on which historical and political contexts are acknowledged, and which are ignored.

Free Use as Free Labor on YouTube

YouTube, subsidiary of Google, serves as a notable example of how a company creates value through free, user-contributed labor. User-producers upload content to YouTube for free and are given the opportunity to freely use Google’s immense, proprietary data centers (commonly called the “cloud”). Adding content, commenting, tagging, and even browsing all add value to the corporate product, though the amount of user investment and creative immersion differs in each of these cases. In the process, content creators facilitate Google’s ability to place targeted advertisements. These advertising schemes are monetized via the billion+ views YouTube receives per week. Commenting, tagging, and browsing are more passive forms of labor, as each adds to YouTube’s ability to build a social space that users will continuously return to, and optimize algorithms that allow for more efficient retrieval and browsing.

While a number of select YouTube partners are being selected for revenue sharing agreements, the vast majority of contributors receive no revenue from the advertising profits generated around the content they produce. As several anthropologists have pointed out, YouTube is also a social space (Patricia Lange) and an educational tool (Michael Wesch, Alexandra Juashz) but it is first and foremost a business that until the YouTube partner program got going in earnest this year was loosing $100,000,000s. YouTube demonstrates the importance of free digital labor in creating profit-making value for a major corporation. But is the free labor users contribute to such sites exploitative? Let’s assess a second example, one in which users are given pennies for networked work.

Amazon’s Mechanical turk (mTurk)

YouTube’s ability to profit from free labor relies on its openness as a system – users can browse, upload, and comment easily. Amazon’s mechnical turk (mTurk), differs from YouTube in that it functions as a more targeted site, linking jobs/employers with potential laborers worldwide willing to work for the price specified. In contrast to free labor sites such as YouTube, mTurk is built around the relationship of an employer assigning a compensated task to an employee who bids on it. This and other digital labor sites (such as odesk.com) connect employers who post simple digital labor jobs (such as spellchecking, color correction, and basic software development) with any laborer worldwide who accedes to the employer’s compensation terms. These tasks are often ones which automated computational systems struggle with, such as image recognition. mTurk laborers can thus be seen as humans working to complement and augment algorithms and systems.

Interestingly, mTurk’s name is inspired by the Englightenment-era chess-playing automaton, “the turk,” which purportedly would play chess against intellectuals and aristocracy in the 18th century. The chess machine magically engaged the chess player or employer. Yet the turk was actually a clever ruse, a machine where a small Turkish man would stand under and move chess pieces that were magnetically linked to the bottom of the table, and often defeating the “machine’s” opponent.

Is mTurk an innovation that positively impacts access to employment for the traditionally excluded? Or can it also be seen as exploitative through the corporate use of this technology to access cheap labor?

Digital labor functions to generate corporate value, yet also can be seen as empowering individual agency by allowing for a variety of uses and interactions by the user/worker. Systems such as YouTube and Amazon’s mechanical Turk, both function in these ambivalent manners based on ethnographic data we have gathered. This blog post traces out some of the details around new media systems and their ambivalent, concurrent invocations of agency/access and exploitation/capitalization.

In her now classic 1989 paper on language and political economy, Judith Irvine talked about situations where language doesn’t merely index political and economic relations in the way that accent is linked to class in Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” but where speech acts are themselves a form of political and economic economic activity. Her example is that of the Wolof griot “whose traditional profession involves special rhetorical and conversational duties such as persuasive speechmaking on a patron’s behalf, making entertaining conversation, transmitting messagesto the public, and performing the various genres of praise-singing.” She discusses how while not anyone can be a griot — you have to be born into the right caste — it is the “most talented and skillful griots” who “earn high rewards and are sought after by would-be patrons.” Irvine then goes on to discuss not just the verbal skill of the griot, but “cases where a verbal statement is the object of exchange.” It is worth quoting this discussion in full:

Recently there appeared a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine, entitled “Flattery getting someone somewhere” (M. Stevens, 28 July 1986). “You’re looking great, Frank!” says a man in business suit and necktie to another, perhaps older, man with glasses and bow tie. “Thanks, Chuck! Here’s five dollars!” Bow Tie replies, handing over the cash. The joke depends, of course, on the notion that the exchange of compliments for cash should not be done so directly and overtly. We all know that Chuck may indeed flatter Frank with a view to getting a raise, or some other eventual reward; but it is quite improper in American society to recognize the exchange formally, with an immediate payment. A compliment should be acknowledged only with a return compliment, or a minimization, or some other verbal “goods.” If it is to be taken as “sincere,” it is specifically excluded from the realm of material payments.

Some cultural systems do not segregate the economy of compliments from the economy of material transactions and profits, however. It is doubtful, for example, that the cartoon would seem funny to many Senegalese. With a few suitable adjustments for local scene, the transfer it depicts is quite ordinary. There is, in fact, a category of persons-the griots-specializing in flattery of certain kinds, among other verbal arts. The income they gain from these activities is immediate and considerable, often amounting to full-time employment for those whose skills include the fancier genres of eulogy.

I remembered this article because something I read made me wonder about the claim that it is “quite improper in American society to recognize the exchange formally, with an immediate payment.” It was a piece in the Washington Post by sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh entitled “Five myths about prostitution.” The second of these five myths is that “men visit prostitutes for sex.”

Often, they pay them to talk. I’ve been studying high-end sex workers (by which I mean those who earn more than $250 per “session”) in New York, Chicago and Paris for more than a decade, and one of my most startling findings is that many men pay women to not have sex. Well, they pay for sex, but end up chatting or having dinner and never get around to physical contact. Approximately 40 percent of high-end sex worker transactions end up being sex-free. Even at the lower end of the market, about 20 percent of transactions don’t ultimately involve sex.

Figuring out why men pay for sex they don’t have could sustain New York’s therapists for a long time. But the observations of one Big Apple-based sex worker are typical: “Men like it when you listen. . . . I learned this a long time ago. They pay you to listen — and to tell them how great they are.” Indeed, the high-end sex workers I have studied routinely see themselves as acting the part of a counselor or a marriage therapist. They say their job is to feed a man’s need for judgment-free friendship and, at times, to help him repair his broken partnership. Little wonder, then, that so many describe themselves to me as members of the “wellness” industry.

So here we seem to have a situation where Americans do pay to be told how great they are. The difference, of course, is that this activity is illegal, and it is private. While a woman at a Japanese hostess bar may be paid to listen and make complements in a public setting, in the US this activity seems to have been relegated to the private sphere – between the man and his griot.

–Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook

Now O’Brien seems to have had enough. After a long silence, he has a new post up on the AAA-UNITE blog, where he writes that he is suffering from “commission-fatigue” —

the creeping death that sets in when you’ve been part of a successful organizing campaign that is co-opted and turned into a rubber stamp for the policies you’d been fighting.

At issue is this year’s conference in New Orleans. There is no strike in New Orleans, but the LRC members are angry that the conference is being held in a non-union hotel.

According to O’Brien, one of the things that happened after 2004 was a vote by the AAA Executive Board mandating that all AAA meetings be held in unionized venues. Now, you may disagree with this position, but it seems to have been arrived at as the result of a democratic process by the AAA leadership. For some reason, which O’Brien doesn’t explain, this policy was downgraded from being a “requirement” to being merely a “preference.” It isn’t clear if this is simply a difference of opinion, or if it was a change made by fiat by the AAA staff?

In either case, the choice of venue this year runs contrary to that preference/requirement, and the LRC is urging action. While O’Brien has personally decided to boycott the meeting, other members of the LRC are hoping to use the meetings to push forward for reforms. Specifically, they want to “change the conference organizing firm that AAA uses from the corporate-friendly Conference Direct to the labor-friendly INMEX.” They are urging individual sections to adopt proposals in favor of this change, and are planning to propose such a motion at the business meeting in New Orleans, as well as with the Executive Board. You can read the full letter over at the AAA-Unite post.

If you would like to sign on to the letter, please email Steve Striffler <striffler {at} hotmail(.)com> or Paul Durrenburger <pauldurren {at} verizon(.)net>.

The issue was set off by the publication of anti-Zionist author Joel Kovel’s book Overcoming Zionism by Pluto.  Books about Israel and Palestine make up a sizable part of Pluto’s leftist-oriented catalog (and are apparently among the company’s highest-selling titles in the US) — and of course, books like this bother the heck out of America’s powerful pro-Israel Jewish community, which began pressuring Michigan to refuse to distribute the book.

After suspending distribution for a short time, Michigan decided that this was akin to censorship (no, you think?) and resumed distribution, but stated that they would rethink their relationship with Pluto.  On one hand, I suppose there is something to rethink: Pluto is an explicitly leftist publisher and publishes work with a distinct political edge, and U. of Michigan is a public university which might feel that by distributing Pluto’s books, it is endorsing their political positions.  

I think Michigan’s concerns in this area are trumped, though, by the fact that it is a university with a university press, and has a higher obligation to foster and contribute to the debates that shape society. If they need to hide that obligation behind the disinterested stance of a “distributorship agreement” (which means they pass books from Pluto into the US’s retail channels without reviewing them or contributing editorially in any way), so be it, as long as they are meeting that obligation in the end.

I suppose some may ask whether I feel any compunctions about publishing with such a “controversial” publisher. The answer, as my mocking sarcasm quotes around “controversial” might suggest, is a resounding “no”.  First of all, I have no problem with anti-Zionist stances, and see no reason why scholarly work should uphold or kowtow to any particular philosophy.  I find the argument that this kind of work is somehow anti-Semitic to be intellectually dishonest and severely misguided at best, and potentially harmful and intentionally misguiding in its strongest manifestations.  But even setting aside the particular nature of the current complaints about Kovel’s work, what about publishing an academic work with a house that is explicitly committed to a particular political position?

The reality is, I had a choice of where to publish and chose Pluto because its terms were much better, both for me as the editor of the book but more importantly for the content and for getting the book noticed.  I’d like the book to be taken up by professors, at least in advanced classes, and publishing with Pluto makes that a possibility.  Pluto markets; many academic publishers do little more than set up at conferences.  Pluto’s books are affordable — they are offering a $27.95 paperback of my book in addition to a $90 hardcover, where other publishers planned to bring out a $130 hardback and nothing else. Pluto will do a press run in the thousands (I’m not sure what the final figure will be) where others were in the hundreds, aimed mainly at library sales. Pluto offered contributor copies for the other authors whose work is included in the book; others offered discounts only. And yes, Pluto pays its authors, though obviously I’m not going to get rich off of a book about the relationship between anthropology and Cold War politics. Still, it’s the principle that counts, and nobody’s made it quite clear to me why anthropologists (and academics in general) should be willing to work for free — especially when, in this age of increasingly privatized academic publishing, somebody’s making a profit off our work.

Obviously I’m not opposed to working for the enrichment of the field without remuneration — I’ve posted at Savage Minds since its inception without making a penny, and I support open publishing models — but a lot of work goes into publishing a book, even (maybe “especially”) an edited volume, and it’s surprising that so few publishers offer any sort of compensation for that labor.

As long as I’m on the topic of publishing and the work of putting a book out, I’d like to ask if anyone would be interested in hearing about that process.  It’s been a huge learning experience for me that I’m more than willing to share (for free, even!) if people feel it would be useful to them. I know my own education did nothing to prepare me for the job. Or are SM readers all well-versed in the publishing world to be interested in that? Let me know.

“Yes, it is,” I reply. “I love teaching.”

“Well then,” he says, “maybe you should give some serious thought not finishing your dissertation, to not finishing your PhD.”

(Not actual quotes, of course – just roughly what was said.)

His logic was this: in today’s academic world, there is an increasing bifurcation between the “stars”, the top researchers who work at the top schools (and mostly are not expected to teach much) and the rest of us, the day-to-day teachers at the community colleges and the state universities and the private liberal arts colleges. As schools come to rely more and more on adjunct and part-time labor – generally offering abysmally low pay – holding a PhD is coming to be a barrier to employment, an over-qualification in the eyes of many school admins. In places like New York City, where starving graduate students are thick on the ground, a PhD is the Kiss of Death for an academic – schools are paying $1500, $1200, and even less for a 3-credit course, rates which are explicitly aimed at attracting grad students and repelling more qualified (and often more experienced) PhDs.

A few weeks later, another friend emails me about his battle with his department at a 2-year college in the midwest. He works full-time, outside the field, to support his family, but likes to teach a couple of classes a semester, to keep his hand in as well as for the extra income. Despite his best efforts, his school seems intent on adding classes to his roster. “I am worried,” he writes, “that I am being gently slipped into teaching 3 classes…part time.” Of course, being an adjunct means being “free” to turn down classes that don’t fit our schedule. He did that at the last school he taught at – and was never asked to teach there again.

Both of these incidents came to mind when I read the following quote at Anne Galloway’s blog, Purse Lip Square Jaw:

One of the reasons that graduate employees are so vocal is because the transformation of graduate education accomplished by the three-decade conversion of the university to a center of capital accumulation needs to be viewed as a profound form of ‘employer sabotage’—most graduate employees find that their doctorate does not represent the beginning but instead the end of a long teaching career: as I’ve observed in another venue, the ‘award’ of the doctoral degree increasingly represents a disqualification from teaching for someone who has already been teaching for a decade or more. In the course of re-imagining the graduate student as a source of informationalized labor, the academy has increasingly evacuated the professional-certification component of the doctoral degree (the degree plays a key role in the way professionals maintain a monopoly on professional labor; however, now that work formerly done by persons holding the degree is done by persons studying for the degree, the degree itself no longer represents entrance into the profession). The consequence of this evacuation is that the old fordist sense of the doctoral recipient as the ‘product’ of graduate education has little meaning—instead, the degree holder must now be understood in systemic terms as the waste product of graduate education—not merely ‘disposable,’ but that which must be disposed of for the contantly-churning system of continuously-replaced student labor to function properly (Bousquet: 3.8).

The quote is from Marc Bousquet’s article, The “Informal Economy” of the Information University, in the journal Workplace (October 2002). Bousquet examines what the shift to an “informationalized” academia means for labor, and the folks – the professors – who provide that labor. By “informationalized”, Bousquet is not referring to the provision of information – we’ve always done that, right? – but to the way that information, and the labor that goes into its creation and transmission, is accessed. Consider the example of the “informationalized carburetor”:

A fully informationalized carburetor is available in the way that emectronically-mediated data is available – on demand, just in time. When you’re not thinking about your carburetor, it’s off your desktop. When you need to think about it, the informationalized carburetor lets you know. When it does manifest itself it gives the illusion of a startling thransparency – you have in the carburetor’s manifestation the sense that you have everything you need to know about carburetors: how they work, fair prices for them here and in the next state, and so on. Informationalization means that artifacts are available on an information logic: on demand, just in time, and fully catalogued; they should feel transparent and be networked, and so forth (Bousquet: 2.5).

My friend in the midwest is experiencing exactly what it means for the academic to be available “on demand, just in time, and fully catalogued”? Among other things, it means “flex-time” – our time flexing to fit what is increasingly their (the administration’s as well as the students’) schedule. “Constrained to manifest itself as data, labor [like the carburetor above] appears when needed on the management desktop – fully trained, ‘ready to go out of the box,’ and so forth – and after appearing upon administrative command, labor in this form should ideally instantly disappear (Bousquet: 2.5).” All the other aspects of living – the necessities to, in Marxian terms, reproduce that labor – are conveniently disappeared as well. Health care, travel expenses, cost of living, retirement plans, down-time employment, none of the trappings of the Fordist/Keynesian labor regime have a place in this purely informationalized economy, a point which was brought home all to forcibly for me this summer.

Unlike my midwestern friend, I have struggled to fill out a schedule that would provide a reasonable living. Last year, I took on classes at the university in addition to my full schedule at the community college, which means that for the first time in many years, I’m pulling in something like a living wage (or would be, if gas prices and real estate speculation weren’t driving the cost of living here through the roof). Since both the university and the community college are part of the state education system, this has pushed me into a new status, effectively “full-time adjunct” which, wonder of wonders, comes with benefits. Not full-time benefits, though – my benefits start each semester when my contract starts, and end ach semester when my contract expires, meaning that I am effectively uncovered during the summer months. (Aside: technically, I teach in the summer, but there’s a hitch: my benefits start on the first of the month after the start of the semester. Since my session this semester started on the 3rd of July, that means my benefits could have started on the 1st of August – but I’m not teaching in August. My contract expired in July.)

More importantly, I was off work in June. I’ve always counted on teaching a June session, but this year they cut the summer schedule nearly in half, and there were no June sessions available. Back in April, I called the unemployment office to see if I was eligible for unemployment during this down-time. They said yes. They lied. Educators are not eligible for unemployment if their unemployment was brought on by the end of the school term, a regulation that went into effect several decades ago apparently in an attempt to stem abuse of the system by teachers and professors who were, at the time, mostly on year-round contracts and therefore getting paid during their periods of unemployment. The world has changed a lot since then, with universities coming to depend on adjunct labor to a degree unheard of in the ‘70s when the regulation went into effect, but the law hasn’t.

So, like an increasing number of my peers, I was left stranded when the unemployment office finally (after 6 weeks) came down with the decision they always knew they’d make. Which sucked for me, but more to the point, did not suck for my employers. “Laboring in an informatic mode means laboring in a way that labor-management feels effortless… called up effortlessly, dismissed at will, immediately off the administrative mind once out of sight” (Bousquet: 2.8). The effort expended to make this happen – the 30-mile drives between classes, the fast-food lunches gulped on the run, the child-care and health-care and everything else – may well be far greater for both labor and management, but it’s invisible, transparent, compartmentalized – it’s literally someone else’s problem (that is to say, it’s my and your problem).

Bousquet’s article hits me, as it did for Galloway, right in the gut. There’s a lot more to the article than what I’ve touched on here – I may revisit it down the road somewhat as it sinks in more. For now, though, I’m wondering what a different it might have made if I’d read this three years ago, when it came out – and when I took my first adjuncting job.

Now, to anthropologists, the way marriage is discussed and deployed in these debates is laughable. We know that marriage as conceptualized by the American religious right at the dawn of the 21st century is neither the only – or even a particularly common – form of marriage in the world, nor the way marriage has always been in our own society. The Biblical marriage that religious conservatives hold up as their example and guiding principle would be (and is) almost universally condemned by today’s Christians. Jacob, the central patriarch of the Biblical Hebrews, would be jailed as a bigamist today; the acceptance of Utah into the Union on the condition that they outlaw polygamy is demonstration enough that we view Biblical marriage norms as literally un-American. Marriage today is drastically different than it was even a century ago, even a half-century ago. A small extremist fringe contingent apart, few Americans would consider the marriage-as-property-arrangement attitude of the 19th century to be truly reflective of our modern notions of freedom and individual fulfillment. And hardly anyone would advocate a return to the way marriage was in the 1950′s, when teen pregnancy was at its peak and fully 1 of 3 marriages involved a pregnant bride. Whatever one thinks of single parenting, I find it unlikely that most Americans would prefer marriage to be thought of primarily as something teenagers do when they get knocked up.

Be that as it may, I think conservatives are right about one thing: if the institution of marriage is going to survive, it does need defending. Not because marriage is the only or best source of truly moral living, but precisely the opposite: marriage is increasingly irrelevant in modern society. In the absence of many good reasons for marriage to even exist, those who value it as a tradition are going to be more and more hard-pressed to perpetuate it.

To understand what I mean here, it might be instructive to look at the kinds of societies where marriage is most relevant and enduring. For the most part, marriage is meaningful in societies where food-production is labor-intensive and dependent on carefully-monitored social rules, which means mainly agricultural and pastoral (herding) societies. Examples include rural Indians and Chinese, Pale of Settlement-era Jews, Central Asian tribalists, and pre-Industrial Europeans and Americans – it is probably not a coincidence that Christianity, and Christian notions of marriage, evolved in a largely peasant population. Marriage in such societies is generally not, as today’s formulation has it, a “relationship between a man and a woman”, but a relationship between extended families in which the relationship between the particular people married is secondary at best – and often simply irrelevant. Thus, in many societies (such as the Biblical Hebrews), the practice of levirate (in which a man marries his brother’s widow) or sororate (in which a woman marries her sister’s widower) allow the kinship bond between families to remain unbroken regardless of the death of a spouse – structurally equivalent, siblings become interchangeable in marriage because their function is identical. Most agricultural and pastoral societies also practice arranged marriage, which generally involves the mobilization of the entire kinship network to locate and secure a suitable mate – with suitable generally defined as having an upright, respectable family. While some effort goes into making sure the personalities of the prospective spouses mesh well, the overall goal is to make sure their families are well-matched – the fit between the spouses then acts as insurance against the dissolution of the inter-familial bond.

Marriage is so important in these kinds of society because the need for social networks through which labor and trading can be arranged is so important. A large extended family might be allied by marriage with a dozen or more other extended families. This pool of contacts gives one: resources to call on in case of natural or human-created disaster; a trading network; a body of closely-bonded men to provide defense; a labor reserve for building, planting, or harvesting; and the emotional well-being that comes of social solidarity. With stakes so high, divorce – while often allowed – is greatly discouraged, and problem resolution in marital relations becomes the business of the entire extended family. (In theory this would protect both spouses, though given the strong tendency towards patriarchy in such communities, an undue burden is often put on women to endure in silence, while men often enjoy much more freedom to divorce as well as the use of prostitutes as a source of emotional and sexual solace when there is trouble at home.)

It’s easy to see, then, why marriage is so important in this kind of society. What is difficult is to understand what function it retains in a society such as ours (“we” here being post-Industrial Westerners, especially urban Westerners) where labor and trade are organized through market, not kin, relations. Under the logic of industrial capitalism, marriage is not only unnecessary in many ways but can even be counter-productive. Unlike the agricultural and pastoral societies I discussed above, where people’s relationships to their kin remain strong throughout their lives, in Western industrial nations (and perhaps especially in the United States) a good part of the enculturation process is directed towards preparing children to eventually separate from their kin, with the end of childhood marked by leaving our parent’s houses to strike out on our own. Marriage obviously does not function to bond families together in this setting; in fact, much of our popular culture is dedicated to the proposition that in-laws are a pain in the ass, a proposition that obviously has great resonance.

Close bonds between families are precisely what you do not want in an industrial society dependent on the mobility of labor to survive. Anthropologists have long noted that modern Westerners have much more similarity to foragers such as the Ju’/huansi and Hadza of Africa than we do to our pre-industrial ancestors of just a few generations ago. Foragers are typically organized into small, highly mobile groups whose membership fluctuates as the availability of resources changes – groups may swell during times of plentiful resources, and break up into smaller when resources get scarcer. I once read (though I forget where) that a typical Ju’/huansi group might have a completely different membership when they rejoin their tribe for their annual coming-together than they had when they left the previous year’s.

Like contemporary foragers, people in modern industrial societies live in a world where resources (in our case, jobs) are in constant flux. Consider the city I live in, Las Vegas. About half the current population of Las Vegas has come here in the last 10 years, as a new wave of mega-resorts sprang up offering hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Now, when people move to Vegas or anywhere else in search of work, they don’t bring their aunts and uncles and their cousins and their in-laws and their grandparents and their uncles’ spouses’ in-laws and… No, they come alone, or with their spouses and children. The small nuclear family is well-suited to the need for mobility in search of resources.

Time was when the nuclear family – a man, his wife, and their 2 – 3 children – was the natural ideal for life in an industrial society. The needs of the household – income, procurement of goods, child-rearing, food-preparation, social involvement, housekeeping – were split up between the husband and wife, allowing the man to participate as fully as possible in the labor market while passing the responsibility for reproduction of both his labor (feeding, clothing, and taking care of him so he can go back to work the next day) and of society as a whole (creating a new generation of labor so the society can continue to function) to the woman. But this ideal was scarce – peaking at just over 50% of American households in the ’50s and ’60s and accounting for only a quarter of US households today – and dependent on a whole range of social, economic, and political interventions in the operation of the market that today are branded by many “un-American”: strong labor unions, strong government regulation of business practices, heavy government investment in education, legal limitations on divorce and adultery, government-subsidized housing development and welfare systems, and so on.

The nuclear family, propped up by New Deal-era legislation and older notions about women’s place and propriety, made industrial capitalism livable for many (though by no means all; minorities in general were largely excluded from this living standard, and it was, as noted, not particularly easy on women, either). But it was a fleeting, almost accidental configuration – America’s post-War prosperity being largely contingent on the economic and political vacuum left by the destruction of European infrastructure in WWII – and it was somewhat against the grain of the logic of capitalism (which explains why workers had to fight so hard for the supports that made it possible). Within a couple of decades these supports began to be eroded away, generally at the request of business-owners, for whom the notion of paying both wages high enough to feed a family and taxes high enough to provide the services that held everything together was considered an excessive burden on business, an obstruction to the free functioning of the market.

As wages fell or stagnated, the feminist movement experienced a victory by default: where a generation earlier women fought for the right to enter the labor force, by the ’80s women’s work had become a necessity. At the same time, the nature of work itself was changing, as our economic base shifted from industrial production to one based on information and services. Where particular regions once offered a steady supply of work – Detroit’s auto plants, Pennsylvania’s steel mills, New England’s textile mills, West Virginia’s coal mines, etc. – the information and service economy is scattered and constantly recentering (again, consider Las Vegas, whose growth is dependent on changing ideas about tourism and leisure; should those notions shift – maybe Bible Belt tourism takes off next year – then jobs will quickly dry up in Vegas while a new wave of movement to the South takes off).

In this new economy, even the minimal tie of one worker to another is beginning to seem too limiting. As academics of my generation have discovered, all-too-painfully, marriage may not just limit one’s prospects but eliminate them altogether. I’ve known a fair share of married academics that live across the country from each other, sometimes for years, as they wait for positions to open up for them. This isn’t limited to academics, though – married couples across the professional spectrum are finding that limiting one’s job search to the city in which one’s spouse lives is a sure path to frustration. Anyone with any degree of specialization may find their career needs and marriage needs at odds. Marriage is, ultimately, a limit on the free movement labor, and in the battle between emotional satisfaction and economic need, doesn’t seem like much of a long-term contender.

If we run down the functions that anthropologists typically cite for marriage, we see that other institutions in our society meet nearly all of them, often better than marriage itself does. For instance, establishing paternity is done with almost no margin of error today thanks to fairly simple DNA comparisons. Although our legal system provides a loose framework for inheritance, this can be rather sloppy and most people who have anything worth inheriting choose to dictate inheritance via a will, rather than counting on the institution of marriage to make inheritance flow smoothly. The huge number of single mothers (and much smaller number of single fathers) show that child-rearing can be performed quite effectively outside of marriage, and much of our child-rearing is handled by schools and other institutions anyway. Sexual access has already moved far beyond the bounds of marriage, with nearly every American having sexual relations outside of marriage at some point in their lives. Finally, the emotional satisfaction and sense of security that can be provided by marriage is apparently fleeting, with half of all marriages ending in divorce, and a goodly number of marriages harboring psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. Many people today find just as satisfying relationships with partners to whom they are not married, whether by legal restriction (e.g. same-sex partners) or by choice.

It is telling that few mainstream defenses of marriage appeal to any necessary function they see marriage performing; rather, the appeal is almost always a symbolic appeal to “tradition”. For instance, in his speech earlier this month backing the drive for a Constitutional amendment banning “gay marriage”, George Bush said

Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society… Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious and natural roots, without weakening this good influence on society.

I’m reminded of a joke that went around during the Internet bubble:

1. Give stuff away
2. ? ? ?
3. Profit!

Bush’s promotion of “loving and serving” each other sounds similar:

1. Defend marriage
2. ? ? ?
3. Good influence on society!

Bush’s appeal is not to how “the commitment of a husband and a wife” might “promote child welfare and the stability of society” but rather to the idea that it should, because in days of yore, it did.

The symbolic value of marriage is, I grant you, still very strong (obviously, or “protecting it” wouldn’t be a tried and true election-year gambit). And there’s certainly something to be said for holding onto practices and institutions simply because they are our traditions, because they provide us with some kind of meaning. I’m not arguing against that – I just don’t think it will work. Marriage – and probably any long-term commitment – is more and more an empty form at odds with the needs of both individuals and of our society as a whole. I’m not arguing that marriage will disappear this year, or even in my lifetime, but I don’t see much future for the institution in the long-term. Stripped of any function, it is possible that people will continue going through the motions for a while, but eventually I can’t see marriage holding onto its significance, especially as it interferes with individual and group survival. And I can’t see people getting too worked up over an empty ritual that provides little or nothing of value.

One final note: None of this is meant to belittle the efforts of same-sex marriage advocates to legalize marriage for all Americans regardless of sexual orientation. That battle has an importance quite distinct from the question of what marriage does or does not do in our society.

The catalyst for this action seems to be Lesley Gill’s recent essay in Transforming Anthropology, “Labor and Humanrights: ‘The Real Thing’ in Colombia” (PDF download). It is worth reading the first few paragraphs in full:

Being a trade unionist in Colombia is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. The statistics paint a gruesome picture. By 2004, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores-the country’s largest trade union confederation-had lost four thousand members since it was founded in 1986, including nearly all of its founders. Seventy-eight were murdered in 2003, and twenty-eight were assassinated in the first five months of 2004. During the early years of the twenty-first century, nearly three-quarters of murdered unionists in the world died in Colombia (International Labor Commission 2004). Hundreds of Colombian working people were threatened, displaced, attacked, detained, kidnapped, and forced into exile. Right-wing paramilitary groups affiliated with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) committed the majority of murders, and they targeted union leaders disproportionately.

The violence of Colombia’s decades-long civil war does not explain the dire situation faced by Colombian unionists. Murdered workers are not the product of indiscriminate, chaotic violence, nor are they the collateral damage of civilians caught between warring groups. They are the victims of a calculated and selective strategy carried out by sectors of the state, allied paramilitaries, and some employers to weaken and eliminate trade unions. It is a strategy that emerges from, and is facilitated by, pervasive impunity. Of the nearly four thousand trade unionists murders since 1986, only five people have been convicted. That represents a rate of impunity of almost 100 percent (International Labor Commission 2004).1 Most of the rights violations are connected to specific labor conflicts, such as strikes, protests, and contract negotiations in which selective assassinations, arbitrary arrests, detentions, unlawful searches, and anonymous threats serve as tools of labor discipline. Targeted and discriminate violence has not only led to the death, exile, and displacement of hundreds of Colombian workers. It has also contributed to a climate of anti-unionism in which trade unions are associated with guerrilla insurgencies and unable to exercise their right to free association.

Multinational firms profit from the reduced effectiveness of trade unions that arises from the intimidation of workers by paramilitaries. Weak unions pose less resistance to job cuts, lowered wages, reduced benefits, and “flexible” contracts that are promoted by multinational corporations and that are emblematic of the new, neoliberal economic order. Yet in some cases multinationals do more than benefit from extra-judicial violence: they actually organize it. Such is the case with the Coca-Cola Company, according to Sinaltrainal (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Industria de Alimentos), the food and beverage workers’ union that represents Coca-Cola workers in Colombia. On July 21, 2001, Sinaltrainal filed suit against the Coca-Cola Company and two of its Colombian bottlers in U.S. Federal District Court in Miami, charging that they collaborated with paramilitaries to murder and terrorize workers.

This post has been gleaned from those of Robert O’Brien on the AAA-UNITE blog, where he has recently been blogging more actively about issues affecting anthropology and labor. In this post he outlines a number of actions anthropologists (and others) can take to demand changes from Coke.

Coca-Cola responds to the charges here.