Thinking about that case introduces another consideration, the role of the national, as opposed to the state or local government, in the politics of the Nokia deal. I know that in the United States, individual states compete with each other to attract foreign investment, offering tax breaks and labor conditions that favor companies over workers; “right to work” laws written to prevent union formation is one common example. Which is why, for example, BMW builds cars in South Carolina and Nissan builds cars in Tennessee.

I note that Apple introduced iPhone in 2007. In 2009, Nokia was still number one in global sales but its market share was slipping, and a host of big competitors from Korea, Japan, and China were entering the lower end of the market where Nokia sales were concentrated. How much of this information was available and to whom when the events you describe were happening is an interesting question. Local perspectives might suggest that local concerns were paramount. On the Nokia side I imagine a company in trouble trying to squeeze every bit that it could out of its local investment.

I do agree with your observations about the relationship between the state, Nokia (in this case) and the people/workers, within this context. Perhaps, on a side note, this underscores how important contexts are in framing particular developments (and, of course, our research into the same).

I find the idea of moral obligation interesting, not only because it’s a recurrent theme in a lot of South Asian, and particularly Indian, works (I am thinking of Partha Chatterjee’s ‘political society’ here – perhaps more as heuristic device). I encountered the same in my own research on migrant workers in Mumbai in how they, while collaborating with a local NGO, articulated something like a “right for/to benefits” (suvidha ka adhikaar hain, to quote one person from the NGO) from the state and private construction companies. Indeed the notion of suvidha becomes quite an important element in political negotiations outside of union contexts and actions (as it is in the civil construction industry).

All of this – including my ongoing thesis work on women’s NGOs – I think, in one way or another, invites us to rethink what neoliberalism (in its broadest sense, for now) means as a dominant social, cultural and political-economic structure (for the lack of a better term). Precisely because notions of what “communities” are changing, I think we need to be attentive to these nuanced shifts that produce different subject positions, and therefore, animates thinking about the future.

Again, these are just some top-of-the-mind reflections to your comment and work (as I still am thinking about mine – or, more accurately, struggling with!) Look forward to reading more of your work on SM, as well as elsewhere.

Cheers!

In thinking this material through, I guess I was struck by two things: 1, the fact that although critical onlookers saw the bad deal that the TN government had made with Nokia, for the workers it was much more a straight benefit, a deliverance into prosperity and position; and 2, that we so often hear middle-class complaints about local governments betraying their populaces, not delivering as they should etc. etc. — but the poor don’t often seem to see it that way, or at least don’t as easily articulate such stark criticisms. Part of the reason for this I think is just that their relationships to the state are that qualitatively different, and they are relationships that invoke moral obligations, guilts, duties, responsibilities, rights, righteous claims, and more; always in the process of working something out, within some written-or-unwritten set of parameters or rules, and are hardly ever terminal transactions. Hence the idea of the political arrangement–and all the attendant questions of what form it might take for different groups and at different moments, what arrangements give way to what other arrangements, and so on–not at all expecting consistency or coherence, or needing, for that matter, to point out contradictions 🙂 The “future” gives us a common vocabulary to articulate a common set of aspirations, or to gather shared values (good or bad), and to track in (somewhat) concrete ways not just the fact that there are unequally distributed futures, but what the consequences and cross-talks facilitated by those unequal distributions might be.

I guess my point (both here and in the next post) is that the translation of these into a concrete set of mechanisms to get from here to there require making some deal with the state, at the level of abstract, distanciated policy or in terms of actual face-to-face relationships with local MLAs, which we then seek out or press for or are content to wait for in a whole lot of different ways.

Not sure if that addresses all of what you were asking, and there’s more yet to say, but then again this feels like a conversation that needs to unfold and evolve, perhaps more in other spaces than just comment exchanges.. though these of course are great, too 🙂

Just wanted to share a quick observation:

What you describe with the Sriperumbudur SEZ resonates very closely to the themes I saw in Dibaker Banerjee’s 2012 film, Shanghai (I would certainly recommend it, if you haven’t watched it!), where the idea of futures, and aspiring to them, seems to be a strong theme (as is the violence of the neoliberal state). A lot of people pointed out an apparent paradox in Shanghai: how can people support a political party and state interventions that ultimately displaces them?

While the Shanghai paradox (let’s call it that – don’t want to give any spoilers) is worth thinking about, I think critics often miss the nuanced “political arrangements” that you underscore in this post: that we do great injustice by seeing opposition to the state/capital solely in terms of “conventional” activism; that there is perhaps a spectrum of engaging with the state – oppositional politics being one part (perhaps Kodaikanal and Kudankulam are exemplary of these, to remain within the context of Tamil Nadu), and collaborative ones the other (for the lack of a better term).

So my question would be: how do you see this spectrum of politicking with the state and capital in a more sort of holistic way? (Or whether we need to think of a spectrum at all?) And how could we talk about labour politics and electoral politics more broadly in a frame that doesn’t rehash the Indian Left’s narrative – or better still may be able to challenge it? How can the framework of futures and aspirations be useful to look at this fragmented field of politics and building futures?

Thanks once again, and I look forward to discussing this further! Cheers!