Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "Arok of Java: A Novel of Early Indonesia"

Periplus Bookshop Kemang cordially invites you to join us in a celebration for the publication of Toer's latest English language publication.

We are going to have a meet and greet with Max Lane, the translator for this book.

And with our guest of honor, Ibu Pram and daughter - Titiek will also be attending. This event will be taking place on:

Day & date : Saturday, October 27, 2007

Time : 11 am – onwards

Venue : Komp. Villa Kemang (Hero Kemang)

Jl. Kemang Selatan 1 – South Jakarta

 

Book Description

It is the 13^th century in Java. Rebelliousness stirs among peasant farmers and Brahmin priests alike. Slavery has returned and men, women and children labour to find gold for Java's rulers. Bearing the symbols of spiritual power, a young scholar-bandit and rebel appears, called Arok – "he who upturns everything". As the rebellion spreads, it is Arok himself whom the rulers employ to suppress it. Thus emerges one of the epic political conspiracies of Javanese history. At stake is power in Java itself, the Lady Consort Dedes, and an end to slavery and oppression.

This novel presents Pramoedya's version of a great legend emerging out of the mists of historical past, is a tale of palace politics, conspiracy and revolution. It sets out the beginning of historical process that began on Java and gives the most vivid picture of the political, cultural and social forces which Pramoedya sees as having remained crucial until even today: the castes of the Brahman intellectuals, the Satria military and the Sudra, the people, the farmers, the artisans and labourers.

About the Author

Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006) was born in Blora, central Java, the eldest son a headmaster and activist. He wrote more than 40 works, including novels, short stories, plays, history, literary criticism and more than 400 newspaper essays. His Buru Tetrology has been hailed as a brilliant work of epic historical fiction.

Pramoedya is survived by his second wife, Maemunah, with whom he had five children. He had three children from his first marriage, 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

For further information please contact:

Tessa

Marketing & Communications
PERIPLUS BOOKINDO

Mobile: 0818 0649 6007

Email: teresa@javabooks.co.id

Sekelumit Cerita di Balik Penyusunan Tesaurus Bahasa Indonesia

dari: Forum Pembaca Kompas

Awal Desember 2006 yang lalu terbit, Tesaurus Bahasa Indonesia(TBI)â€"agaknya karya pertama dalam sejarah dari jenis ini. Buku yang diterbitkan Gramedia ini mendapat sambutan yang cukup bagus. Dalam waktu singkat, ia sudah mengalami cetak ulang.

Yang menarik, tesaurus setebal 736 halaman ini dikerjakan seorang diri. Penyusunnya Eko Endarmoko, anggota redaksi Jurnal Kebudayaan Kalam (sekarang on-line) di Komunitas Utan Kayu, Jakarta.

Eko Endarmoko, yang pemalu dan pendiam ini, baru sekarang menceritakan pengalamannya menyusun karya yang sulit dan bertahun-tahun dikerjakan ini.

Tesaurus ini adalah buah dari dorongan terus-menerus akan keperluan mendapatkan kata paling jitu sewaktu merangkai kalimat. Hampir separuh kandungan tesaurus itu berasal dari setumpuk carikan kertas berisi kata-kata bersinonim yang saya catat berdikit-dikit sejak kuliah di tahun 1980-an. Kira-kira sepuluh tahun kemudian, demi lebih cepat mendapatkan sesuatu kata sekaligus mencegah carikan-carikan kertas tadi berceceran, semua catatan tadi lalu saya garap dengan program pengolah kata.

Niat membukukannya, yang muncul sesudah melihat seluruh bentuk kasarnya terketik di layar, terdesak dan bahkan sempat terlupakan beberapa lamanya, oleh rutinitas kerja sebagai penyunting di penerbit Pustaka Utama Grafiti.

Sekitar pertengahan tahun 1997, yaitu saat saya mulai bergabung dalam Jurnal Kebudayaan Kalam, adalah momen penting yang memungkinkan TBI menemukan bentuknya seperti sekarang. Jurnal Kalam, Teater Utan Kayu, dan Galeri Lontarâ€"ketiganya merupakan sayap kesenian Komunitas Utan Kayuâ€"tak lain dari apa yang biasa diringkas dengan sebutan TUK atau Teater Utan Kayu.

Rekan-rekan saya, para kurator-sastrawan di sana, Nirwan Dewanto, Sitok Srengenge, Hasif Amini (dan sebelum ini: Ayu Utami), memerhatikan persoalan bahasa Indonesia dengan tekun, cerewet, dan bersemangat. Bekerja sama dengan mereka memberi rangsangan tersendiri bagi saya untuk meneruskan penyusunan tesaurus ini, sekalipun praktis kami cuma berkumpul sekali seminggu, tiap Rabu, antara lain untuk rapat menyusun program acara tiga bulan ke depan.

Bekerja di TUK atau KUK memang setengah "kerja sukarelawan". Maka tiap orang punya kegiatan samping. Kegiatan samping saya adalah menjadi penyunting bahasa, antara lain bagi terjemahan yang akan diterbitkan oleh lembaga KITLV (Koninklijke Instituut voor Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde) Belanda yang di Jakarta diwakili Jaap Erkelens. Bung Jaap sering datang ke Kedai Tempo dan kami duduk berdua bekerja di depan tumpukan naskah. Bung Jaap dengan demikian juga jadi bagian dari KUK, sebagaimana tiap orang yang kerap datang dan bekerja di sana. Bahkan Bung Jaap pernah jadi "kurator" pameran karikatur pers Belanda dari masa revolusi Indonesia (Februari-Maret 2006).

Oleh KLTV juga, saya disponsori untuk kerja penelitian di Leiden, Belanda, selama Mei-Agustus 2001 dalam menyiapkan TBI. Saya senang rekan-rekan di TUK merelakan, bahkan mendorong, saya meninggalkan kerja selama itu. Saya harap hasil kerja itu tidak mengecewakan.

Memahami Aceh dalam Kerumitan Indonesia

Koran Tempo - Jum'at, 19 Oktober 2007

Opini

Otto Syamsuddin Ishak, peneliti senior pada Imparsial, Jakarta

Sekarang lebih mudah memahami Aceh ketimbang Indonesia. Berbeda dengan dahulu, lebih mudah memahami Indonesia--yang akhirnya berkembang menjadi permakluman politik--daripada memahami Aceh, yang kemudian melahirkan resistansi politik.

Mungkin karena Aceh adalah dunia mikro, dan Indonesia adalah dunia makro, lebih mudahlah memahami Aceh daripada memahami Indonesia. Namun, antropolog Clifford Geertz telah mengingatkan tentang Aceh yang cenderung ekstrover sehingga cenderung bergerak evolutif. Sedangkan Indonesia--akibat dominasi budaya Indonesia Dalam yang agraris dan membatin--cenderung introver dan bergerak involutif.

Seturut itulah, Aceh lebih mudah dipahami karena kemikroannya, sifatnya yang ekstrover, dan geraknya yang evolutif. Indonesia tentunya semakin susah--kalau belum memusingkan--dipahami karena kemakroannya, sifatnya yang introver, dan geraknya yang involutif.

Singkatnya, anatomi Aceh itu sederhana. Anatomi Indonesia itu rumit. Namun, bukankah, pasca-Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) Helsinki, Aceh berada dalam Indonesia? Karena itu, apakah cukup memadai untuk memahami kesederhanaan Aceh tanpa kaitannya dengan kerumitan Indonesia?

Tengoklah laporan International Crisis Group, "Aceh: Komplikasi Pasca-Konflik". Kiranya ini sebuah contoh yang ideal bagaimana memahami kesederhanaan Aceh tanpa kaitannya dengan kerumitan Indonesia. Anatomi Aceh--yang diwakili oleh kajian tentang evolusi Gerakan Aceh Merdeka dan Badan Reintegrasi Aceh (BRA)--demikian lancar diuraikan tanpa mengaitkannya dengan kerumitan Indonesia, serta dengan mudah dapat diramalkan bagaimana jadinya di esok hari.

ICG melaporkan, pasca-MOU Helsinki, ada ketenangan di Jakarta, dan terjadi kegelisahan yang semakin kuat di Aceh perihal masa depan perdamaian yang sedang dilangsungkan. Pasalnya sederhana saja, yakni menyangkut evolusi dalam tubuh GAM dan BRA. Dan kedua kelembagaan ini dikendalikan oleh orang GAM. Meskipun ICG mengakui orang GAM bukan pelaku satu-satunya yang menggelisahkan, anatomi pelaku lain tak juga diuraikan oleh ICG. Mungkin terlalu rumit.

Transformasi politik yang berdampak sosial yang terjadi pasca-pemilihan kepala daerah (pilkada) yang digelar sejak Desember 2006 digambarkan oleh ICG dengan terang-benderang dan sederhana bahwa "para pemilih di Aceh tampaknya telah mengganti elite korup yang satu dengan yang lain". Pejabat baru melahirkan jaringan patronase baru.

Perihal patronase baru bukanlah hal yang unik. Di mana pun dunia politik hidup dan mengalami pembaharuan, baik secara demokratis maupun nondemokratis, pastilah melahirkan jaringan patronase baru yang seturut dengan penguasa baru. Dalam sejarah kesultanan Aceh, setiap muncul sultan dan sultanah baru, apalagi dari wangsa baru, dengan segera terbentuk jaringan patronase baru. Dalam sejarah Indonesia, begitu Soeharto menjatuhkan Soekarno, maka segala jaringan patronase Soekarno dihancurkan dan dibentuk jaringan patronase yang Soeharto-sentris. Sejarawan Ong telah menguraikan keniscayaan sejarah tentang kemunculan kaum orang kaya baru setelah kemunculan penguasa baru.

Hal penting lain yang tak pernah dikaji adalah bahwa pilkada Aceh itu telah memutuskan dominasi oligarki partai nasional yang sudah selaras dengan pelaku birokrasi dan militer sejak masa Orde Baru. Ternyata, klaim politik bahwa hanya partai politik nasional, birokrasi, dan serdadu yang bisa melahirkan pemimpin tidak sepenuhnya benar. Gerakan protes juga bisa melahirkan pemimpin yang bisa terpilih oleh rakyat. Klaim politik hitam bahwa uang adalah modal utama untuk menjadi penguasa politik juga salah. Klaim politik kampanye dengan mobilisasi massa yang sebesar mungkin dengan umbul-umbul politik yang mengepung rakyat--sehingga membutuhkan dana politik yang besar--juga salah. Aliansi antarpartai atau membeli partai sebagai tunggangan politik juga kalah.

Di satu sisi, kita bisa membaca peristiwa itu sebagai sebuah reintegrasi Aceh, dan khususnya GAM, ke dalam sistem politik Indonesia. Lalu, kita bisa berkata-kata: itukah perpolitikan Aceh yang berbeda dengan perpolitikan Indonesia? Di sisi lain, kita pun dapat memahami peristiwa itu sebagai sebentuk revolusi politik. Paling tidak lebih revolusioner daripada capaian politik yang diperoleh dari gerakan Reformasi 1998 secara nasional.

Akibat perubahan politik yang revolusioner itu--sekalipun baru pada tataran pelakunya, belum masuk ke revolusi struktur dan kultur politik di Aceh-- keseluruhan sendi kehidupan di Aceh menjadi goyah. Kaum elite lama khawatir terjungkal. Sebagian besar rakyat yang merasa menang atas dominasi kaum elite lama menggelembungkan harapan hidup barunya pada pemimpin yang baru.

Celakanya, pilkada juga bisa berarti menjebloskan penguasa baru itu ke dalam struktur dan kultur politik, birokrasi, dan keserdaduan yang telah mengakar dengan rumit, yang juga adalah refleksi dari keberhasilan Indonesianisasi di Aceh. Masalahnya, apakah para pelaku politik dari pihak GAM, yang sekarang terintegrasi ke dalam struktur dan kultur politik keindonesiaan itu, mampu mengubah atau justru tenggelam di dalam kerumitan Indonesia.

Dalam perancangan anggaran, penguasa baru belum berhasil merancang sistem anggaran belanja yang sesuai dengan visi dan misinya. Kaum teknokrat dan birokrat yang mendominasi penganggaran masih menyusunnya sesuai dengan mindset yang tak sensitif terhadap kondisi Aceh pascakonflik dan bencana tsunami. Dalam restrukturisasi pemerintahan Aceh, penguasa baru terbentur dengan cara berpikir kaum politikus di parlemen lokal yang tidak melihat Undang-Undang Pemerintahan Aceh sebagai acuan utamanya. Bahkan mereka disekongkoli oleh kaum birokrat yang khawatir terjungkal.

Untuk melihat lebih jauh bagaimana kesederhanaan Aceh didominasi oleh kerumitan Indonesia, Badan Reintegrasi Aceh (BRA) merupakan contoh idealnya. Pada aras politik, penanggung jawab utama seluruh reintegrasi berada di pundak pemerintah RI, baik yang menyangkut GAM maupun korban (rakyat sipil). Hal itu dibunyikan dengan kalimat, "Pemerintah RI dan pemerintah Aceh akan melakukan upaya? Pemerintah RI akan mengalokasikan dana? Pemerintah RI akan mengalokasikan tanah pertanian dan dana?" MOU juga menjelaskan dengan terang benderang apa saja dan siapa saja yang menjadi subyek reintegrasi itu.

Namun, dalam aras implementasinya terjadi dua hal yang merumitkan. Pertama, BRA adalah sebuah lembaga yang dibentuk oleh pemerintah Aceh, bukan oleh pemerintah RI sehingga kewenangannya sulit menjangkau langit-langit kebijakan politik nasional. Beban nasional dilimpahkan menjadi beban daerah, meskipun dengan alokasi dana dari anggaran nasional (APBN). Agenda reintegrasi pun berkelindan dengan agenda dinas sosial.

Kedua, kerumitan semakin menjadi, ketika BRA dibebani hal-hal di luar mandat MOU Helsinki. BRA harus menanggulangi para milisi yang merupakan subyek tak tersebutkan dalam MOU Helsinki. Bahkan BRA menjadi saluran dana bagi Forum Komunikasi dan Koordinasi (FKK), yang merupakan evolusi dari Desk Aceh di masa perang yang berelasi dengan Menteri Koordinator Politik Hukum dan Keamanan. Hal ini terjadi setelah FKK melibatkan keanggotaan pemimpin GAM di dalamnya. BRA pun tak berdaya memperoleh akuntabilitas pemakaian dana itu dari FKK. Lebih rumit lagi bila benar bahwa pembentukan FKK merupakan siasat politik menyabotase pembentukan Komisi Bersama Penyelesaian Klaim, yang diamanatkan MOU Helsinki namun belum juga dibentuk, sedangkan permasalahan semakin rumit.

Hal lain yang semakin merumitkan adalah pemerintah RI tidak berupaya membuat agenda reintegrasi yang terancang dengan baik (blueprint) bagi Aceh-Indonesia pascaperang. Pertarungan politik internal dibiarkan dan ketidakpuasan para subyek BRA terus menggelembung.

Tampaknya, contoh-contoh di atas sudah cukup untuk menjelaskan bagaimana kerumitan-kerumitan Indonesia yang semakin mengepung Aceh, yang merupakan produk dari pengabaian komitmen-komitmen politiknya sebagaimana yang tercantum dalam MOU. Situasi pun semakin rumit manakala tanggung jawab pemerintah RI untuk memfasilitasi transformasi GAM dari gerakan bersenjata menjadi gerakan politik tidak dilakukan. Apalagi para donor yang terlibat dalam memfasilitasi pemerintahan Aceh maupun GAM sama sekali tidak memahami apa dan bagaimana kesederhanaan Aceh dan kerumitan Indonesia itu. Sementara itu, pelaku-pelaku politik baru di Aceh mulai kehilangan kesadaran akan kesederhanaan Aceh dan mulai terseret ke dalam alam kerumitan Indonesia

Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (Paperback)

Book Review

by Gil Dines, Robert Jensen, Ann Russo

A must read for EVERYONE, June 9, 2003

By
Kevin Davis (Charlotte, NC United States) - See all my reviews

I say this is a must for everyone because pornography effects everyone (whether you use it or not). This is an honest look into the world of pornography including the producers, consumers, and victims. Since it was written by 3 outspoken liberal feminists (e.g., one author claims to be anti-capitalist, and they all dismiss religious conservatives such as fundamentalists as often hypocritical; not to mention, they make a point of naming the Catholic religion of many of the users and abusers of porn). Even with those quibbles (since I'm a conservative/fundamentalist Baptist, pro-capitalist, and for the most part, anti-feminist), I still highly recommend this book. Beware, however: the illustrations of mainstream porn and the accounts of the victims are very graphic. For those of us who never "got into" the world of hardcore or semi-hardcore pornography, this will be an eye-opener that will make you both sad and disgusted. If you don't have the money to buy this book, please go see if your library has it (like mine). A must read no matter where you are on the left-right social/political spectrum.

In Memoriam Marianne Katoppo: Kepergian "Yang Lain" Itu

Oleh Aryawirawan Simauw

Sabtu siang tanggal 13 Oktober 2007, di tengah keriangan Idul Fitri, angin sepoi-sepoi terasa sendu di Krematorium Oasis Lestari, Tangerang. Pada sebuah oven, jasad Marianne Katoppo dalam dua jam telah menjadi abu berwarna putih. Kesenduan dan keheningan bersatu menghantar Marianne berpulang menuju Sang Khalik. Tak ada suara kucing-kucing yang mengantarnya, mahluk hidup yang selama bertahun-tahun menjadi teman setianya. Tak ada isak-tangis yang berkepanjangan. Suasana sunyi dan teduh, sesunyi dan seteduh hidupnya. Kepergiannya begitu lain. Sepi, sunyi, damai, dan indah.

Sejumlah kalangan yang mendengar kabar berpulangnya Marianne seakan tak percaya. Bagi saya, kepergiannya sangat mengagetkan dan menyesakkan dada. Sebab, seminggu sebelum Marianne berpulang, ia meminta saya datang menengoknya di Bogor, tapi saya tak bisa. Ironisnya, sesungguhnya sejak minggu lalu Marianne sudah setuju untuk menjadi penasihat penulisan cerita dalam film layar lebar yang sedang saya persiapkan, "Ashram Shanti". Sebuah film yang direncanakan diputar 8 Maret 2008, pada Hari Perempuan Internasional, dan sekaligus bagian dari hadiah HUT ke-65 Marianne.

Perempuan yang dilahirkan di Tomohon pada 9 Juni 1943 itu, memiliki sejumlah sahabat. Sejak 1989, saya membangun persahabatan dengannya, melanjutkan persahabatan ayah dan ibu saya. Bersamaan dengan menguatnya tekanan rezim Orde Baru, Marianne adalah sosok pemberani yang luar biasa.

Mungkin tidak banyak yang tahu, bahwa dalam fase perubahan dari 1990 hingga 1998, Marianne memberikan kontribusi bagi percepatan reformasi secara tak langsung. Tulisan-tulisannya di Suara Pembaruan dalam fase itu dan kehadiran di berbagai forum internasional serta kenekatannya mendirikan Forum Demokrasi (1991) bersama Gus Dur dkk adalah kontribusinya yang cerdas.

Marianne yang menulis buku Compassionate and Free pada 1979 dan telah memberi pencerahan di mana-mana, memilih teologi perempuan sebagai teologi pembebasannya. Gelar Sarjana Teologi dari STT Jakarta tidak membuatnya sungkan untuk beradu pandangan dengan teman-teman teolog Indonesia lainnya yang Strata II dan Strata III.

Sebab, dengan kemampuan lebih dari 10 bahasa, penguasaan pengetahuan filsafat, sejarah, politik, sosial, dan ekonomi, Marianne dikenal kalangan luas. Ia juga terlibat berbagai organisasi, mulai dari sebagai anggota Pengurus Pusat Gerakan Mahasiswa Kristen Indonesia (1962-1964, 1976-1978), pendiri Kelompok Hapus Hukuman Mati (1980), anggota Pendiri Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologian in Indonesia (1982), anggota United Borad for Christian Education in Asia (1982-1986), anggota Majelis Pekerja Harian Persekutuan Gereja-gereja di Indonesia (1984-1989), dan anggota International Council of World Conference for Religion and Peace (1989-1994).

Teman-temannya bukan saja dari kalangan Protestan, tetapi Katolik dan Ortodoks. Demikian pula dari kalangan Islam, Hindu, Buddha, Khonghucu, Sikh, Brahmana Kumaris, dan Bahai. Keterlibatannya pada pergumulan pluralisme, multikulturalisme dan theologiae religionum tetap pada pilihannya pada teologia perempuan sebagai paradigma berteologia.

 

Realitas Kemanusiaan

Dalam buku peringatan 50 Tahun Sekolah Tinggi Teologia Jakarta tahun 1984, dengan jelas Marianne mengatakan bahwa diperlukan paradigma baru dalam berteologi, yaitu realitas kemanusiaan dan bukan lagi sekadar pewahyuan dari Allah. Marianne sangat yakin harusnya realitas kemanusiaan yang terpecah sekarang ini dan menghasilkan kemiskinan, ketidakadilan, ketidakdamaian, kerusakan lingkungan menjadi titik-tolak berteologia agama-agama dalam menyelesaikan persoalan kekinian kita.

Teriakannya yang keras tentang konsep Imago Dei dalam memperjuangkan kesetaraan, persamaan, pemulihan kemanusiaan, dan hubungan yang hancur dimampatkan dalam konsepnya tentang Liberation Theology Toward Full Humanity. Dan baginya, tugas ini bukan melulu pada satu agama tertentu, tetapi pada agama-agama. Oleh karena itu, selain dikenal sebagai perintis pikiran teologi perempuan di Asia, Marianne juga menggunakan teologia perempuan sebagai karya-karya pembebasan bagi agama-agama menemukan kembali fungsinya sebagai pembebas.

Dalam ranah yang lain, Marianne juga dikenal sebagai seorang novelis dengan kekayaan tema perempuan yang menyentuh. Sebutlah "Dunia Tak Bermusim" (1976), "Raumanen" (1977), dan "Rumah Di Atas Jembatan" (1981). Bahkan novelnya "Raumanen" diganjar Hadiah Yayasan Buku Utama (1978) dan SEA Write Award (1982). Konon, latar kisah dalam novel-novelnya banyak diambil dari pengalaman hidupnya dan teman-temannya. Selain itu, Marianne menerjemahkan karya sastra dari bahasa aslinya ke bahasa Indonesia. Misalnya "Lapar" (Knut Hamsun, Norwegia), "Malam dan Fajar" (Elie Wiesel, Prancis) dan antologi cerpen India dan Thailand.

Namun, karya terbesarnya adalah buku Compassionate and Free. Buku ini ditulis Mei 1979, selama satu bulan dalam bahasa Inggris untuk kepentingan Dewan Gereja-gereja se Dunia. Buku ini telah membawa banyak pencerahan di kalangan perempuan, komunitas dan lembaga di dunia. Seorang teman saya bercerita bahwa ketika mengikuti sebuah workshop teologi feminis, oleh banyak perempuan Marianne dianggap sebagai inspirasi mereka. Juga bagi beberapa peserta dari negara-negara Timur Tengah.

Setelah 28 tahun buku ini ditulis, diterjemahkan ke berbagai bahasa, dipakai sebagai text book mata kuliah teologi feminis, baru pada tahun ini diterjemahkan dalam bahasa Indonesia, diterbitkan oleh sejumlah sahabat perempuannya. Dalam perjalanan pulang kami semua berujar, bahwa setelah 28 tahun bukunya dibungkam di Indonesia dan raga Marianne telah tiada, buku ini menjadi momentum kebangkitan teologi perempuan Indonesia.

Saat ini, Marianne telah tiada. Marianne tahu masih banyak perempuan yang acap dianggap tak ada, tak perlu ada, dan tak lagi ada. Dianggap "yang lain" itu. Tetapi Marianne telah berhasil menyatakan: "Saya mengklaim hak perempuan untuk dibebaskan dari yang Lain yang mengancam itu. Saya menuntut hak perempuan menjadi Yang Lain dalam seluruh kepenuhannya dan dengan berbagai karunianya–Yang Lain, yang bukan merupakan lawan, deviasi, subordinat dari Diri, melainkan dia yang memberikan makna pada Diri". Perempuan "Yang Lain" itu telah tiada, dengan kematian "Yang Lain", tapi kini perjuangan menjadi Diri "pasti lain" jadinya! Marianne, kami akan lanjutkan perjuanganmu!

Penulis adalah pekerja seni, hiburan, media dan penyiaran; pendamping orang dengan HIV/AIDS; pendamping perempuan korban kekerasan

Laskar Jihad: Islam, Militancy, and the Quest for Identity in Post-New Order Indonesia

Journal article by Zachary Abuza; Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol.
29, 2007

Review

Laskar Jihad: Islam, Militancy, and the Quest for Identity in Post-New
Order Indonesia. By Noorhaidi Hasan. New York: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2006. Softcover: 266pp.

The first time that I met Umar Jafaar Thalib, the first thing that I noticed about him was that he had delicate manicured hands, an eerie juxtaposition to all the bloodshed for which he was responsible. Yet reading through Noorhaidi Hasan's Laskar Jihad: Islam, Militancy, and the Quest for Identity in Post-New Order Indonesia--the first book-length study that charts the decline and fall of one of the most visible symbols of post-Soeharto Islamic militancy--one gets little sense of the sheer brutality or scope of violence that plagued Indonesia's Outer Islands from 1999 to 2002. Much of the violence gets glossed over and many parts of the book are frustrating because very little attention is given to such critical points. But the book, which was based on 18 months of fieldwork and 125 interviews of members of Laskar Jihad, remains a wealth of information.

The book in many ways is much more of an intellectual history of the Salafi movement within Indonesia, and in particular, Jafaar's quest to become the movement's paramount leader. Chapter 4, for example, simply explains the Salafi ideology as it took root in Indonesia. The book begins with an analysis of the rapid emergence of Salafi mosques, madrassa, and halqa' ("study circles"). It ties in local politics with the expansion of Saudi Arabian geopolitics and explains the emergence of what he considers a "new type" of Salafi students, in particular, those who went through Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Islam dan Bahasa Arab (LIPIA). Under the constraints of the New Order regime, the nascent Salafi movement in Indonesia was forced to focus on what it considers to be its core mission: da'wah, and eschewing politics and militancy.

Hasan's argument is that the Salafi movement, perhaps more than any other movement in Indonesia, was highly influenced by exogenous factors: the Afghan war, Gulf charity funding, and the first Gulf war.

As Soeharto's legitimacy waned in the 1990s with economic slowdowns and rampant corruption, he turned to the Islamists for support--a move that gave the Salafi movement more space. Yet the Salafi movement remained woefully disparate throughout the 1990s. Hasan explains both the doctrinal schisms and personality contests that kept the Salafis divided (pp. 54-58). To that end, Jafaar turned to the Saudi Arabian Hai'at Kibar al-Ulama (the Committee of Senior Ulama) led by Bin Baz to issue fatwas justifying Thalib's actions, and hence his authority--a tactic Thalib would use again in the coming years to crush his rivals in the Salafi movement (pp. 58-61).

Following a rift within the global Salafi movement over the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia in 1991, Thalib began publishing Salary in 1996, which became his ideological mouthpiece. Hasan argues: "There is little doubt that the monthly Salafy quickly reinforced Thalib's image as a leading Salafi authority in Indonesia" (p. 85). Salafy was followed by a network of pasentren, Ihyaus Sunnah Network, though which Thalib fell out of favour and was ousted.

The move from quietest activities into political activism, always a wedge within the Salafi community between the strict Salafis and the Ikhwanists and Surusist, is charted in Chapter 3. As Hasan notes: "The dramatic shift of the Salafi movement towards political activism and militancy was inseparable from the political ambitions of the movement's leaders who saw that the rapid changes in the Indonesian political landscape would facilitate the orchestration of popular politics and the staging of collective actions" (p. 93). While some of the opening came from the rise of Islamist political leaders following the fall of Soeharto in May 1998, Hasan contends that it was the outbreak of sectarian conflicts that gave the Salafis not just the political opening, but a religious obligation to act--both a personal obligation (fard ayn) and a collective obligation (fard kifaya).

Thalib with other Salafis established Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Sunnah wah' Jama'ah, the umbrella organization for Laskar Jihad.

Forum Komunikasi questioned the "indifference" of the government to the plight of the Muslims in the Malukus (p. 209), and in particular to President Abdurrahman Wahid's coddling of Christians, communists, and his desire to forge diplomatic relations with Israel. For the conspiracy-minded Thalib, the Malukan conflict was something escalated by a Zionist-American conspiracy to rip apart the Indonesian state (p. 114). Here again, Thalib relied on the fatwas of no less than six leading Salafi clerics in the Middle East to justify the Laskar Jihad's jihad in the Malukus (pp. 116-21). Those fatwas were used to declare President Wahid, the former leader of Nadhalatul Ulama, the world's largest Muslim organization, a kafir (infidel), who had abdicated his responsibility to defend Muslims from aggression. And in doing so, Hasan contends that the Salafis "appointed Thalib as temporary commander of their jihad mission" and ergo "temporary leader whose commands should be followed" (p. 155). Thalib's quest to become the amir of the Salafi movement was one step closer to fulfilment.

Despite extensive fieldwork and interviews, Laskar Jihad is not a quantitative study, but it sheds particular light on the process of exclusion and establishing parallel communities, cut off from secular society, what Hasan labels "enclaves". The author demonstrates how the leaders of Laskar Jihad encouraged members to live apart in terms of dress, norms, behaviour, and language, "a domain in which a resistance identity is created" (p. 181). While he admits that the public sphere of the Salafi movement "belongs only to men" (p. 180), there is little discussion of women's role within Forum Komunikasi and the Salafi community.

The 6 April 2000 meeting in Jakarta between three Laskar Jihad leaders and President Wahid, who refused to sanctify their vigilante defence of the Muslims in the Malukus, marked the start of armed conflict.

Laskar Jihad began military training. Some members of Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI) appear to have assisted in this process, but what Hasan fails to demonstrate is why the Indonesian government allowed Laskar Jihad to continue the training and then board government-owned ships bound for Ambon, an event that dramatically escalated the violence. The TNI's complicity in supporting Laskar Jihad's activities in Malukus must be understood in the context of what was happening in East Timor, a subject that goes completely unexplained. Far more on the role and involvement of the TNI needs to be researched.

Hasan argues that Laskar Jihad added little to the battlefield in terms of tactics or military skills; indeed, their "achievement in the Moluccas was, in many ways, strikingly limited" (p. 197). In general, Laskar Jihad was there to set up Koranic centres and to take control of abandoned mosques. Hasan rightly notes that much of the fighting was done by the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)-linked Laskar Mujahidin, and some foreign fighters, though he explains little about these groups or how they were related with Laskar Jihad. Indeed, there was often significant tension between them.

The March 2001 stoning to death of a member who committed rape was a turning point in the organization. Thalib used his religious authority, again based on a fatwa issued in Saudi Arabia, to  implement shariah, rather than simply calling on followers to obey it. He became known not only as a jihad leader, but also as one of the vanguard who supported comprehensive implementation of the shariah. It was as though he had challenged those who had previously spoken out about the need to return to the Jakarta Charter to step forward and prove their commitment to Islam (p. 199).

Yet again, while explaining the actions and implications, Hasan glosses over what happened on the part of the state: "Partly because of the demands of the aforementioned Muslim organizations, the police released Thalib and changed his legal status to that of house detainee. Following the pre-judicial trial, which determined that his arrest was illegal, the police eventually absolved Thalib of all indictments" (p. 199). This is hardly a convincing and satisfactory answer to why someone who unilaterally challenged the authority of the state was able to literally get away with murder. Likewise, Hasan is really unable to explain why it took the state so long to send troops to the Malukus, in August 2001, though his analysis of the repercussions on Laskar Jihad is quite strong.

There are a few factual errors regarding the JI in his discussion of the post-9/11 environment. There were no arrests of JI members until after the 12 October Bali bombings; indeed the Indonesian government was in an appalling state of denial regarding the scope of Islamic militancy within its borders. Likewise, the author overstates the popularity and resilience of Jaringan Islam Liberal (Liberal Islam Network) which has been in significant retreat since 9/11, as other militant groups such as Front Pembela Islam (FPI, or Islamic Defender's Front) have intimidated its members, while the quasi-official Ulama's Council of Indonesia (MUI) have issued fatwas branding "liberal Islam" un-Islamic (p. 208).

There are other places that simply begged for a more thorough treatment and analysis. The jihad in Poso got only a paragraph (p. 205), yet the violence continues there to this day, as it does in the Malukus. While the author contends that Laskar Jihad had scant involvement there, the conclusion would have been an apt place to discuss the ongoing legacy of Laskar Jihad. While the group disbanded under the weight of internal factionalism and Thalib's rapid fall from grace, discussed in pages 211-13, the legacy of militant Islam continues to this day. The Indonesian government's apparent reluctance to take on these small laskar groups is troubling.

All too often groups such as Laskar Jihad and the FPI are dismissed as thugs. Hasan's work is integral to our understanding of the profoundly theological nature of these groups. He explains the theological debates and schisms with clarity and consistency. Despite some limitations as mentioned above, Laskar Jihad is very balanced and eminently readable, and will remain the standard reference on the group. It should be read by anyone interested in Islamic militancy in Indonesia.

ZACHARY ABUZA is a Professor in the Department of Political Science
and International Relations, Simmons College, Boston, USA.

The Burmese Way to Fascism

---

Far Eastern Economic Review - October 2007

by Bertil Lintner 

If Karl Marx was right that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, Burma is still stuck in the tragedy phase. The protests and crackdown in Rangoon in recent days are reprising the doomed democracy movement of 1988. As time passes and the security forces succeed in cowing the population, the world's outrage gives way to ineffectual responses and then resignation.

HARRY HARRISON

In the initial euphoria that such mass movements inevitably bring, the Western media dubbed this Burma's saffron revolution, comparing it to the peaceful "color revolutions" of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. So named because of the leading role played by Buddhist monks, the movement seemed destined to sweep away the unpopular military regime that has impoverished a country once among the wealthiest in Asia. The moral authority of the clergy, combined with the flow of information to the outside world facilitated by new technology, stoked the sense of optimism. The U.S. imposed tougher sanctions, while even China and the Association of South-East Asian Nations, not normally known for putting pressure on their neighbors, issued strong statements.

However, the reality is that nothing substantive has changed since 1988. In fact, the Burmese regime is arguably stronger than it has ever been. It is well prepared to weather this new storm of domestic and international criticism.

The survival of successive military regimes in Burma is one of the enigmas of Southeast Asian politics. The key to this puzzle is understanding that Rangoon is no "ordinary" military dictatorship, and it cannot be compared with Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan or other countries in the region which also have had spells of military rule.

When the army first seized power in Burma in 1962, it not only took control over the government, but also assumed economic power.

Branded the "Burmese Way to Socialism," this meant that almost all private property was confiscated and handed over to a number of military-run state corporations. The old mercantile elite, which to a large extent was of ethnic Indian and Chinese origin, left the country, and so did many of Burma's intellectuals. Prior to the 1962 coup, Burma had had one of the highest living standards in Southeast Asia, and a fairly well-educated population. But thereafter the military became the only elite.

The Burmese military establishment also developed into a state-within-a-state, a society where army personnel, their families and dependents enjoy a position far more privileged than their counterparts ever had in, for instance, Thailand and Indonesia. In both those countries, some degree of pluralism was always accepted even during the darkest years of military dictatorship.

After the last uprising in 1988, the Burmese Way to Socialism was abolished after the 1988 uprising, perhaps in an attempt to appease the international community, which had condemned the carnage in Rangoon, but also because the military had realized that they could make more money in a free-market economy. Private enterprise and foreign investment were permitted after the bloody events of 1988, when at least 3,000 protesters were gunned down, but, in essence, the Burmese Way to Capitalism is also a military-dominated economy.

There are few major enterprises which are not directly or indirectly controlled by the military, or by businessmen affiliated with the military, like the powerful, 43-year-old tycoon Tay Za, who is close to junta leader Gen. Than Shwe and his family. His Htoo Trading Company was one of two main contractors that built Burma's new administrative capital, Naypyidaw. The other was the Asia World Group, which is headed by Tun Myint Naing, or Steven Law, the son of Lo Hsing-han, who in the 1970s was branded by U.S. authorities as the king of opium in Burma's sector of the Golden Triangle.

In Burma, there are special schools and hospitals for the military and their dependents. They live in secluded, subsidized housing and shop for goods that are not available in ordinary stores. An army pass assures the holder of a seat on a train or an airplane, and a policeman would never dare to report him or her for violating traffic rules. The military's only civilian support base is the Union Solidarity and Development Association, USDA, which was formed in 1992. It claims to have 21 million members, but that is mainly because membership is compulsory for civil servants and ordinary citizens are forced to join. Like the Burma Socialist Program Party, BSPP, which ruled Burma until the 1988 uprising, it is a colossus on feet of clay, which, in the wake of current events, is likely to collapse, as the BSPP did 19 years ago.

The rise of military power in Burma began shortly after independence from Britain on Jan. 4, 1948. Communist as well as ethnic rebel armies rose in rebellion against Rangoon, and, in the northeast, remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese forces retreated across the border after being defeated by Mao Zedong's communists. At independence, the Burmese army was only 15,000 strong, plus militias. But by 1955, because of the civil war, the ranks of the army had increased to 40,000, and it was already involved in businesses such as shipping, banking and publishing. When the emerging state-within-a-state gobbled up the state in 1962, there were 104,200 men in all three services. That rose to 140,000 in 1976, 160,000 in 1985, and, at the time of the 1988 uprising, 180,000 in the army and nearly 200,000 in all three services.

Today, the strength of the three services is estimated at 400,000, and they are much better equipped than at any time in Burma's modern history, mainly due to massive procurement of arms from China. The latest expansion comes at a time when the ruling military has managed to strike cease-fire agreements with most of the country's rebel groups, so, during the past decade, there has been very little fighting in Burma's traditionally volatile frontier areas. The enemy now is the population at large.

China's support is a key factor in the junta's staying power, and Beijing wants "stability," not a regime change. In January this year, China—along with Russia—used its veto power to block a U.S. and U.K.- sponsored resolution in the U.N. Security Council, although a majority of U.N. members had voted in favor. The Chinese insisted that the Burmese regime did not a pose a threat to regional security and, therefore, the Security Council was not the right forum to pass resolutions on political repression in Burma. Not even appeals by activists for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics seem to have swayed China into being more critical of the Burmese regime. China has not reacted to pictures from the carnage in Rangoon showing Burmese soldiers carrying Chinese-made T-56 automatic assault rifles.

It may be argued that Chinese military aid is of little help in quelling urban unrest. But the modernization of Burma's armed forces since 1988 has also served the purpose of ensuring the loyalty of the military, which is crucial for the survival of the present regime. Nothing is going to change as long as the military remains united, and there have so far been no credible reports of splits within the military. Given the abuse of power, their privileges and the atrocities they have committed, the Burmese military has everything to lose and nothing to gain from allowing more openness and transparency. Foreign-based opposition groups like to talk about "dialogue" and "national reconciliation," but these are no more than popular buzzwords with little relevance inside Burma, where the military talks to no one but itself.

A Rangoon-based Western diplomat once put it to me quite bluntly: "They fear that if they don't hang together, they'll hang separately." The junta is now reading from its standard playbook, blaming the "disturbances" on "internal and external destructionists." In a speech on Sept. 24, Burma's religious affairs minister, Brig.-Gen. Thura Myint Maung, asserted that "political extremists" from the pro-democracy National League for Democracy, NLD, "remnants" of the Communist Party of Burma (which has been defunct for more than 18 years), and foreign broadcasting stations had instigated Buddhist monks and others to demonstrate. The situation, he said, was being handled "softly" and "with care."

Meanwhile, the National League for Democracy, formed shortly after the 1988 uprising, has been decimated. Its main leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has charisma but she remains under house arrest, and nearly the entire, original leadership of the NLD is either dead, in prison or has simply given up all political activity. Most young NLD activists have been imprisoned, cowed into submission, or have fled the country. Only a handful of elderly spokespersons remain, and none of them has the strength and charisma to carry the party forward. That serves the interests of the junta, since the new-look NLD would appear to the outside world not to be a viable alternative.

Nor have external forces had much influence over Burma's ruling generals. Western sanctions have had minimal effect, as the country's neighbors—China, India and Asean—continue to trade and invest in the country, allowing the generals to use their ample natural resources and strategic geographical position to survive. China was the first major country to show interest in Burma's riches, even before the events of 1988. Pan Qi, former vice minister of communications, wrote an article in the Sept. 2, 1985 Beijing Review entitled "Opening to the Southwest: An Expert Opinion," outlining the possibility of finding an outlet through Burma to the Indian Ocean for trade from China's landlocked provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan. He mentioned the Burmese railheads of Myitkyina and Lashio in the northeast, and the Irrawaddy River, as possible conduits for the export of Chinese goods.

By late 1991, Chinese experts were assisting in a series of infrastructure projects to spruce up the poorly maintained roads and railways. Chinese military advisers also arrived in the same year, the first foreign military personnel to be stationed in Burma since the Australians had a contingent there to train the Burmese army in the 1950s. The total value of Chinese arms deliveries to Burma is not known, but intelligence sources estimate it to be about $1.4 billion.

Burma's close relationship with China caused concern in India. To counter China's growing influence, at first India supported Burma's pro-democracy movement. But when it became clear that it was not going to come to power within the foreseeable future, India began to court the junta. Enticing Burma to distance itself from China, however, was not New Delhi's only concern; the rapidly expanding Indian economy needs energy, and Burma has ample resources of natural gas.

During the current turmoil, China blocked an attempt by the U.N. Security Council to adopt a binding resolution of Burma, while a spokesman for the Indian government on Sept. 26 made a rather bland statement: "The government of India is concerned at and is closely monitoring the situation in Myanmar (Burma). It is our hope that all sides will resolve their issues peacefully through dialogue. India has always believed that Myanmar's process of political reform and national reconciliation should be more inclusive and broad-based."

Burma's generals are, therefore, firmly entrenched in power, and not overly worried about condemnation by the West. That doesn't mean that their position is entirely secure. They remain profoundly despised by the population at large and, last year, an entirely new movement began to take shape. It consisted of veterans of the 1988 uprising, the most prominent among them being Min Ko Naing, a student leader who was arrested in March 1989—and released only in November 2005, after nearly 16 years in solitary confinement. In 1988 he was a 26-year-old zoology student addressing crowds of tens of thousands in Rangoon. When he was released he was 42, and his years in prison had left their mark on his face and body. In 2005, he looked old and haggard—but his fighting spirit had not been quelled. "The people of Burma must have the courage to say `no' to injustice and `yes' to truth," he said at a meeting of the newly formed "88-Generation Students' Group" in Rangoon in August 2006.

Min Ko Naing's group played an important role in organizing the first protests in August, shortly after the authorities had increased the price of petrol and fuel, causing further hardships for a population that was already suffering from rising living costs. But the entire leadership of the group was arrested immediately, depriving the movement of direction. The monks, who took the initiative in the street marches which led to a renewed mass movement, can only mobilize people and take the moral high ground; as monks, they cannot be political leaders. Thus, unlike in 1988 when a number of political leaders emerged, among them Aung San Suu Kyi, the current movement is leaderless and rudderless.

The bitter reality is that nothing is going to change as long as the military remains united and willing to gun down its own people. A younger generation of army officers, who see the need to negotiate with the pro-democracy movement, is probably the only hope. But for now, no one is aware of any "young Turks" lurking in the wings, and there are no signs of serious cracks within the ranks. But if change does come to Burma, it will in any event be because of action taken by such younger army officers, not demonstrations led by monks. The protests can, at the most, influence sections of the army to realize that there is no future in supporting the present regime. But only time will tell if that is going to happen.

Mr. Lintner is a free-lance writer based in Thailand. He is the author of several books on Burma.

Dari Catatan Harian Imam Bonjol

Tempo - Edisi. 34/XXXVI/15 - 21 Oktober 2007

Iqra

Imam Bonjol meninggalkan sejumlah catatan hidupnya saat diasingkan. Ada catatan tentang jalannya pertempuran dan negosiasi dengan Belanda. Tak ada tentang kebrutalan.

"Ini ada surat kumpeni menyuruh saya datang kepada kumpeni sekarang. Bagaimana kiranya segala datuk-datuk atau baik saya pai (pergi—Red.) atau tidak?"

Imam Bonjol wafat di Manado. Selama di Manado, ia ternyata menulis semacam otobiografi dalam huruf Arab Melayu. Oleh anaknya, Naali Sutan Chaniago dan Haji Muhammad Amin, yang ikut dibuang ke Manado, naskah itu diselamatkan.

Dalam catatan itu, kita temukan kesaksian Imam Bonjol menyerang daerah-daerah yang belum menjalankan syariah, juga kisah bagaimana ia mengirim Tuanku Tambusai ke Mekkah, yang kemudian membuat Tambusai bergelar Haji Muhammad Saleh.

Atau bagaimana di sebuah salat Jumat, ia menyerukan hukum adat basandi syarak. Ia melukiskan dengan agak rinci betapa ganasnya perang mempertahankan benteng Bonjol. Tapi bagian paling panjang adalah pengakuannya bernegosiasi dengan Belanda.

Diceritakan, utusan Belanda, Kroner (Kolonel) Elout, memintanya menyerah. Ia menolak, lalu terjadi pertempuran sengit. Dikisahkannya ia memasang meriam sendiri untuk menggempur Belanda. Tapi benteng Bonjol jatuh, dan utusan datang lagi. Di Padang, ia bertemu dengan Residen Francis.

Resident Francis: Dulu saya minta Tuanku, Tuanku tidak mau datang bertemu kami….

Tuanku Imam Bonjol: Tempo tuan kirim surat yang dahulu tuan minta saya. Saya kasih lihat surat itu kepada raja-raja dan penghulu. Hampir saya dibunuh orang tempo itu dan dicabik-cabiknyo dek surat itu. Surat kemudian tidak kasih lihat pada penghulu. Maka itulah sekarang mencari tuan….

Imam Bonjol akhirnya mau dibawa kapal ke Betawi, Surabaya, Buton, Ambon, sampai Manado. Di sanalah, di Lotak Pineleng, ia tinggal sampai wafatnya. Keberadaan naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol pertama kali dilaporkan oleh Ph.S. van Ronkel dalam artikel Inlandsche getuigenissen aangaande de Padri-oorlog (Kesaksian Pribumi mengenai Perang Padri) dalam jurnal De Indische Gids, 1915.

Ronkel menyebutkan bahwa dia telah menyalin satu naskah berjudul Tambo Anak Tuanku Imam Bonjol setebal 318 halaman. Pada 2004, Sjafnir Aboe Nain dari Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Minangkabau, Padang, menerbitkan transliterasi naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol.

Kata pengantar yang ditulis Sjafnir menyebutkan bahwa salinan Ronkel itu sesungguhnya gabungan antara catatan Imam Bonjol yang berjumlah 191 halaman dan catatan anaknya, Naali dan Amin. Naskah itu sendiri, menurut dia, dikenal dengan nama Tambo Naali Sulthan Chaniago.

Transliterasi dilakukan Sjafnir ke dalam bahasa Minang-Melayu, membuat naskah ini agak sulit dipahami dalam waktu singkat. "Saya butuh waktu lama untuk memahami naskah ini," kata peneliti sejarah Tapanuli Selatan, Basyral Hamidy Harahap.

Tak ada bagian dari naskah ini yang menampilkan sikap Imam Bonjol akan kekerasan yang dilakukan Padri. "Tapi saya yakin Imam Bonjol mengetahui kekejaman kaum Padri, baik penculikan maupun pemerkosaan. Tapi ia diam saja," kata Basyral.

Ia merujuk, ada halaman yang menampilkan masalah penculikan dan jual-beli perempuan ternyata dibicarakan secara terbuka dalam suatu pertemuan yang dihadiri tokoh-tokoh umat, yakni Sultan Chaniago, Nan Pahit, Datuk Kayo, Datuk Limo Koto, Rajo Minang, Punjuak Batuah, dan Pado Alim.

"Pailah (pergilah—Red.) ke rumah Malin Kecil, basua (bertemu) perempuan. Ditanyalah dek (oleh) Datuk Limo Koto perempuan itu. 'Siapo nan manangkap di lading Batang Silasung?' kata Datuk Limo Koto. Alah (kemudian) menjawab perempuan, 'Nan manangkap saya dicari (si Cari) orang Durian Tinggi. Dijualnya dek si Cari itu saya kepada Rajo Manang. Dek Rajo Manang dijual pula ke Bamban.'"

Sejarawan dari Universitas Andalas, Padang, Dr Gusti Asnan, melihat, untuk sebuah catatan harian, Tuanku Imam Bonjol sangat tidak mungkin menuliskan fakta-fakta kebrutalan Padri. "Bila dibandingkan dengan sumber sejarah Belanda, Tuanku Imam Bonjol tidak memasukkan peristiwa pembakaran, perampokan, serta penculikan dan pemerkosaan perempuan. Tapi saya pikir dia tahu mengenai kejadian itu," ungkap Gusti.

Baik Basyral maupun Gusti melihat proses negosiasi Tuanku yang diwakili anaknya, Sutan Chaniago, dengan pemimpin Belanda sama sekali tidak menunjukkan ketegangan. Mengherankan, Imam Bonjol yang dikenal sebagai sosok penentang Belanda yang gigih kemudian seperti melemah. Bahkan Gusti melihat keakraban Tuanku dengan Residen Elout dan Residen Francis aneh.

"Sekarang Tuanku pergi ke negri Menado, karena negri Menado baik, tempat baik, makanan murah…."

"Sebagai seorang pahlawan nasional, apa iya Tuanku tidak merasa curiga terhadap niat Belanda?" tanya Gusti.

Sita Planasari Aquadini, Seno Joko Suyono

Kontroversi Kebrutalan Kaum Padri

Iqra

Tempo - Edisi. 34/XXXVI/15 - 21 Oktober 2007

Gerakan Padri selama ini diidentikkan dengan kepahlawanan Imam Bonjol dan kelom­pok­nya melawan Belanda. Tapi belakangan se­buah buku lama yang kontroversial dan me­nunjukkan sisi gelap Padri, Tuanku Rao, diterbitkan kembali. Lalu muncul buku baru dengan judul Greget Tuanku Rao sebagai reaksi.

Kedua buku ini memperlihatkan bahwa gerakan Padri sesungguhnya adalah gerakan Wahabi—gerakan pemurnian Islam yang dilakukan secara keras terhadap Islam kultural di Minang dan Batak. Dan itulah gerakan yang membuat puluhan ribu nyawa jadi korban. Imam Bonjol dianggap dengan sadar melakukan itu, sehingga ada usul gelar pahlawan nasional dicabut darinya. Be­tulkah demikian? Ikuti pembahasan Tempo.

… Petisi ini mendesak Pemerintah Indonesia untuk membatalkan pengangkatan Tuanku Imam Bonjol sebagai Pahlawan Perjuangan Kemerdekaan…. Imam Bonjol adalah pimpinan Gerakan Wahabi Paderi…. Gerakan ini memiliki aliran yang sama dengan Taliban dan Al Qaeda…. Invasi Paderi ke Tanah Batak menewaskan jutaan orang….

Petisi online itu tersebar di banyak mailing list seminggu lalu. Seorang anak muda, Mudy Situmorang—lulusan Teknik Elektro Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, kelahiran Simanindo, Pulau Samosir—telah mengirimnya. Dalam petisi itu, ia membeberkan dosa-dosa gerakan Padri, antara lain pembantaian massal keluarga Kerajaan Minangkabau Pagaruyung dan penyerbuan Padri ke Batak yang menewaskan Sisingamangaraja X.

Ia mengatakan petisi itu atas nama pribadi, bukan organisasi, dan semata-semata untuk pelurusan sejarah. "Kita tunggu sampai 500 pendukung. Hasilnya dikirim ke pemerintah," katanya saat dihubungi Tempo. Sampai sekarang, petisi itu memang belum "berbunyi".

Namun petisi ini mengingatkan orang akan dua buah buku bertema sama yang baru-baru ini terbit. Yang satu adalah buku lama karya Mangaradja Onggang Parlindungan berjudul Tuanku Rao. Buku itu pertama kali dicetak penerbit Tanjung Pengharapan, 1964, dan diluncurkan kembali oleh penerbit LKiS Yogya, Juni lalu, tanpa suntingan apa pun, bahkan tetap dalam ejaan lama.

Itulah buku yang pada 1964 menghebohkan. Buku itu tidak bercerita langsung tentang Imam Bonjol, tapi berisi kronologi penyerangan komandan-komandan Padri. Parlindungan sendiri menyusun buku itu berdasarkan data sejarah Batak yang dimiliki ayahnya, Sutan Martua Radja. Pada 1918, ayahnya adalah guru sejarah di Normaalschool Pematangsiantar. Ayahnya memiliki warisan dokumen sejarah Batak turun-temurun dari tiga generasi sepanjang 1851-1955.

Di samping itu, Parlindungan memakai bahan-bahan milik Residen Poortman. Posisi Poortman sama dengan Snouck Hurgronje. Snouck adalah seorang ahli Aceh, yang informasinya diminta oleh pemerintah Belanda. Sedangkan Poortman adalah seorang ahli Batak. Poortman pensiun pada 1930 dan kembali ke Belanda. Di Leiden, Belanda, Poortman lalu menemukan laporan-laporan para perwira Padri sepanjang 1816-1820 untuk Tuanku Imam Bonjol. Parlindungan mengenal Poortman secara pribadi dan pernah bertemu di Belanda. Poortman mengirimkan bahan-bahan laporan itu saat Parlindungan menulis bukunya.

Parlindungan bukan sejarawan profesional. Caranya menulis pun serampangan. Data yang diramunya itu sering ditampilkan cut and glue atau dinarasikan kembali dengan bahasa campuran: bahasa Indonesia lisan, kadang disisipi kalimat-kalimat Inggris yang panjang. Di sana-sini, ia memberikan komentar yang cara penulisannya seperti seorang ayah yang menerangkan kisah kepada anaknya. Kata ganti yang dipakai untuk dirinya adalah "Daddy". Sedangkan anak laki-lakinya di situ disebut "Sonny Boy". Ketika polemik menghangat, buku itu ditarik dari peredaran. Buku itu pun jadi buku langka. Di sebuah pameran buku di Jakarta, buku itu beberapa tahun lalu bahkan sempat dihargai Rp 1,5 juta.

Buku kedua, Greget Tuanku Rao, ditulis Basyral Hamidy Harahap, terbit September lalu. Basyral adalah Ketua Jurusan Perpustakaan Universitas Indonesia 1965-1967 dan pensiunan pustakawan Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV). Ia ingin mengoreksi beberapa info tentang Tuanku Rao yang dianggapnya kurang tepat. Tapi, pada garis besarnya, ia sepakat dan bahkan menambahkan data kekerasan yang dilakukan Padri. "Buku Parlindungan banyak salahnya, tapi buku itu ada di jalan yang benar."

l l l

Siapakah Parlindungan? Tak banyak yang tahu sosok pengarang ini. Basyral sendiri pada 1974 pernah bertemu dengannya di dekat rumah Hamka di Jakarta. Ia langsung menanyakan kabar polemik antara Parlindungan dan Buya Hamka. Agaknya Parlindungan tak suka. "Saat itu ia langsung mengarahkan tongkatnya yang berkepala gading ke arah dahi saya. Saya kaget, mengelak," kenang Basyral.

Hal ini sedikit terkuak ketika anaknya, Dorpi Parlindungan Siregar, kini 59 tahun, mau bercerita kepada Tempo—dialah anak yang dipanggil Sonny Boy dalam bukunya.

"Ayah saya seorang perwira KNIL. Perjalanan karier ayah saya dimulai ketika pada 1 Oktober 1945, Jenderal Mayor Oerip Soemohardjo mendirikan Tentara Keamanan Rakyat (TKR). Beliau mengumpulkan 17 anak muda di Yogyakarta, di antaranya Soeharto, Ibnu Sutowo, dan ayah saya."

Pada usia 27 tahun, menurut Dorpi, ayahnya memperoleh pangkat letnan kolonel. Sebagai insinyur kimia lulusan Jerman dan Belanda, ayahnya menjadi bawahan dr Willer Hutagalung, dulu dokter pribadi Jenderal Soedirman. Mereka kemudian mengambil bekas pabrik mesiu dan peralatan senjata Belanda, yang lalu menjadi Pindad.

Pada 1960, ayahnya ditahan rezim Soekarno karena dianggap pro-Masyumi. Tempat tahanan ayahnya berpindah-pindah, dan akhirnya menjalani tahanan rumah. Di sanalah, dengan data milik kakeknya dan Residen Poortman, ayahnya menulis buku Tuanku Rao.

Dan yang mengejutkan, bagian terbesar halaman buku ayahnya menceritakan kisah kejahatan algojo Padri bernama Tuanku Lelo, sosok yang tak lain menurut Parlindungan adalah kakek dari kakeknya sendiri. "Jadi ia seperti menceritakan aib keluarga sendiri. Tak banyak penulis yang berani seperti itu," kata Ahmad Fikri dari LKiS. Buku itu awalnya, menurut Dorpi, tidak diperuntukkan bagi umum, tapi bagi anak-anaknya saja. "Sehabis membaca Al-Quran setiap hari, Ayah membacakan cerita ini untuk saya dan adik," kenang Dorpi akan ayahnya yang meninggal pada 1975 itu. Atas desakan teman-temannya, buku itu akhirnya diterbitkan.

Buku itu intinya berisi informasi bagaimana gerakan Wahabi masuk Minang. Waktu itu, tahun 1803, Haji Piobang, Haji Sumanik, dan Haji Miskin kembali ke Minang setelah bermukim di Mekkah lebih dari 12 tahun. Mereka adalah bekas perwira tentara Turki. Mereka mencoba menanamkan mazhab Hambali di Sumatera, menekankan pemurnian Islam.

Gerakan pembersihan agama Islam ini menarik hati seorang mubalig besar bernama Tuanku Nan Rentjeh, yang tengah gundah lantaran di Minang berkembang Islam Syiah. Mereka bersama-sama kemudian mencita-citakan suatu Darul Islam. Piobang membentuk pasukan Padri yang sangat profesional. Pakaian mereka serba putih. Persenjataannya cukup kuat. Mereka, misalnya, menurut Parlindungan, memiliki meriam 88 milimeter bekas milik tentara Napoleon yang dibeli "second hand" di Penang. Dua belas perwira Padri dikirim belajar di Turki. Tuanku Rao, yang aslinya seorang Batak bernama Pongkinangolngolan Sinambela, dikirim untuk belajar taktik kavaleri; Tuanku Tambusai, aslinya bernama Hamonangan Harahap, belajar soal perbentengan. Pasukan Padri juga memiliki pendidikan kemiliteran di Batusangkar.

Sasaran pertama "gerakan kaum putih" ini adalah Istana Pagaruyung, karena istana itu dianggap sebagai boneka Belanda yang merintangi Darul Islam. Pada 1804, ribuan rumah dibakar dan keluarga Istana Pagaruyung dibantai. Untuk cita-cita Darul Islam, pasukan Padri ingin meluaskan agresinya ke luar alam Minangkabau—ke tanah Batak.

Salah satu tamatan pendidikan militer Batusangkar, bernama Peto Syarif Ibnu Pandito Bayanuddin, oleh Tuanku Nan Rentjeh diperintah mencari lokasi yang bakal digunakan sebagai benteng—basis tentara Padri menyerang Tanah Batak. Peto menemukan bekas sarang perampok di rute Minangkabau-Batak bernama Bonjol. Ia mengislamkan kawasan Bonjol, membangun benteng di sana, serta melatih kekuatan 10 ribu tentara. Sejak itu, ia dijuluki Imam Bonjol.

Buku Tuanku Rao ini menjelaskan cukup detail bagaimana persiapan dan kronologi invasi Padri ke Batak Selatan (1816) dan Toba (1818- 1820). Dari etape-etape dan serangan kilat (blitzkrieg), siasat-siasat, sampai notula rapat-rapat para panglima dideskripsikan. Pendiri Padri, Haji Piobang dan Tuanku Imam Bonjol, mengkoordinasi penyebaran pasukan di bawah pimpinan Tuanku Rao, Tuanku Tambusai, Tuanku Lelo, Tuanku Asahan, Tuanku Maga, dan Tuanku Kotapinang.

Toba dikepung dari empat penjuru. Tuanku Asahan dengan kavaleri berkekuatan 11 ribu tentara menyerang dari samping kanan; Kolonel Djagorga Harahap dengan kekuatan 4.000 anggota pasukan dari sayap kiri; Tuanku Maga menusuk dari sisi tengah atas dengan 5.000 anggota pasukan; Tuanku Lelo bersama 9.000 tentaranya merangsek dari sisi tengah bawah. Pada 1820, Sisingamangaraja X, yang bertahan di Benteng Bakkara, akhirnya tewas. Kepala Sisingamangaraja X ditusuk di atas tombak, dipancang di tanah.

Penyerbuan yang paling bengis dilakukan oleh Tuanku Lelo. Parlindungan sendiri menganggap "eyangnya" itu "kriminal perang". Tuanku Lelo bernama asli Idris Nasution. Sosoknya besar, berjanggut hitam, berambut panjang, berombak-ombak. Ia mengenakan baju jubah dan serban yang seluruhnya putih serta suka memakai selempang dan ikat pinggang berwarna merah bertaburan emas—yang dirampasnya di Pagaruyung. Ia dikenal sebagai algojo pembantai, juga maniak seks.

Parlindungan bahkan sampai menyebut eyangnya itu seorang big scoundrel yang memiliki kelakuan binatang. Di tiap kawasan, sang eyang mengumpulkan ratusan wanita, lalu memerkosanya. Di Toba, 14 malam berturut-berturut pasukannya dibiarkan melakukan pesta seks besar-besaran.

Ketika pasukan bergerak meninggalkan Toba, Tuanku Lelo memerintahkan ribuan wanita dikumpulkan di Red Light District di Sigumpar Toba. Dari Sigumpar, mereka digiring berjalan kaki melalui Siborong-borong, Pangaribuan, Silantom, Simangambat, Sipirok, menuju Natal Mandailing. Sesampai di Mandailing, hanya 300 wanita selamat; 900 mati. Yang capek dipenggal.

Kemudian Belanda memutuskan menyerang Padri. Pertempuran pada 1820, menurut Parlindungan, meletus di Benteng Air Bengis. Imam Bonjol turun sendiri. Tuanku Rao tewas di situ. Nah, di pertempuran Air Bengis ini, secara licik Tuanku Lelo melakukan desersi. Melihat Imam Bonjol terdesak, ia lalu memimpin kavalerinya sendiri menuju Angkola dan Sipirok. Ia melanjutkan petualangannya, menjarah, membunuh, melampiaskan nafsu seksualnya. Ia lalu menjadi warlord di Angkola dan Sipirok selama 1822-1833. Ia di sana mendirikan sebuah harem di bentengnya di Padang Sidempuan.

Buku Tuanku Rao hanya sedikit menyinggung peran Tuanku Tambusai. Namun, menurut Basyral, Tuanku Tambusai tak kalah kejam dibanding Tuanku Lelo. "Kebrutalan Tuanku Tambusai terjadi di daerah Padang Lawas, Dolok, dan Barumun. Salah satu kawasan yang paling parah terkena adalah daerah nenek moyang saya, Simanabun," tutur Basyral (lihat "Tambusai dan Pasukan Putih-putih").

l l l

Para sejarawan berbeda pendapat soal kebrutalan ini. "Sebetulnya masuknya Padri ke Batak bukan ekspansi. Kelompok-kelompok musuh Padri saat itu dapat dipukul mundur hingga ke Tapanuli Selatan. Karena itu, mereka bertempur sampai ke daerah tersebut," tutur Dr Mestika Zed, sejarawan dari Universitas Negeri Padang.

"Sebagai sebuah buku sejarah, buku Parlindungan sumbernya sangat lemah. Dokumen Poortman sendiri diragukan. Banyak yang tidak faktual," kata Dr Asvi Warman Adam dari Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia. Hamka bahkan pernah menganggap Tuanku Lelo hanyalah karangan Parlindungan belaka (lihat "Mengenang Sanggahan Hamka"). Memang, sekarang mustahil untuk mengecek semua sumber yang digunakan Parlindungan, karena semua data itu dimusnahkan oleh Parlindungan sendiri.

Dalam bukunya itu, Parlindungan menyebutkan data yang diwariskan ayahnya kepadanya hanya meliputi 20 persen dari yang dimiliki ayahnya. Ia menyaksikan sendiri, pada 1941, ayahnya membakar sisanya sambil bercucuran air mata di tepi Sungai Bah Bolon.

"Daddy tidak mau risiko," katanya kepada anaknya. "Our family secrets yang ketahuan pada outsiders cukup yang terbatas dalam buku ini. No more." "Saya menduga, itu adalah alibi dia, yang sebenarnya tak cukup memiliki data otentik, atau bisa juga ia tak mau sejarawan lain menelitinya," kata J.J. Rizal dari Yayasan Bambu, yang menerbitkan Greget Tuanku Rao.

Akan halnya Dr Gusti Asnan, pengajar Jurusan Sejarah Fakultas Sastra Universitas Andalas, Padang, menganggap tidak semua sumber Belanda yang digunakan Parlindungan mengandung bias. Dari 100 laporan, ada 20-50 persen data yang benar. Menurut dia, historiografi Perang Padri sendiri dimulai pada 1950-an. "Saat itu terjadi dekolonialisasi historiografi Indonesia, termasuk Perang Padri. Demi persatuan dan kesatuan, bagian-bagian miring dari data yang ada, seperti kebrutalan Perang Padri, sengaja tidak disiarkan."

Ia juga melihat gerakan pasukan Padri tak semata-mata bermotif agama, tapi juga ekonomi. Sejak akhir abad ke-18 hingga awal abad ke-19, perkembangan ekonomi di Sumatera Barat memang luar biasa karena booming kopi.

Dr Gusti pernah membaca sebuah kisah tentang saudagar bernama Peto Magik di Pasaman. Ia dikenal sebagai saudagar Padri—bisa dianggap konglomerat. Seorang Belanda bernama Bulhawer yang melakukan kerja sama dengan Peto mengaku tidak melihat sedikit pun gambaran islami padanya. "Kesan yang dilihat Bulhawer, Peto Magik adalah seorang kapitalis. Dan gambaran ini saya rasa juga menggambarkan sebagian besar kaum Padri," ujar Gusti.

Maka, menurut Gusti, ketika daerah kekuasaan di Tanah Datar dan Agam mulai direbut Belanda, kaum Padri pun meluaskan ekspansi ke utara: Bonjol, Pasaman, dan Tapanuli Selatan. Mengapa ke utara? Karena daerah utara memiliki basis kekayaan yang sangat tinggi. Apalagi, dengan menguasai area tersebut, Padri masih dapat melakukan hubungan dengan kaum lain, seperti Aceh, melalui jalur sungai.

Sekalipun mengakui kekerasan yang dilakukan Padri, sebagian orang memandang dari sudut berbeda. "Soalnya saat itu kan tidak ada HAM," kata sejarawan Taufik Abdullah.

Basyral sendiri melihat Imam Bonjol mengetahui segala perampokan, pemerkosaan, dan mutilasi yang dilakukan perwira-perwiranya. "Mustahil Imam Bonjol tak tahu. Ia kan komandan," kata Basyral.

Tapi Taufik Abdullah tak sependapat. Menurut dia, kekerasan di awal gerakan Padri bukan tanggung jawab Tuanku Imam Bonjol. Saat gerakan Padri masih radikal di awal, Tuanku Imam Bonjol masih muda dan baru menjabat sebagai asisten Tuanku Bandaro, salah satu pemimpin gerakan Padri saat itu.

"Buat saya, pencabutan gelar pahlawan itu nonsens. Justru di bawah pimpinan Tuanku Imam Bonjol pasukan Padri lebih menitikberatkan serangan pada pihak Belanda," kata Taufik.

Menurut Taufik, keliru jika melihat sosok Imam Bonjol dalam Padri disamakan dengan Diponegoro. "Diponegoro merupakan pemimpin tunggal, sementara gerakan Padri merupakan gerakan sosial kolektif, dengan banyak pemimpin," katanya.

Taufik mengatakan, bahkan, Tuanku Imam Bonjol sempat mengirim empat anak buahnya ke Mekkah untuk naik haji, termasuk Tuanku Tambusai. Tujuannya untuk melihat kondisi Islam di Mekkah. Ternyata Islam saat itu jauh lebih moderat. Sehingga, ketika kembali ke Minang, Tuanku Tambusai pun menjadi lebih moderat. Sekembali dari Mekkah, seperti disebut dalam Tuanku Rao, ia pun menyesal melihat dengan mata kepala sendiri bagaimana wanita-wanita ditawan oleh pasukan Tuanku Lelo.

Menurut Taufik, adat basandi syarak justru mengemuka di bawah kepemimpinan Tuanku Imam Bonjol. Imam Bonjol wafat pada usia 93 tahun di Manado, pada 1864. Tak banyak orang yang tahu, ia meninggalkan sebuah "catatan harian" (lihat "Dari Catatan Harian Bonjol").

Seno Joko Suyono, Sita Planasari

Dua Jilid Terra Incognita

Tempo - Edisi. 34/XXXVI/15 - 21 Oktober 2007

Dua buku ekologi Papua diterbitkan, menggenapi lima seri alam Indonesia. Hanya menyingkap sebagian kekayaan Papua.

The Ecology of Papua
Editor: Andrew J. Marshall, Bruce M. Beehler
Penerbit: Periplus International, 2007 Tebal: 1.476 halaman (2 volume)

Sampai pertengahan abad lalu, para ilmuwan hayati dunia meyakini Papua sebagai satu-satunya terra incognita—dunia tak dikenal—yang terbesar dan masih tersisa. Bahkan, menurut G.S. Hope, peneliti dari Australia, sampai pertengahan 1976, hanya segelintir peneliti yang dengan izin khusus bisa memasuki kawasan ini.

Papua yang dekat, tapi begitu jauh dari jangkauan, merupakan persoalan kontemporer kita. Dan keadaan miris ini berlangsung hingga akhir September lalu—ketika dua volume Ecology of Papua, tebalnya mencapai 1.476 halaman, diterbitkan. Sebuah buku yang mencoba mencatat keadaan geografis serta kekayaan hewani dan nabati subkontinen yang menakjubkan itu. Patut pula dicatat, semua ini jadi lebih terbuka setelah 86 orang pakar hayati dan taksonomi bergerak sepuluh tahun silam, seraya mengumpulkan keanekaragaman hayati tanah Papua.

Ya, Ecology of Papua adalah hasil jerih payah yang panjang yang membuahkan hasil. Lihatlah bagaimana buku ini menggambarkan bahwa sebuah pohon roboh bisa dihuni oleh 173 jenis lumut. Tapi gambaran Papua yang tertangkap dalam buku ini tentu saja lebih dari itu. Ecology of Papua menyampaikan bahwa para pakar itu menjumpai 20-25 ribu spesies tanaman berpembuluh, dan sekitar 60-90 persen merupakan endemik Papua. Ada catatan istimewa tentang paku-pakuan yang meliputi sekitar 2.000 spesies; 30 persen di antaranya berada di atas ketinggian 4.000 meter dari permukaan laut.

Dari dunia nabati, kita juga bisa mendapatkan gambaran kekayaan anggrek Papua—plus Papua Nugini. Mereka menyimpan sekitar 2.800 spesies anggrek atau sekitar 11 persen dari anggrek dunia. Dengan kata lain, merekalah yang terkaya kedua, setelah Pegunungan Andes di Amerika Selatan.

Di luar kekayaan nabati, Papua punya kekayaan lain. Di pulau itu, para pakar menemukan antara lain 37.643 spesies vertebrata atau sekitar 6,5 persen dari binatang bertulang belakang di dunia. Di antaranya terdapat 600 spesies burung, termasuk 25 spesies cenderawasih. Mereka memperkirakan Papua memiliki 300-500 ribu spesies vertebrata. Serangga saja jumlahnya ditaksir 100 ribu spesies dan baru sebagian kecil yang dikatalogkan. Dengan jumlah flora dan fauna yang melimpah itu pun, menurut Direktur Pusat Penelitian Biologi Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia Dedy Darnaedi, "Mungkin baru sebagian kecil kekayaan hayati Papua yang bisa diungkap."

Hewan Papua juga merupakan campuran hewan Benua Asia dan Australia. Ada satu hal yang menarik dicatat dari buku ini: temuan mereka tentang kanguru pohon. Dan ini membuktikan bahwa spesies itu belum punah. Sebagaimana diketahui, kanguru pohon yang hanya hidup di Papua itu tidak pernah ditemukan selama 90 tahun terakhir. Dilengkapi ratusan foto, gambar, dan peta, Ecology of Papua tak pelak lagi bisa menjadi rujukan untuk hal-hal yang sangat praktis. Misalnya zonasi dalam pengelolaan sumber alam. Dan kita mungkin masih ingat rencana pembangunan proyek listrik tenaga air Mamberamo dua-tiga tahun lalu—rencana yang terpaksa terhenti lantaran lokasinya masih masuk zona inti yang tidak boleh disentuh oleh pemanfaatan manusia.

Apa pun, yang jelas, terbitnya buku ekologi Papua ini menambah khazanah literatur ekologi Indonesia, yakni melengkapi lima seri ekologi Indonesia yang sudah ada: ekologi Sumatera, Kalimantan, Jawa dan Bali, Sulawesi, Nusa Tenggara dan Maluku, serta satu seri ekologi laut Indonesia.

I G.G. Maha Adi

Just a Prude? Feminism, Pornography, and Men’s Responsibility

By Robert Jensen
Original URL

I want to begin by coming out: I am a man. More specifically, I am a white man. That’s important because it suggest two things regarding what I know about the world. First, I know some things that women don’t know about men. By definition, women are never in all-male spaces. Women don’t directly experience what men say about them when there are no women around. I do, and that means I know some things that women don’t.

Being a man also means there’s a lot I don’t know, that I have had to learn—and have to keep learning—from women and a feminist movement. In these remarks, I’m going to speak about the feminist critique of pornography and the feminist anti-pornography movement, from which I have learned much. But in doing that, I should acknowledge the irony of a man talking to a group of mostly women about the feminist analysis of pornography. I need to make it clear that I am not speaking for women. Instead, I see my role as speaking with women, and with the ultimate goal of speaking about the insights of this critique to men.

But even that is complicated, of course, because women do not speak with one voice about pornography, nor any other issue. There are pro-pornography women who would contest much of what I have to say. All I can do is acknowledge the women who have helped me come to understand the issue, tell the truth as I see it, and ask men to take seriously this critique of the domination/subordination dynamic that is so common in pornography and, indeed, in the world.

The minute one begins to make such a critique, one can expect this response: Feminists who critique pornography are really just prudes at heart. Pornography’s opponents, we are told, are afraid of sex. In one sense, that’s true. I am afraid of sex, of a certain kind. I’m afraid of much of the sex commonly presented in contemporary mass-marketed pornography. I am afraid of sex that is structured on a dynamic of domination and subordination. I am afraid of the sex in pornography that has become so routinely harsh that men typically cannot see the brutality of it thorough their erections and orgasms. I’m not against sex or sexual pleasure. I’m against the kind of sex that is routinely presented in contemporary pornography. I’m against that kind of sex because it hurts people in the world today, and it helps constructs a world in which people—primarily the most vulnerable people, women and children, both girls and boys—will continue to be hurt.

 

Pornographic sex

Let me describe one kind of sex that I’m afraid of. This is a scene from the film Gag Factor #10 released by J.M. Productions, which boasts that it pushes the envelope in pornography. The company website brags that this gag series, which is going on #17 as of March 2005, offers ‘The best throatfucking ever lensed.’ If you want a sample, the website has pictures and short video clips, under the heading ‘this week’s victim,’ with the promise ‘new whores degraded every Wednesday.’

In one of the 10 scenes from Gag Factor #10, released in 2002, a nagging wife is haranguing her husband and asking why he is so lazy. ‘Why can’t you do anything?’ she asks, going on to insult his intelligence and criticize him because he doesn’t read. She asks him if he even can read, and then suggests Henry Miller, from which she starts to read. The camera focuses on her mouth as she reads, then cuts to his eyes, which look increasingly angry. The film cuts to the woman on her knees as he yells, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ He grabs her hair and thrusts his penis into her mouth. From this point on, we hear almost exclusively from him: ‘Your teeth feel good you little bitch. Eat that dick. … Are you OK? Are you crying? I love you. I fucking love you. Open that mouth.’ He slaps her mouth with his penis. ‘Open wide. Choke. Open wider, wider. You’re so good baby. Put your mouth on my balls. You treat me so fucking good. That’s why I keep you here. Give me the eyes [meaning, look up at me] while I gag you. … Do you like to gag? Beg for it. Say please. Say please gag me some more. … Your throat is so good.’ At this point, she re-enters the conversation. She says, ‘Keep going.’ He says, ‘Good, that’s the fucking answer I was looking for.’ He then flips her over, putting her on the table with her head hanging over edge. She gags several times when he thrusts into her mouth. He holds her by the cheeks, spreading her face apart. She gags but he doesn’t stop. He allows her to catch her breath. Her face is unexpressive, almost frozen. ‘I want those tears to come out again, baby. I want to choke the shit out of you,’ he says. He grabs her hair and drives his penis into her mouth. He says: ‘Suck that dick. Convulse. I want to see your eyes roll back in your fucking head. Yes, I love it.’ He asks her if she loves it; she says yes. He ejaculates into her mouth and says, ‘Spit that cum out. I can’t hear you. What did you say? Don’t talk with your mouth full.’ He walks away and says ‘Don’t give me any more shit.’

Gag Factor is a type of ‘gonzo’ pornography, which is the roughest form available in the mainstream pornography shops and also the fastest growing genre. This scene is more overtly misogynistic than some, but it is not idiosyncratic. The sex and the language in what the industry calls ‘features’ typically is not as rough, though the message is the same: Women are for sex, and women like sex this way.

Empathy

I am afraid of the sex I just described to you. I’m worried about the physical and emotional well-being of the woman in that scene. I’m afraid of the way in which the men who use that pornography will act in their own lives, toward women in their lives. I am afraid of the world that such sex helps to create. I am afraid, and you should be, too.

If anyone wants to dismiss these concerns with the tired old phrases ‘to each his own’ and ‘as long as they are consenting adults’—that is, if you want to ignore the reality and complexity of the world in which we live—I can’t stop you. But I can tell you that if you do that, you are abandoning minimal standards of political and moral responsibility, and you become partially responsible for the injuries done as a result of a system you refuse to confront. I will defend that conclusion in a moment. But first, I want to make sure we come to terms with the scene I just described. We live in a world in which a woman can be aggressively ‘throat fucked’ to facilitate the masturbation of men. We all live in that world. We all live with that woman in Gag Factor #10. She is one of us. She is a person. She has hopes and dreams and desires of her own. We all live with that woman who finds herself making a living by being filmed in another kind of gonzo film called a Blow Bang, in which a woman has oral sex in similar fashion with more than one man.

In one of these films, Blow Bang #4, released in 2001, a young woman dressed as a cheerleader is surrounded by six men. For about seven minutes, ‘Dynamite’ (the name she gives on tape) methodically moves from man to man while they offer insults such as ‘you little cheerleading slut.’ For another minute and a half, she sits upside down on a couch, her head hanging over the edge, while men thrust into her mouth, causing her to gag. She strikes the pose of the bad girl to the end. ‘You like coming on my pretty little face, don’t you,’ she says, as they ejaculate on her face and in her mouth for the final two minutes of the scene. Five men have finished. The sixth steps up. As she waits for him to ejaculate onto her face, now covered with semen, she closes her eyes tightly and grimaces. For a moment, her face changes; it is difficult to read her emotions, but it appears she may cry. After the last man, number six, ejaculates, she regains her composure and smiles. Then the narrator off camera hands her the pom-pom she had been holding at the beginning of the tape and says, ‘Here’s your little cum mop, sweetheart—mop up.’ She buries her face in the pom-pom and the scene ends. Dynamite is one of us. She is a person. She has hopes and dreams and desires of her own.

The women in the movement to end men’s violence have helped society understand that we have to empathize with the victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. We also need to extend that empathy to the women in pornography and prostitution. Now we are going to practice empathy, that most fundamental of human qualities. I want us to think of that scene with Dynamite. One woman and six men. After she has performed oral sex on six men, after six men have thrust their penises into her throat to the point of gagging, after six men have ejaculated onto her, the camera is turned off. Think not about the sex acts but about the moment when the camera shuts off. The men walk away. Someone throws her a towel. She has to clean the semen of six strangers off her face and body and from her hair. This woman, who is a person, who is one of us, who has hopes and dreams and desires of her own, cleans herself off.

Now, I want you to imagine that the woman in that scene is your child. I want you to think about how you would feel if the woman being handed a towel to wipe off the semen of six men were your child, someone you had raised and loved and cared for. How does that feel? Then imagine that woman is the child of your best friend, or of your neighbor, or of someone you work with. Then imagine that women is the child of someone you have never met and never will meet. Imagine that woman is just a person, one of us, with hopes and dreams and desires of her own. Forget about whether or not she is your child. She is a person; she is one of us. Imagine that you are the one handing her the towel. Look into her eyes. We need to dare to look into her eyes and try to understand what she might be feeling. You can’t know for sure what she is feeling. But try to imagine how you would feel if it were you.We are constantly told pornography is about fantasies. Those scenes I just described are not fantasy. They are real. They happened. They happened to those women. Those women are not a fantasy. They are people. They are just like us.

And after those scenes were put on videotape, the films were sold and rented to thousands of men who took it home, put it into VCRs or DVD players, and masturbated to orgasm. That also is real. Men fantasize when they masturbate, but the men who are masturbating are not a fantasy. Thousands of men have climaxed to the recording of those women being aggressively ‘throat fucked.’ Those orgasms happened in the real world. Those men’s sexual pleasure was being conditioned to images of women being aggressively ‘throat fucked,’ in the real world. Those specific women and those specific men are part of the world we live in. And that idea of what a woman is, and that idea of what’s men’s sexuality is—those ideas are also part of the world we live in. None of it is a fantasy. All of it is as real as we are.

So, I want to pose a simple question: What do we owe those women? What do we owe Dynamite? What is our responsibility to her, to her hopes and dreams and Choices, hers and ours?

At this point, some will think: ‘Whatever you or I may think of those activities, she chose to do that. She’s an adult. Who are we to condemn her choice?’ I agree; we shouldn’t condemn her choice, and we shouldn’t condemn her. We should empathize with her. And we should think not just about her choice abut about the choices of the men who pay for the tape and create the demand for aggressive ‘throat fucking.’ From research and the testimony of women who have been prostituted and used in pornography, we know that childhood sexual assault (which often leads victims to see their value in the world primarily as the ability to provide sexual pleasure for men) and economic hardship (a lack of meaningful employment choices at a livable wage) are key factors in many women’s decisions to enter the sex industry. We know how women in the sex industry—not all, but many—routinely dissociate to cope with what they do. We know that in one study of 130 street prostitutes, 68 percent met the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. We know that any meaningful discussion of choice can’t be restricted to the single moment when a woman decides to allow herself to be sold sexually, but must include all the background conditions that affect not only the objective choices she faces but her subjective assessment of those choices. What matters is not just what is available but how she perceives herself in relation to what is available. We know that in anyone’s life, completely free choices are rare, that every choice is made under some mix of constraint and opportunity.

I know, for instance, that in my large lecture classes when I give a multiple-choice exam, virtually none of the students believes that such exams are an accurate or meaningful way of measuring their learning. I know that many of them find such exams to be ridiculous, as do I. But all of my students ‘choose’ to take a test they know to be virtually useless (except for the data it provides me in a large cattle-call class so that I can assign grades at the end of the term). They choose to take that exam because if they chose not to—no matter how sensible and compelling their analysis of the exam’s flaws—they will not pass the course, and they will be denied something that is important to them, a college diploma. They could choose to reject the institution, and thereby give up that asset, but it would cost them. Their choice is free, but it is not made under conditions of complete freedom, given their limited power in the system. So, let us not be naïve about choice.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the specific woman who was used in that aggressive ‘throat fucking’ movie made a completely free and meaningful choice to participate, with absolutely no constraints on her. That could be the case, but it does not change the fact that many women in the industry choose under dramatic limitations. And so long as the industry is profitable and a large number of women are needed to make such films, it is certain that some number of those women will be choosing under conditions that render the concept of ‘free choice’ virtually meaningless. When a man buys or rents a videotape or DVD, he is creating the demand for pornography that will lead to some number of women being hurt, psychologically and/or physically. That is a fact in the world in which we live. So, men’s choices to buy or rent pornography are complicated by two realities. First, at any given moment, the consumer has no reliable way to judge which women are participating in the industry as a result of a meaningfully free choice. And second, even if the men consuming pornography could make such a determination about specific women in specific films, the demand for pornography that their purchase creates ensures that some women will be hurt. Given that conclusion, there is only one decision that men who claim to have even minimal standards of moral and political responsibility can make: They must not buy or rent pornography. Let me restate that in a personal way: You and I must not buy or rent pornography. You and I must not create the demand that creates the industry that creates a world in which vulnerable people will be hurt.

If we buy or rent pornography, we bear some responsibility for that world. We can try to pretend we don’t know that, but we can’t avoid that responsibility.

Justice and self-interest

That’s the argument from justice. It’s an argument that men, and the women who buy or rent pornography, should take seriously unless they want to abandon minimal moral and political standards. But it is fairly obvious that arguments from justice do not always move people who are in positions of power and privilege. Maybe such arguments from justice should be enough to change people, but they often aren’t. So, arguments from self-interest are important, too.

Men should stop buying and renting pornography because it is the right thing to do. They also should do it because it is in their self-interest. To explain that, I want to tell a story from my experience at the 2005 convention of the pornography industry, the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, which I attended as part of a team working on a documentary film called Fantasies’ Matter. At the end of our first day filming at the convention, the film’s director/editor, Miguel Picker, and I walked out of the Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas without saying much. We had just spent the better part of the day together on the exhibition floor, which featured about 300 booths visited by thousands of people. Miguel had been behind the camera, and I had been interviewing pornography performers, producers, and fans about why they make, distribute, and consume sexually explicit media.

We had spent the day surrounded by images of women being presented and penetrated for the sexual pleasure of men. All around were pictures and posters, screens running endless porn loops, and display tables of dildos and sex dolls. I had listened to young men tell me that pornography had taught them a lot about what women really want sexually. I had listened to a pornography producer tell me that he thinks anal sex is popular in pornography because men like to think about fucking their wives and girlfriends in the ass to pay them back for being bitchy. And I interviewed the producer who takes great pride that his Gag Factor series was the first to feature exclusively aggressive ‘throat fucking.’ Miguel and I had spent the day surrounded by sex for sale, immersed in the predictable consequence of the collision of capitalism and patriarchy. We had talked to dozens of people for whom the process of buying and selling women for sex is routine. When that day was over, we walked silently from the convention center to the hotel. The first thing I said was, ‘I need a drink.’

I don’t want to feign naivete. As a child and young adult, I used pornography in fairly typical fashion. I have been working on the issue of pornography since 1988. I have talked to a lot of people about pornography, and in very short and controlled doses, I have watched enough of it to understand how corrosive it is to our individual and collective humanity. But I had never been to the industry convention before; I had always found a reason to avoid it. As Miguel and I left the hall, I understood why. ‘I need a drink,’ I said, and we stopped at the nearest hotel bar (which didn’t take long, given how many bars there are in a Las Vegas hotel). I sat down with a glass of wine. Miguel and I started to talk, searching for some way to articulate what we had just experienced, what we felt. But all I could do was cry.

It’s not that I had seen anything on the convention floor that I had never seen. It’s not that I had heard something significantly new or different from the people I had interviewed. It’s not that I had had some sort of epiphany about the meaning of pornography. It’s just that in that moment, the reality of the industry, of the products the industry produces, and the way in which they are used—it all came crashing down on me. My defenses were inadequate to combat a simple fact: The pornographers have won. In the short term, the efforts of the feminists who put forward the critique of pornography, the sex industry, and men’s violence have failed. The pornographers, for the time being, have won. The arguments from justice lost. The pornographers not only are thriving, but are more mainstream and normalized than ever. They can fill up a Las Vegas convention center, with the dominant culture paying no more notice than it would to the annual boat show.

And as the industry has become more normalized, paradoxically, the content of their films becomes ever crueler and more overtly degrading to women. The industry talk is dominated by talk of how to push it even further. Make it nastier. Make it, in the terms of one industry observer, ‘brutal and real.’ That’s the way the pornographers and the customers like it: Brutal. Because brutal is real. And real sells. It is real, and that’s at the heart of the sadness. What was reflected on the convention floor was not just a truth about pornography, but a truth about gender and sex and power in contemporary culture, as well as a truth about the brutality of capitalism. At the end of that day, I was more aware than ever that the feminist critique of pornography is not simply a critique of pornography but about the routine way we are trained to be sexual, about the eroticization of domination and subordination. Feminism, as I learned it, is a full-bore attack on systems of illegitimate authority, of which male dominance is one, along with white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism.

And at that moment, all I could do was cry. It was a selfish indulgence, because at that moment, my tears were not for the women who are used and discarded by the industry, or the women who will be forced into sex they don’t want by the men in their lives who use pornography. The tears were not for girls and young women who bury their own needs and desires to become sexually what men want them to be. I wish I could honestly say that was front and center in my mind and heart at that moment. But the truth is that my tears at that moment were for myself. Those tears came because I realized, in a more visceral way than ever, that the pornographers have won and they are helping to construct a world that is not only dangerous for women and children, but also one in which I have fewer and fewer places to turn as a man. Fewer places to walk and talk and breathe that haven’t been colonized and pornographized. As I sat that, all I could say to Miguel was, ‘I don’t want live in this world.’ I think at that moment Miguel didn’t quite no what to make of my reaction. He was nice to me, but he must have thought I was going a bit over the top. I don’t blame him; I was a bit over the top. After all, we were there to make a documentary film about the industry, not live out a melodrama about my angst in a Las Vegas hotel bar.

The next day Miguel and I hit the convention floor again. At the end of that day, as we walked away, I made the same request. We sat at the same bar. I had another glass of wine and cried again. Miguel, I think, was glad it was the last day. So was I.

Two days after we left Las Vegas, Miguel called me from New York. This time he was crying. He told me that he had just come to his editing and recording studio and had put on some music. Miguel is not only a director and editor, but a very talented musician. He’s one of those people who understand the world through music. He told me that he had put on music that he finds particularly beautiful, and then the floodgates opened. ‘I understand what you meant in the bar,’ he said, speaking through his own tears.

I tell that story not to glorify two sensitive new-age men. Miguel actually is a sensitive person, though not very new-age. I’m not new-age, and I don’t feel particularly sensitive these days. I feel harsh and mean. I feel angry most of the time. I spend most of my days on political organizing. I don’t write poetry. I’m from North Dakota. People from North Dakota don’t write a lot of poetry. We shovel snow. I tell that story because it’s never been clearer to me that in the struggle over pornography, the sex industry, and men’s violence, it is not enough to be right and to make arguments solely about justice. The central insights of the feminist critique of pornography are, I believe, right. I think it is the most compelling way to understand the issue. If anything, that critique of pornography is truer today than it was when the founding mothers of the movement first articulated it in the late 1970s. But we live in a society in which the pornographers have won, in the short term. Their products are more widely accepted and available than ever. Much of the culture has bought the ‘pornography is liberation’ and ‘pornography is freedom’ lines. To the degree that an anti-pornography position can get traction in the dominant culture, it comes from right-wing groups that have co-opted the language of feminism—the political language of harm—as a cover for a regressive moralism that rejects the values of feminism. Those same right-wing groups typically resist a critique of the capitalist commodification of everything, an analysis crucial to understanding pornography.

At this moment, being right is not enough. We have to find ways to tap into the humanity of people, a humanity that is systematically diminished and obscured by capitalism and patriarchy, as well as the explicit racism in pornography. That’s the argument from self-interest that men must hear. Men get something very concrete from pornography: They get orgasms. For most men, it’s an extremely effective way to gain physical pleasure. But it comes at a cost, and the cost is our own humanity. To be a man in this sense is to surrender some part of your humanity. I speak from experience here: It’s a bad trade-off. No orgasm is worth that much. That’s why the experience that Miguel and I had on the floor is important. On that day, the concentrated inhumanity of the pornographic world overwhelmed us. I went onto the convention floor knowing a lot about pornography. I left the floor feeling it more deeply than ever before. We know a lot about the pornography industry and its effects. We know there is a compelling critique. We have to be willing to feel it, as well.

Feeling and thinking our way forward, together

I realize that this task is difficult: We have to help men understand the depravity of their own pleasure. We have to make them feel that sense of desperation, articulating it in a way that leads people to action not paralysis, hope not despair, resistance not capitulation. We have to make them face what pornography does to us all, men and women. For men, we have to make them face that to be a pornography user is to be a john, to be someone who is willing to buy women for sex, someone who sees sex as a commodity, someone who has traded his own humanity for an orgasm.

Those realities are not easy for women to face either. I can’t speak for women, of course, but I assume that it is not easy to be a woman and understand how pornography portrays women and their sexuality, and to know that men like it. Put bluntly, in pornography, women are reduced to three holes and two hands. In pornography, women are reduced to the parts of their bodies that can sexually stimulate men. Women are not really sex-objects (which at least implies they are human) but more fuck-objects, simply things to be penetrated. I imagine that is not an easy thing to face when you are faced with pornography all around you. I imagine it is not easy to realize that this is the world in which women learned to be sexual.

Men have some difficult realities to face. So do women. I understand how painful those realities can be, because I have struggled, and continue to struggle, with them, and I have talked to many other people about their struggles. Sometimes I feel like I know too much. Sometimes I wish that I didn’t have all these pictures in my head. Sometimes I wish I had never heard the stories of women’s pain that I have heard. But I never wish I were back where I was 20 years ago, because 20 years ago I also was in pain, albeit a very different kind. In some ways, that old pain was easier to mask, but it was impossible to escape. This newer pain might be more intense at times, but it is a necessary part of the process that has changed my life for the better. I don’t really like it, but I accept the need for it, because this pain can lead somewhere. It can lead to a long and difficult, but ultimately rewarding, process of trying to revision sexuality. It can lead to involvement in a political movement to change the world that, even if not successful in the short term, holds out the hope for not just personal but societal transformation. Confronting the violence and pain of the world, both outside and inside me, has led me to meet many amazing people whose friendship and love has sustained me through difficult times.

When we talk like this, one of the predictable rejoinders is that we are trying to impose strict sexual rules on others. As one prominent pro-pornography feminist scholar, Linda Williams, put it in a recent interview, ‘Really, who are anti-pornography activists to tell us where our sexual imaginations should go?’ I agree. No one can tell others where their sexual imaginations should go. Imaginations are unruly and notoriously resistant to attempts at control. But our imaginations come from somewhere. Our imaginations may be internal in some ways, but they are influenced by external forces. Can we not have a conversation about those influences? Are we so fragile that our sexual imaginations can’t stand up to honest human conversation? It seems that pro-pornography forces live with their own fear of sex, the fear of being accountable for their imaginations and actions. The defenses of pornography typically revert to the most superficial kind of liberal individualism that shuts off people from others, ignores the predictable harms of a profit-seeking industry that has little concern for people, and ignores the way in which we all collectively construct the culture in which we live. I have no interest in telling people where there sexual imaginations must end up. But I would like to be part of a conversation about the direction in which we think our sexual imaginations can move.

So, I am afraid of the sex that pornography creates because it hurts people. But I am not afraid of talking about an alternative to the cruelty and brutality of the pornography industry. I need that conversation. I can’t do this on my own. I’m not smart enough and I’m not strong enough. I need help. I know the direction I want to move, but I stumble on the way. I have made mistakes that have hurt others and hurt myself. I can correct some of those mistakes on my own, but none of us can do this completely on our own. So, can we start talking about how to move our sexual imaginations toward respect, toward empathy, toward connections based on equality not domination? Can we give up enough of our fear of the unknown to try to imagine together what that might look like?

This culture tends to talk about sex in terms of heat: Who’s hot, what kind of sex is hot. What if we shifted to a language of light? Sex not as something that produces heat, but something that shines light. Can we talk about moving toward the light? The light that is inside me and inside you. The same light that is inside Dynamite. I want to live in a world in which Dynamite can tell us her name, not the pornographers’ name. I want to live in a world in which we hear her about her hopes and dreams and desires, not the pornographers’. I want to live in that world not just for her sake but for my own, because it is that world in which I can find my own authentic hopes and dreams and desires.

We have given the pornographers far too much power to construct our sexual imaginations. It is our world, not theirs. It is our world to take back. This is not just about taking back the night, but taking back the whole day, taking back the culture’s imagination, taking back the way we see men and women and sex. If we do not, I fear that the light inside us will dim. Our hopes and dreams will be increasingly shaped by the pornographers. And our hopes for a desire based on equality, maybe even the dream of equality, may not survive. I am afraid of that.

We all need to work to make sure that does not happen. For Dynamite’s sake. For your own. For all of us.
——————————————-
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, a founding member of the Robert Nowar Collective, and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (Routledge) and author of Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

“Green and Red Revolution”

By Tom O'Lincoln

Original URL

Reviews:

• John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000);
• Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2004);
• Paul Roberts, The End of Oil: The Decline of the Petroleum Economy and the Rise of a New Energy Order (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).

Last year I walked in Sumatran rainforests. It was a delight, and yet … There were almost no birds, because people steal the eggs to scratch a living. Illegal logging is chronic, and before being exported to the West, the logs travel to a plywood factory south of the provincial capital of Padang. The factory employs poor people for paltry wages. It squats menacingly at the top of beautiful Bungus Bay, where fisherfolk say pollution has reduced their catches by 90 percent. Men drag long nets across the bay, but all they catch is bits of wood.

It gets worse. This is one of the places where forest-clearing fires got out of hand in 1997 and blanketed the region with dark haze; the haze blocked the sunlight which in turn killed the coral reefs. So the tourists stay away, leading to more economic desperation, putting more pressure on the forests, the sea, the air. And we are only talking about one region of economically and ecologically miserable Indonesia, which is just one part of a crisis-ridden planet. How can we can survive, and will it mean radical changes in the way we live?

These three titles tell us what we’re up against. Limits to Growth, an update of the Club of Rome forecasts, audits just how badly the planet is damaged, offeirng scenarios for coming decades. The End of Oil is a racy account of the energy business and its social and environmental impacts. Marx’s Ecology has been with us since 2000, an authoritative guide to the old man’s ‘green’ thinking.

 
Limits to Growth

Some people dismiss the ‘Club of Rome’ as panic merchants. The right wing Cato Institute remembers their 1972 report this way:
The Club of Rome had just released its primal scream, Limits to Growth, which reported that the earth was rapidly running out of everything. The most famous declinist of the era, biologist Paul Ehrlich, had appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to fill Americans with fear of impending world famine and make gloomy prognostications, such as ‘If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.’

Seven years ago, by contrast, energy banker Matthew R Simmons reviewed the same report and remarked that ‘for a work that has been derisively attacked by so many energy economists, a group whose own forecasting record has not stood the test of time very well, there was nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely invalidated.’

My reaction to the new volume is more like Simmons’. Everything in the new book seems to add up; nothing seems unreasonable. The authors don’t claim to predict the future. But they offer us some credible projections on which to base our own judgements. The outlook is grim:

It is a sad fact that humanity has largely squandered the past thirty years in futile debates and well-intentioned, but half-hearted responses to the global ecological challenge. We do not have another thirty years to dither. Much will have to change if the ongoing overshoot is not to be followed by collapse during the twenty-first century. (p. xvi)

The authors begin their main argument with a chapter on ‘exponential growth’. This might suggest a clash with Foster’s book, since Marx cut his theoretical teeth on demolishing Malthus’ theories, which said population must grow exponentially and therefore outstrip food supply. Marx’s reply was that different social contexts create very different population dynamics. Whereas Malthus blamed the poor for their own suffering; Marx blamed capitalist society.

After careful reading, I don’t think Limits to Growth is Malthusian in the strict sense. The authors’ charts do show exponential growth in population and industrial production (which may exhaust resources) and they’re certainly worried about population; but they also emphasize the social context:

… in pre-industrial societies both fertility and mortality are high, and population growth is slow. As nutrition and health services improve, death rates fall. Birthrates lag by a generation or two, opening a gap between fertility and mortality that produces rapid population growth. Finally, as lives and lifestyles evolve into the patterns of a fully industrial society, birthrates fall …(p.31)

So they recognize that ‘population problems’ are social problems. In fact, declining fertility is causing angst in 60-odd countries right now – which is one reason the United Nations expects the global population to plateau at around at 9 billion. The problem, the Limits to Growth team would still insist, is that the demands of 9 billion people may be enough to exhaust the planet.

The book asks just how serious is the depletion of sources of materials, taken together with the destruction or overwhelming of the sinks that absorb pollution. Forests, for example, are both sources and sinks: if you burn them you generate energy and release carbon, and at the same time you lose their ability to absorb the CO2 generated by industry and cars. The book traces demands on sources and sinks, considers the costs to humans, and throws up scenarios. These are complex, yet the lay reader won’t be daunted, because the authors take us through them in easy-to-read installments while beginning to suggest solutions.

Scenario One is the unlikely possibility of ‘business as usual’. If we do nothing differently, human welfare goes downhill fairly sharply in a decade or two. Under Scenario Two, if resources are more plentiful than we think, we may postpone the evil day for 20 years, but then the environmental costs catch up with us.

Later scenarios factor in pollution control technology, land yield enhancement, land erosion protection, resource efficiency technology. None makes the dilemma go away entirely. However, we can still achieve a reasonable lifestyle for all of humanity, if we act now. Along what lines? The headline answers in Limits to Growth are that we need to control population, control industrial production, and change the way we live. I think all three are deeply problematic.

Population control might seem like common sense. If there are less shoppers in Safeway, they will throw away fewer plastic bags; fewer people to keep warm in winter would mean less demand for energy. But when you look deeper, ugly problems arise. Thus the authors invite underdeveloped countries to take the lead in population reduction, because at least it’s an area where they can readily contribute. But impoverished third world people put less pressure on the planet per head than we ‘consumerist’ westerners do. India’s per capita ‘ecological footprint’ is less than 8% of the USA’s, so why is it up to Indians to have fewer babies? It’s not hard to see racist dangers along this path. The spectre of Malthus returns.

Moreover reactionary social policies are linked to reducing fertility, from forced sterilisation in India to China’s repressive one-child limit. To accept these policies legitimises the regimes that use them, yet reactionary regimes are more likely to take a slash-and-burn approach to the environment. In addition to infanticide and gender imbalance, the US National Intelligence Council reports another grim irony of China’s one-child policy: the Chinese are now madly industrialising and polluting ‘in a race to see if they can get rich before they get old. If economic growth cannot provide the capital to support its growing elderly population, China will be hard pressed to support its needs once the "one-child" generation dominates the labour market.’

Talk of reining in industrial production has its dangers too, seeming as it does to threaten workers’ jobs, which only opens up opportunities for the likes of John Howard to divide our side of politics. But there are ways to ensure both prosperity and environmental sustainability, as the authors emphasise: ‘The good news is that current high rates of throughput are not necessary to support a decent standard of living for all the world’s people.’ (p. 9, emphasis in original). How can do we do that? We’ll see a bit later.

The End of Oil?

Limits to Growth is a sober policy document. Paul Roberts’ The End of Oil offers something much racier. He has toured the planet, talking to Azerbaijani managers, Saudi ministers and renewable energy technologists, asking whether the world will run out of petroleum.

It’s not a new topic. In 1956 geophysicist M. King Hubbert predicted American oil production would peak in the early 1970s. Though derided by experts, he was right. Will the world as a whole reach ‘Hubbert’s peak’, and if so when? Harris thinks non-OPEC oil will peak by around 2015, and western rulers are nervous about depending on OPEC, particularly after the 2005 oil price spike.

No wonder Washington moved to seize Iraqi oilfields.. Roberts calls the 1991 Gulf War ‘the first military conflict in history that was entirely about oil,’ noting also that after the 2003 invasion, the Americans quickly secured the Oil Ministry while ‘hospitals, schools, utilities … were left to be burned and looted’. (p.105, 304)

He’s vaguer on the race for oil, gas and pipelines around central Asia and their connection to the 2002 Afghan war; and in fact Roberts doesn’t even come out clearly against these acts of imperial aggression. There’s nothing left wing about his book. It does however provide important facts about the economic and political sides of the environmental crisis.

Take politics. The Bush administration keeps pressing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, with more than the obvious agenda: ‘ANWR can be used as a bargaining chip in an energy debate with far larger political stakes …. strategists have long known that the Arctic wilderness carries a far higher emotional impact among voters than does fuel efficiency …’ (p. 299-300) Congress can only manage one ‘green’ vote each year, and with the reluctant acquiescence of the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society they choose to protect ANWR rather than take the much more important step of imposing stricter fuel standards on car-makers.

The book summarises the global warming debate, surveying alternative energy strategies; and it’s convinced me big business won’t invest seriously in solar or wind power until some major shock gets their attention. The ‘renewables’ are too costly for the market to spontaneously embrace. Solar cells and wind farms are too decentralised to fit the dominant industrial paradigm, and neither guarantees power 24 hours a day. Of course there are technical fixes for all these drawbacks, they just need a lot of government-funded R&D of the kind George Bush is not going to sponsor.

But this doesn’t have to be an impasse, Roberts hopes, if governments use market mechanisms cleverly. The energy economy and its environmental consequences are an extreme case of ‘market failure’ -- as documented by researcher Joan Ogden, who calculated the ‘hidden costs’ of oil, petrol and cars ‘from well to wheels’, including health, mortality, and global warming’s consequences such as weather damage to crops. The price tag was $2006 per car. These are real costs, it’s just that society pays them rather than energy companies, car makers or owners.

One solution is to tax petrol so prices reflect total costs. Another is carbon trading. Governments combated acid rain fairly effectively by allowing companies to trade ‘pollution credits’ in sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, so why not trade carbon? The problem, which Roberts skates over, is that it’s easy for our rulers to manipulate these mechanisms. Do we trust governments not to hand credits to cronies? And in the international sphere, market arrangements can turn very ugly.

For example, the Kyoto Protocol allows western governments and corporations to earn credits for investing in projects to cut greenhouse emissions in poor countries. That could mean they dump older technology on China, while the west introduces new, clean equipment. If the old technology is "cleaner" than existing Chinese factories and power plants, the west may get greenhouse credits while the Chinese are stuck with obsolete infrastructure that won’t perform when China’s turn comes to directly reduce emissions. Thus a seemingly benign environmental program can veil an imperialist agenda.

Or consider the Bisasar Road landfill in Durban, South Africa. Under apartheid, this site filled with toxic waste, causing cancer in surrounding areas. Upon coming to power, the African National Congress promised to clean it up. Then in 2002 the World Bank proposed to Durban’s mayor that the site be left alone so that methane could be siphoned off for emissions trading under the Bank’s prototype carbon trading program. The local government would make millions, and it might make a slight dent in global warming, but as what cost to the local people? The October 2004 Durban Conference declaration trenchantly criticised the underlying capitalist logic of pollution trading: ‘History has seen attempts to commodify land, food, labour, forests, water, genes and ideas. Carbon trading follows in the footsteps of this history. Through this process … the Earth’s abillity and capacity to support a climate conducive to life and human societies is now passing into the same corporate hands that are destroying the climate.’

So we’re talking about capitalism and imperialism, in which case Karl Marx may have something to offer.

 

Marx’s Ecology

The San people of the Kalahari have no trouble whatever understanding the value of biodiversity. Until fairly recently … all their food, their clothing, their shelter, their medicines, their cosmetics, their playthings, their musical instruments, their hunting weapons, everything came from the productivity of their surroundings, the plants and animals on which they completely depended for a living. Why, then, is it so difficult for most of us in the industrialised nations … to grasp the significance of biodiversity?    (Niles Eldridge)

The answer that we’re estranged from nature. A simple yet profound insight, and more central to Karl Marx’s thought than most Marxists have realised. Reading the Communist Manifesto we pass casually over its call for ‘abolition of the distinction between town and country’. John Bellamy Foster explains its importance. He focuses on the issue of alienation, a concept that emerged in Marx’s early polemics. The rising capitalist order denied the poor their traditional right to firewood, an aspect of the wider ‘privatisation’ of common land into the hands of the rich. This was part of turning the working people into a wage-earning proletariat, but at the same time it destroyed all their relationships with nature not mediated by private property. The labourers were estranged from the products of their labour and their environment, with everything commodified, as the Durban Declaration notes.

Just as we lose control over capital (the fruits of our own past labour) which returns as an alien power to exploit us, so we are cut adrift from our relation with nature; the ‘subjection of nature’s forces to man’ becomes the seizure of land by an exploitative minority.

Capitalism drives millions into cities where they labour for capitalist employers; while those who remain on the land are likewise forced to work for capitalist farmers. Either way, people who used to gather and grow their own food, and the materials for their own clothing, begin to purchase these things through intermediaries. Today we buy things in supermarkets, seldom asking whence they came. This threatens a crisis for humanity, because: ‘Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die.’ (p. 72) The emancipation of labour on the economic, political and social fronts becomes inseparable from restoring workers’ organic connection to the earth.

One consequence was a drastic disruption of the cycle of nutrients. In traditional society, these had returned directly to the soil as human excrement. In Marx’s time, harvested food began to be sold to the cities on a massive scale, after which vast amounts of excrement went into urban sewers, leading to one of the great environmental crises of the age. The land, for its part, became increasingly impoverished, to the point where people plundered old battlefields looking for bones to fertilise it.

Marx learned about this from Scottish economist James Anderson, and German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig – two ‘environmental gurus’ of the age. This breakdown had already begun to take on global proportions. Marx discussed how England exploited its neighbours’ land: ‘England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the soil.’ (p. 164). Britain went on to plunder the globe. The search for fertiliser likewise became global: in a bizarre scramble foreshadowing today’s imperialist race for oil, the United States seized 94 guano-rich islands, rocks, and cays around the world between 1856 and 1903. It was natural, therefore, for Marx to combine his concern for the environment not only with support for workers’ struggles, but also with those against imperialism and national oppression.

From his study of environmental and social questions, Marx arrived at what today we call ‘sustainability’:

Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]. (p. 164)

A sustainable revolution?

Marx wanted a social revolution, which seems a long way from the concerns of Limits for Growth. Or is it? The latter’s authors call for a ‘sustainability revolution’, and they mean truly radical change.
Their sustainable society would be ‘interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion’ (p. 253) with radically negative growth for some:

‘Some games that amuse and consume people today, such as arms races or the accumulation of unlimited wealth, would probably no longer be feasible, respected or interesting. But there would still be games, challenges, problems to solve, ways for people to prove themselves [and live] perhaps more satisfying lives than any possible today.’ (p. 256)

So we need ‘new feedback loops, new behaviour, new knowledge, and new technology, but also new institutions, new physical structures and new powers within human beings ... Visioning meaning imagining … what you really want.

That is, what you really want, not what someone has taught you to want, and not what you have learned to be willing to settle for.’ (p. 270)

This seems a good starting point for dialogue between green and red revolutionaries.

Tom O'Lincoln has been active on the left since 1966, in the German SDS, at Berkeley and for many years in Australia. He is the author of Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism, Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era, and United We Stand: Class Struggle in Colonial Australia. He maintains the Marxist Interventions website: http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/

Capital Accumulation, Sustainability and Hamilton, Ontario: How Technology and Capitalism can Misappropriate the Idea of Sustainability

Original URL

Erin Balser

One response to the environmental crisis--to climate change, natural resource depletion, species extinction, deforestation and a myriad of other ecological problems--is the idea of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability is often defined as inter- and intra- generational equity in the social, environmental, economic, moral and political spheres of society (Meadows 7). Ideologically, sustainability is a communal concept. However, in practice, the attempt to engage in sustainable lifestyles and make environmentally conscious decisions has largely fallen to the individual and through technology. As a result, the environmental crisis isolates and ostracizes various populations who cannot afford to become sustainable. By engaging in an analysis of the environmental crisis, the intersection between sustainability and capitalization, I will demonstrate how this intersection between sustainability and capitalism is potentially causing harms to communities, by examining how the emergence of environmental technologies has further oppressed the poor. This phenomenon is occurring globally and locally. The BIOX bio-diesel production plant that was recently built in Hamilton, Ontario demonstrates and its impact on the surrounding community demonstrates this.

Karl Marx developed the idea of capital accumulation in his work Capital. Capital accumulation is the constant conversion of products into means of production (715). Originating in both trade and expropriation, it arises from the constant need to realize surplus value. According to Marx and more recently, Rosa Luxemburg, this cycle perpetuates social inequality and instability. Marx scholars David Harvey declares that “market liberalization- the credo of the liberals and the neo-liberals- will not produce a harmonious state in which everyone will be better off. It will instead produce ever greater levels of social inequality” (144) and “produce serious and growing instabilities cumulating in chronic crises of overaccumulation” (144). This process begins at the point called private accumulation. For Marx, this was the initial divorce of labourers from the means of production (716). It was not the start of capital accumulation, but an external point which mechanized it. Every new market or commodity that capital accumulation subsumes can be traced back to this point of primitive accumulation.

Capitalism is constantly looking for new things to commodify. Either by subsuming not-capital markets or by intensifying internal markets, capitalism thrives on creating, then subsuming the other. Capitalism is constantly expanding, capital accumulating is never-ending. Marx states “a precondition of production based on capital is therefore the production of a constantly widening sphere of circulation, whether the sphere is directly expanded or whether more points within it are created as points of production” (407). Capitalism is not a simplistic linear system in which subsumes singular items. Rather it’s a diverse web that is continuously expanding and trapping things. These crises can vary in size, expression and materialization.

This supposition insinuates the notion of crisis. In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri declare that “crisis indicate[s] a passage, which is the turning point in every systematic cycle of accumulation, from a first phase of material expansion (investment in production) to a second phase of financial expansion (including speculation)” (238). With every crisis, it appears as if this cycle of capitalization reaches its limit. Yet, the reinvention of capitalization ensures that this is not the case. The environmental crisis is no different, it exists at a threshold in which constant new technologies, policies or ideas push it past these limitations, and deferring the apocalypse for yet another day. This construction of crisis only further perpetuates the cycle of capitalization. Hardt & Negri recognize this inherent contradiction when they declare “it is logical to assume that there would come a time when these two moments of the cycle of accumulation, realization and capitalization, come into direct conflict and undermine each other” (227). They do feel however, that “this contradictory tension is present throughout the development of capital, but it is revealed in full view only at the limit, at the point of crisis- when capital is faced with the finitude of the humanity and the earth” (228; my emphasis). Thus, the only crisis which might destroy this cycle is one of environmental origin, when the social constructions of humanity finally reared head against the limitations of the earth’s natural resources. While this has been the threat for decades, the environmental crisis has continually evaded this and reinvented itself along the lines of the cycle of capitalization and commodification. Instead of ending this cycle, it has only perpetuated it.

While sustainable practices existed for centuries in indigenous cultures and traditional agriculture (Hawken 22), sustainability as an environmental buzzword is relatively new. The most common definition of sustainability is from Brundtland Commission’s Our Common Future: “sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (9). The Commission developed two key concepts: “the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which the overriding priority should be given” and “the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs” (11). While these concepts supposedly establish sustainable practices, they remain dependant on defining these ‘limitations’, which are determined by ‘technology and social organization’. Thus, sustainability is the interrelationship between ‘human needs’ and ‘human productive capacities’ (Norton 21). Where does the environment fit into this definition? Are there any limitations on these ‘human productive capacities’? Is technological innovation the only limitation? The environment is a passive element; it seemingly imposes no limitations that cannot be overcome by ‘technology and social organization’. What the Brundtland Commission resulted in a vague, human centered definition that does not recognize the external limits on the human systems. To return to Hardt & Negri for a moment, crisis occurs at the moment such limitations are realized. Yet these crises are a natural component to the process of capitalization. They declare that “capital does not function within the confines of a fixed territory and population, but always overflows and internalizes new spaces” (Hardt & Negri 221). By reinventing sustainability as a technological issue, internalizing these new spaces becomes a simple process of technological innovation, through which human needs are met.

Donella Meadows attempts to address the Bruntland Commission’s limitations in her book, Limits to Growth: “a sustainable society is one that can persist over generations, one that is far- seeing enough, flexible enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or social systems of support” (Meadows 8). This definition, too, recognizes the importance of intergenerational equity. The inherent difference between Meadows and the Bruntland Report is that one recognizes how external systems- namely the finite nature of environmental resources- influence human’s capacity to build technology, infrastructure and bolster the current economic system. However, recognizing these physical limitations has not hindered the technological reinvention of sustainability.

Paul Hawken wrote The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability and Natural Capital in an attempt to respond to these issues. Both of these works adamantly claim that we cannot escape capitalism. Hawken declares

No ‘plan’ to reverse environmental degradation can be enacted if it requires a wholeseale change in the dynamics of the market. We have to work with who we are- which includes our strong instinct to shop the market and buy products of comparable quality at the lowest price (Hawken, Ecology xv).

Hawken’s interpretation of the environmental crisis and of sustainability can be interpreted as a practical and realistic approach. It attempts to work within the systems at hand in order to create change as opposed to constantly fighting them. However, by not recognizing the problems and limitations of capitalism for the environment, and for the human population, he is merely validating the system and all the solutions found within it. In Natural Capital, Hawken “explore[s] the lucrative opportunities for businesses in an era of approaching environmental limits” (7). This book repackages environmentalist ideals and the concept of sustainability directly into capital rhetoric. It outlines four points businesses need to follow in order to become environmentally responsible:

-Radically increase the productivity of resource use.
-Shift to biologically inspired production with closed loops, no waste, and no toxicity.
-Shift the business model away from the making and selling of "things" to providing the service that the "thing" delivers.
-Reinvest in natural and human capital (11).

This validation of capitalism by such influential environmentalist writers, only further perpetuates the cycle of capitalism and belief in it. The most recent manifestation of this discourse is Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. He, too, finds the answers in technology, in democracy and in capitalism. These works encourage seeking answers to sustainability in technology and resource efficiency and effectiveness. Sustainability is a process about “coming to terms with sustainability in all its deeply rich ecological, social, ethical and economic dimensions” (O’Riordan & Voisey 32; my emphasis). Sustainability is no longer about the salvation of nature, but the prolonging of human life and human social and economic systems, namely capitalism. And this is done, not only through technological advancement and the capitalization of environmental solutions, but the perpetuation of the sustainability discourse that supports these processes, the individualization of sustainability.

Bio-diesel is an alternative ‘clean’ fuel that is becoming an increasing popular alternative to regular diesel fuel. It is designed to work effectively in traditional diesel engines. Bio-diesel is the conversion of vegetable and animal fat into usable fuel (Pahl 13). Bio-diesel is considered sustainable because it is reusing vegetable and animal residue often found the in food production industry. It is also considered renewable because of the short life cycle of corn plants, which is the primary source for bio-diesel. Use of bio-diesel results in lower emissions and a longer engine life, due to the lower restraint bio-diesel puts on engines. Mass production of bio-diesel must adhere to strict policies and regulations put in place by the various levels of government and the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) guidelines (Pahl 32). While the creation of such regulations are designed to preserve personal health and safety, it has mechanized a big business bio-diesel industry, the building of large bio-diesel plants and the large scale sales and shipment of mass quantities of bio-diesel. What began as a small time, agricultural project, which hoped to maximize the efficiency of agricultural practices, has become a huge environmental business, designed to save the environment and help consumers feel good about the types of products they are purchasing (Pahl 47).

Mass produced bio-diesel is more expensive than traditional diesel fuel, due to the limited production and shipment of the product (Pahl 51). While the price of bio-diesel is expected to decline with time, it is currently a difficult to access product for most consumers, unless it is self-made. One of the largest proponents of bio-diesel is the multi-national company BIOX Corporation. BIOX was incorporated in Canada in 2000, and has grown rapidly ever since. BIOX was incorporated to create high quality, accessible and affordable bio-diesel for environmentally concerned consumers. In September 2004, BIOX announced that they were going to build the first commercial scale bio-diesel production plant in Canada in Hamilton, Ontario. Specifically, this project was to be built in the North End of Hamilton (BIOX).

Hamilton has one of the highest incidents of low income per household in Ontario (StatsCan), most of which is concentrated in the North End of Hamilton (Neufeld 17). The North End of Hamilton borders Lake Ontario and is where most of Hamilton’s major industries, including the steel mills of StelCo and DofasCo exist (Neufeld 19). While Hugo Neufeld paints a vibrant picture of the North End community in his book The North End Lives- he joyfully notes a Hamilton Spectator caption that read- “the North End of Hamilton is a complex mix of grit and gritty characters, tough problems, and big hearted neighbours” (Spectator as quoted in Neufeld 17), his stories are laced with the themes of poverty and helplessness. The North End is where the poor and the oppressed reside, where joblessness and homelessness are fairly common problems (Neufeld 22).

The proposed site for the BIOX plant in the North End of Hamilton was directly across from residential homes. The proposed location of this plant was only a few hundred feet from several homes in the area. The BIOX plant negatively impacted the community from the moment it was proposed. First, the site selected was community green space. Second, the constant tremors resulted in severe damage to several homes in the area, including near- collapsing chimneys, jammed doors and windows, cracked walls and ceilings, and splintered foundations. Third, making bio-diesel involves the storing of highly flammable chemicals, sulphuric acid and ‘BIOX blend’. BIOX’s storage facility for the Oliver Street site was within one hundred feet of residents’ homes, which violates many health and safety regulations, within the municipal, provincial and federal governments. Finally, with the completion of the site, it is now a constant source of noise, light and air pollution. This constant exposure has the potential to impact the health and safety of the entire community.

While the BIOX plant represents the ecological integrity and economic prosperity that is deemed so important for sustainability, it is certainly at the sacrifice of social equality. The introduction of the plant in the community has diminished the quality of life of the residents, exposed them to harsh and potentially harmful chemicals, and to a variety of constant pollutants. This exploitation was done for the sake of sustainability, in order to promote a more environmentally friendly fuel, and to appease the consumers of bio-diesel. They can rest easy because their consumer choices are more environmentally conscious and more sustainable. Yet it was done at the sacrifice of the poor. When sustainability is reinvented as technology and as individual choices, it creates a divide in the population along the lines of class. Not only is the wealthy engaging in sustainable solutions, their decisions to do so impact the lives of those who cannot afford such luxuries. The BIOX plant is large, unattractive and potentially dangerous. Even if it adheres to the most stringent governmental and industrial regulations, it has taken away some of the quality of life in the North End. Neufeld was so proud of the community and liveliness he found here, despite the rampant poverty (27). How can that dynamic remain unchanged if it is the prime development location for industry? Who is going to tell these people why?

These issues are laced with contradictions and complications. Sustainability claims to be a communal concept which requires new and innovative ways to look at the world. Yet, in practice it has the potential to become about individual decisions and technological innovations to delay and reinvent the ecological limitations imposed on our current lifestyle. Sustainability discourse simultaneously blames capitalism for the current environmental problems and looks to it for solutions. Sustainability also claims to promote social equality and economic prosperity, yet, again in practice, it oppresses and ostracizes specific populations in order to attain its goal. Sustainability can demonstrate how Marx’s idea of capital accumulation can manipulate the end result and how it subsumes even the most unlikely ideologies and practices. The situation in the North End is not, and never was, the intention of promoting sustainable practices and technologies. Rather, it became a tangential and necessary victim to ensure that bio-diesel production was efficient and the product was affordable. This phenomenon is not unique. There are several local, national and international circumstances which mirror the situation in Hamilton. However, this creates a moral conflict: is it right to save the environment, or to save the poor? How do we decide? Who gets to decide? Until we can reinvent the practice of sustainability so it mirrors its ideological construct of community, morality, equality and prosperity instead of technology-driven innovation, capitalist-oriented motives this situation will only become more and more frequent as we constantly look for the answers to the environmental problems within technology.

Works Cited
Brundtland Commission. Our Common Future: The World Commission on Environment and Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. New York: Rodale Press, Incorporated, 2006.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Hawken, Paul, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins. Natural Capital: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. London: EarthScan, 1999.
Hawken, Paul. Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: Harpers Collins Publishers, 1994.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
Meadows, Donella. Beyond the Limits. Post Mills, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992.
Neufeld, Hugo. The North End Lives: A Journey Through Poverty Terrain. Herald Press: Waterloo, Ontario, 2006.
Norton, Bryan G. Searching for Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
O’Riordan, T. and Henry Voisey. The Politics of Agenda 21 in Europe. London: EarthScan, 1998
Pahl, Greg. Biodiesel: Growing a New Energy Economy. Chelsea Green Pub: White River Junction, 2005.
Rutherford, Paul. “The Entry of Life into History.” Discourses of the Enviroment. Ed. Eric Darier. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
Alternative Energy. Accessed at: http://store.altenergystore.com/Solar-Electric-Panels/Roofing-Solar-Panels/c680/. Accessed on: 2006-12-06.
BIOX Corporation. Accessed at: http://www.bioxcorp.com/. Accessed on: 2006-12-06.
Saskatchewan Organic Directorate. Accessed at: http://www.saskorganic.com/about_organic_food/why_organic_food_costs_more.hml. Accessed on: 2006-12-06.
Statistics Canada. “Incidence of low income among the population living in private households, by census metropolitan area (1996 and 2001 Censuses).” Date modified: 2005-01-10. Accessed at: http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/famil60g.htm Accessed on: 2006-12-06.

Corporeal Capital: Theorizing the Division of Body Parts under Global Capitalism

Original URL

Sarah Blacker

While in the academy…‘the body’ is generally treated as a text or a trope or as a metaphor that is ‘good to think’ with, in the larger society and in the global economy ‘the body’ is generally viewed and treated as an object, albeit a highly fetishized one, and as a ‘commodity’ that can be bartered, sold or stolen.  -- Nancy Scheper-Hughes (“Bodies for sale,” 1)

This paper will bring the practice of the global trade in human organs to bear on a discussion of recent theorizations of biopolitics in order to reveal the way in which this practice announces the urgency of a re-theorization of our political subjectivity under global capitalism (Cazdyn 5-6). Even in the throes of radical commodification, the body manages to continue to occupy a space in which it demands special consideration through articulations of residual beliefs regarding the sanctity of the body. Of particular interest is the way in which this movement to protect the ‘sacred integrity’ or ‘wholeness’ of the body at all costs constitutes an unusual moral intervention in late capitalism and interrupts the process of the commodification of the body. Why does this moralistic discourse emerge in the context of corporeal dispossession while economic dispossession fails to elicit the faintest whisper of moral outcry? An examination of the global organ trade, a literal undoing of the body politic under late capitalism, facilitates the construction of a concrete portrait functioning as a sort of autopsy of the processes of dispossession at work in this practice and will shed light on more insidious and less visible and immediately theorizable forms of dispossession. By looking (non-metaphorically) at the politics of corporeal movement under biopolitics and bioeconomics and the way in which bodies are divided into saleable parts under global capitalism, it is possible to develop a modus operandi that will allow us to identify, understand, and address these more covert forms of dispossession.

A description of the global black market trade in organs in its current incarnation will not be a focus of this paper as this practice is an extremely complex and multifaceted one, taking on different forms in different regions, thereby resisting summarization. Rather, this discussion will work from Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ contention that within the global organ trade, organs are distributed in an identical manner to all other types of resources under late capitalism (“Bodies for sale” 4). According to Scheper-Hughes, “the flow of organs follows the modern routes of capital: from South to North, from Third to First World, from poor to rich, from black and brown to white, and from female to male” (“Global traffic” 193). Working from the premise of a general tendency within which wealth consistently overdetermines the body, this paper will interrogate the politics of movement in this context in which organs occupy the unique position of life-giving capital that is widely “needed” and desired, but cannot be legally purchased.

A discussion of this practice requires that organs be viewed not only within the context of late capitalism, but that we view organs as unmediated capital. The global organ trade is symptomatic of the way power is working under capitalism to maximize production in which body parts themselves are transformed into capital. The human body becomes divisible and destructible; the productive value of the body no longer lies in its potential for labour, but instead in its components. This paper seeks to identify the repercussions of a practice that enacts a one-directional allocation of organs as capital, looking to the methods of selection employed by biopolitics and bioeconomics that result in the extension of some lives and the abbreviation of others through the organ trade under global capitalism.

As organ transplantation increasingly becomes the standard of care or norm in the treatment of a multitude of diseases, the market value of organs has skyrocketed in relation to the productive limitations defining this practice. With the exception of the ability to produce animal organs for human usage, as of yet there exists no standard practice by which to procure organs for this purpose other than through the willed donation or sale on the part of the divisible body, to take place either during life or following death. In the case of the live donor or seller, the procurement of the organ is viewed as an exchange through which the donor or seller forfeits biological capital and for this reason must be compensated for his or her loss. The normalization of this practice creates an unprecedented demand for human organs as well as an unprecedented moral directive that those who can afford to do so must attempt to extend their lives, by any available means, through the procurement of organs for transplantation (Waldby and Mitchell 187). As Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell write, there is now “a cultural desire for, and sense of entitlement to, self-regeneration among the aging populations of the wealthy North” (162). This drive is symptomatic of the reach of what Foucault calls regulatory biopower in that this practice reflects the repercussions of advancements in medical research and technology within a globalized world defined by a radical inequality in economic conditions through which to “make live” (Foucault 241).

For the normalization of the practice of living donor organ transplantation to take root within global neoliberal capitalist culture, a fiction of scarcity had to be instituted to simultaneously instill fear in potential organ consumers and a sense of opportunity and profitability in potential organ vendors. As Eric Cazdyn writes, “the logic of the market requires a withholding—or even a destruction—of any surplus goods…so as not to push prices so low that they jeopardize the integrity of the system itself” (26).   Dependent upon the ideological entrenchment of this fiction of scarcity in organs available for transplant, the medical discourse of organ transplantation constructs the practice as the sole mode of treatment on the table for discussion, unrivalled in its efficacy, rather than as an elective practice and merely one of several treatment options (White 25). In this context of “invented needs and artificial scarcities” (Scheper-Hughes, “Bodies for sale” 3), there is no foreseeable reason why patients would not prefer the option of transplantation to alternate treatments. The relations of power structuring the transplantation process coercively “intervene to make live” (Foucault 248) through the cultural imperative to extend life at all costs by means of, within this specific sector, the procurement of organs for transplantation.

Introducing what he calls “a ‘biopolitics’ of the human race” (243), Foucault asserts that this new “technology of power” (242) is exercised on a larger scale than was disciplinary power, shaping “a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on” (242-243). Addressing these biological processes “at the level of their generality” (246) as well as “a whole series of related economic and political problems” (243), biopolitics “is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species” (242). Biopolitics determines the conditions for life for “a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted” (245). Of pertinence for this discussion is the manner in which biopolitics works to “incapacitate individuals, put them out of circuit or neutralize them” (244) by way of managing the “relations between the human race” (245). In contrast to disciplinary power as it functioned under the sovereign nation-state—actively killing some while passively allowing others to live at the level of individual bodies (241)—the “massifying” regulatory power of biopolitics actively ensures continued life for some while passively allowing death for others on the international scale of the human species as a whole (247). Taken at face value, this biopolitics makes the rich live through the indoctrination of the belief that extending life through organ transplantation is not an elective decision but an unquestioned path of action, and lets the poor die through the creation of conditions for life that drive poverty-stricken organ-possessors to sell their means to biological life.

Foucault writes that the regulatory power of biopolitics works “to improve life by eliminating accidents, the random element, and deficiencies” (248). I argue, however, that the regulatory power we see manifested in the current operation of the global organ trade works only to improve life that occupies a dominant position within the global flow of capital. The tenure of this form of life is extended through organ transplantation, while the corporeal material required to extend these lives is procured from the subservient form of life which endlessly contributes to the economic system from which they cannot escape through their labour, often without even receiving a living wage in return. How does the ideal of individual autonomy and entrepreneurship as central to neoliberal culture fit into this? At first glance, it seems as though the population from which organs are procured are quietly relegated to a state of exception—a system in which autonomy and responsibility for one’s own livelihood is forced upon us all, that is, all except this population as standing reserve. However, even this obviously exploited population is subsumed into the neoliberal discourse of individual autonomy and responsibility for one’s own destiny through the insistence that giving would-be organ sellers the opportunity to improve their financial status through entering this exchange of capital from which they would otherwise be prohibited to participate is somehow giving this population the promise of an otherwise unattainable upward mobility.

The global organ trade constructs a lack of organs available for transplant as the enemy or threat to the human population or man-as-species (Foucault 256). As Foucault writes, “the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population” (256). In the context of the global organ trade, the enemy is not a “bad” or “inferior race” (255). Instead, the enemy is the death that threatens to rob the global economy of its main contributors to the accumulation of capital; more specifically, the enemy is the lack of resources through which these lives can be extended and fortified. Foucault’s theorization of racism as justification for murder is inadequate to explain the process of human exploitation occurring within the global organ trade. The violence inflicted upon organ-supplying populations is not predicated on assumptions of inferiority of race. Instead, this exploitation is denounced through neoliberal narratives pronouncing the infallibility of the ideal of autonomy and the ‘generous’ provision of opportunity for economic advancement. Working towards “the elimination of the biological threat to…the species” (Foucault 256), the global organ trade has worked to eliminate the threat of borders closed to the trade of organs, thus eliminating the threat to the survival of the segment of the species with the power to dictate the survival of the species as a whole under global capitalism. The creation of sites of production for these ‘desperately needed’ organs adheres to the rules of limitless accumulation: organs are simply procured from any site of economic deprivation and desperation featuring an international airport.

In a neoliberal global market economy driven by consumer desire and a model of subjectivity in which individuals are defined solely as consumers, the consumer rarely balks at the labour practices leading to the satisfaction of desire. Why, then, does the consumer cringe at the thought of the desperation leading individuals to sell organs? As Scheper-Hughes writes, we “can all too easily fall prey to an uncritical moralizing rhetoric, a knee-jerk reaction against body commodification to which still attaches fairly ‘primitive’ sentiments of bodily integrity and sacredness which demand that the body be treated as an exception” (“Bodies for sale” 3). Where to draw the line demarcating which possessions should and should not be sold out of economic desperation? As Lesley Sharp questions, “[c]an or should we hold sway over the body’s parts if they are of value on the open market?” (49). Why does the affluent Western observer of the organ trade value biological bodies with more fervour and protectiveness than are mobilized in response to the lack of economic or material conditions that allow the body to live in extreme poverty? Today, we hardly flinch when we hear the daily toll of lives lost in Iraq, but hearing about the sheer numbers of Iraqis driven to sell their organs by an unemployment rate as high as 70 percent (Jarabi) and for as appallingly little compensation as $700 (Al Jibouri and Freeman) gives us pause.

Cazdyn also warns against falling into the trap of moralizing, asserting that this discourse can distract us from the crucial question raised by processes unfolding under bioeconomics: what can these processes in their current incarnations tell us about “the general transformation of power underway today”? (18).   Viewing the global organ trade as symptomatic of what he calls bioeconomics, “an emerging global ideology…that exceeds various nationalisms and that feeds off of the current logic of contemporary capitalism” (15), Cazdyn argues that though related to bioeconomics, eugenics and biopolitics cannot adequately describe political subjectivity under global capitalism (16). He makes a distinction between biopolitics and bioeconomics, asserting that biopolitics works “toward constituting national subjects from the body up” under the nation-state, bioeconomics flourishes under global capitalism, “constituting global subjects who are at the mercy of their diseased bodies and can appeal to no one save the most impotent NGOs” (Cazdyn 16). The economic mechanism of control instituted by bioeconomics is entirely determined by the forces mobilized to drive capitalism in general, “scarcity, sustainability, and profit,” but in service of a greater goal: “to set in motion an ideological justification for the lack of democracy” (Cazdyn 18). This justification is often articulated as follows: ‘sure, it would be nice to extend medical services and other social programs to everyone regardless of inability to pay, but if we did so, our economy would collapse, silly!’

The bio under Cazdyn’s bioeconomics is defined by an economic equation through which health is positioned as directly proportional to wealth, and suffering inversely proportional to ability to pay for medical treatment. Put crudely, those who have access to the capital required to ward off death will live, while those cut off from the flow of capital who are subject to suffering and disease are so often cut off from the medical treatment available to those who can pay. Inequality is inherent to the logic of bioeconomics, an economic system “based on the unapologetic logic of the capitalist market” that “is not at liberty to suspend the rule of profit and expansion under any circumstance” (Cazdyn 16). There are no exceptions to the rule; health is bought and sold like any other commodity. The logic is infuriatingly simple and straightforward; this partially explains the moral outrage emerging in response to organ sales. There exists a residual belief that health and the physical body should somehow escape capitalism, that they should be treated as an exception and not be determined and distributed by economic affordability. However, capitalism as an economic system will not permit this exception: as Cazdyn suggests, “so many are dying not because capitalism is failing, but because it is succeeding, because it is fulfilling its logic” (17).

The advent of the global organ trade is sometimes perceived as a positive development, reflecting the view that globalization should be celebrated for its extension of economic opportunity to otherwise excluded and un-coincidentally poverty-stricken populations. This logic suggests that both organ vendor and organ recipient benefit from the exchange: the organ vendor received much-needed cash in exchange for surgery while the organ recipient purchases as otherwise unattainable restoration of life, thus enabling continued accumulation. The global organ trade ensures that the poor are no longer excluded from the global market economy. Participation in global trade is no longer inaccessible to these populations. Instead, participation becomes coercive as the trade continues to expand and populations become increasingly economically deprived, and therefore, desperate to acquire the means to ongoing material life even if this acquisition threatens their own personal means to ongoing corporeal life. Organ vendors are included in global trade, though only by means of exploitation. As Deleuze writes, “[m]an is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (6). The problem posed by this inclusion of populations valued only for their exploitability in an exchange of capital is the threat posed by the possibility that the exploitable will acquire too much capital, enough to relieve this desperation that is the very condition of inclusion. To guard against this threat that the position of the exploitable be measurably improved through the trade, the process is surveilled in order to protect a delicate balance of the economic imbalance. This is a process of policing to ensure the mono-directionality of capital’s flow. As Eugene Thacker notes, “[t]he problem of security for biopolitics is the problem of creating boundaries that are selectively permeable” (27).

Étienne Balibar suggests that the late capitalist system cannot survive any limitation being placed upon its propensity towards accumulation through exploitation, and for this reason “elimination or extermination has to take place, ‘passive’ if possible, ‘active’ if necessary” (129). The form assumed by this process in the context of the global organ trade is a ‘production’ of ‘development’ of “specific populations” into “viable donors” in what Lawrence Cohen calls a “biopolitics of suppression” (11). In order to allow global capitalism to fulfill its destiny, the process of accumulation must not be hindered by a pesky shortage in organs! In response to this threat, organ donors are produced as the exploitable, available-to-be-killed population required by “the system” to ensure its survival (Balibar 129). As Balibar contends, material conditions inadequate for the proliferation of life are reproduced for the sole purpose of exploitation; this is certainly the case for the “superfluous” populations from which organs purchased by wealthy ‘Westerners’ are excised (128). Balibar argues that all forms of seemingly disconnected discrimination and exclusion taking place concurrently and robbing populations of the means of life must be viewed in relation to their overall ramifications (128). As Balibar writes, these “zones” in which donors are produced amount to systems of indirect murder: “In the face of the cumulative effects of different forms of extreme violence or cruelty that are displayed in what I called the ‘death zones’ of humanity, we are led to admit that the current mode of production and reproduction has become a mode of production for elimination” (Balibar 128). An examination of the global organ trade illuminates this process and reveals the strict biopolitical division of the world’s population through the conditional investment in donor populations in order to excise the desired resources while maintaining these populations’ dependency. In this sense, the populations existing within the “death zones” cannot properly be called life under a global economic system that defines life as accumulation while simultaneously requiring these excluded populations as the possibility for accumulation.

Zygmunt Bauman notes that security is maintained under global capitalism through a strict regulation of movement and travel. A discussion of the role of travel in the context of the global organ trade is especially pertinent considering that the enormous distances traveled by organs sold for international transplantation and the speed of this travel are unprecedented for medical interventions. The phenomenon known as “transplant tourism” exemplifies the dual and contradictory movement invoked by globalization as articulated by Bauman: “[g]lobalization divides as much as it unites; it divides as it unites” (2). Bauman describes globalization as a process within which some are liberated from previously-constrained spaces by newfound access to movement and travel on a global scale, while others are imprisoned within increasingly constrained spaces. Arguing that the “the freedom to move” is “the main stratifying factor” (2), Bauman terms the first group, “the increasingly global and extraterritorial elites” (2), tourists, while the second group, simultaneously lacking mobility and enabling that enjoyed by the first group, are the vagabonds (92).

Bauman’s description of the relation between the two groups suggests a type of Darwinian natural selection. He writes that the ‘vagabonds’ are “the mutants of postmodern evolution, the monster rejects of the brave new species…the waste of the world which has dedicated itself to tourist services” (92). Indeed, trapped within a space increasingly devoid of resources to support life, the ‘vagabonds’, driven by desperation to sell organs, do become an ‘inviable’ form of life viewed as a standing reserve by the organ-purchasing ‘tourists’ who possess the capital required to extract the coveted biological capital in the form of organs from the ‘vagabonds.’ As Waldby and Mitchell remark, “‘spare’ kidneys in third world bodies are resignified as a negotiable surplus” (162). Thus, Bauman insists that the opportunity for continuing ‘tourism’ is dependent upon a continued stationary gridlock of the ‘vagabonds.’ Within the bodies of the ‘vagabonds,’ the organs are viewed as wasted; capitalism dictates that the organs would be better put to use within the bodies of the global elite, in which case the organs are mobilized to work towards accumulation, while they were seen to be ‘wasting away’ in the bodies of the ‘vagabonds.’ However, this form of accumulation is of course limited, not limitless. The supply of ‘vagabond’ organs is finite, and as long as ‘tourist’ lives are extended while those of the ‘vagabonds’ are cut short, the organ-supplying ‘vagabond’ population will eventually be killed off completely. Does this practice constitute “biocolonialism” (Nelkin and Andrews 33)?

Now that the divisible human body has entered the globalized market under late capitalism, body parts are distributed in a manner identical to all other commodities on the world market: they are sold to the highest bidder. However apt this description of organs functioning in the global market as commodities may be, Waldby and Mitchell caution that organs offer long-term benefits, unlike many commodities, and this factor must be taken into consideration (177). Waldby and Mitchell assert that organs are “extremely complex forms of generative value that are not used and consumed in the usual sense but incorporated by the recipient as the condition of continuing life” (177). This examination of the global organ trade reveals the way in which particular forms of power allow medical technology and discourses promoting the extension of life at all costs on economically deprived populations under global capitalism.

Ronald Munson attempts to justify the asymmetrical allocation of organs based on universal neoliberal commitment to self-determination and autonomy, despite the disparity in income level – there are no exceptions to this commitment to autonomy, no matter the stakes of inability to pay. Through what Cazdyn would call “a simple economic analysis…to justify human suffering” (17), Munson offers a now ubiquitous argument for a legalized and regulated system to replace the black market organ trade. As Scheper-Hughes writes, “the neo-classical economists of the global economy, and a new class of bioethicists following their lead, now argue that free markets, including body markets, are liberating in their valuing of individual choice, autonomy and the impersonality of the economic exchanges” (“Bodies for sale” 3). Munson’s argument is at bottom informed by an assumption that we should be driven to eradicate disease and ward off death by procuring organs for transplantation from living donors, rather than relying solely on cadaver organs and allowing those who are unable to secure cadaver organs for transplantation to die. Munson argues that in order “to reduce human misery and save lives, we should try to increase the number of living kidney donors” by creating a regulated system through which organ ‘donors’ are financially compensated (116). Acknowledging that organ sales within this system would continue to benefit the rich while exploiting the poor, Munson argues that this is not symptomatic of the organ trade itself but of larger problems of global inequality (117). As he writes:

in a just world…people wouldn’t have to sell a kidney to meet the basic needs of their children. We don’t live in such a world, however, and the relevant question is whether, in the society we inhabit right now, we should condemn paying living donors as unethical and prohibit the practice (117).

In defense of this argument, Munson cites “our commitment to allowing individuals to be self-determining” (117), thus appealing to the neoliberal ideal of individual autonomy. Munson suggests that a failure to legalize compensated organ donation would amount to a stripping of individuals’ rights to mobilize their economically-valued possessions in the form of corporeal property in times of need.  

The obvious counter-argument to Munson is that the organ sellers do not actually exercise autonomy and freedom of choice by voluntarily offering up their organs for sale but are instead coerced to sell their organs out of economic desperation. Autonomy remains ever-elusive to those living in “the social and economic contexts that make the choice to sell a kidney in an urban slum of Calcutta or in a Brazilian favela”; this ‘choice’ is not selected from among a variety of options at hand, but rather is made out of desperation and is “anything but a free and autonomous one” (Scheper-Hughes “Global traffic” 197). Scheper-Hughes writes that the consumer demands of the affluent global North enforce the dominance of an economic valuation of organs as means to financial survival for the working poor who would otherwise view their organs as sacred and indissociable parts of the self but are forced to defy these cultural beliefs in order to survive (“Global traffic” 210-211). Waldby and Mitchell suggest that we must avoid paternalism at all costs, and that disallowing legal and “fair” compensation for organ vendors inevitably constitutes paternalism (173). They ask why it is that we feel more comfortable with the moral coercion required in order to procure organs from related donors in gift system of organ transplantation than with the economic coercion required to procure organs from the poor (Waldby and Mitchell 173). It could be argued that related donors do not exercise autonomy and freedom of choice when agreeing to have organs removed for the benefit of family members. This desperation or coercion can be seen as moral or relational rather than economic, although economic factors can also play a role in these decisions.

Would the establishment of a regulated and controlled global market monitoring the trade in human organs result in decreased exploitation of the economically desperate? Could a system be created through which organs would be allocated on the basis of medical need rather than ability to pay through the establishment of an international grants system? If a grant system was instituted, how would organs be allocated? What criterion of allocation would be utilized: merit, lottery, health, utility, age, ‘need’? How would the ‘market price’ of organs be determined? Would a fluctuating price for something so ‘sacred’ and ‘priceless’ as a human organ ever be widely accepted? If the market price for organs is determined in relation to the highest price offered for the commodity on the world stage, it would become like the international oil market in that the highest bidder would set the price. These questions will only become more urgent in coming years as the baby boomer generation ages. These consumers, armed with wealth and a fierce desire to fend off death, will create an enormous demand for organs. Demand for every commodity has been transformed by the impact of this generation. Why would organs be an exception to this rule? The prospect of an enlarged market suggests increased exploitation if a mechanism to reverse the current pattern of distribution is not instituted. Today, the economic capacity of the organ recipient determines the market value of organs. It will become imperative to create a biopolitics that can institute a barrier to the distribution of organs based on wealth as it is likely impossible to reverse the cultural valuation of medical interventions in the service of extending life at all costs.

The logic of capitalism and its engine, biopower, dictate that distribution is identical in every sphere of life; thus, the mono-directional global trade of organs is of interest due to its unprecedented division of bodies, rather than the direction in which these body parts flow. An examination of the global organ trade allows us to concretely visualize “the material transformation of the paradigm of rule” of biopolitics (Hardt and Negri 22). Driven solely towards limitless accumulation, capitalism redistributes organs so that those contributing to the accumulation of wealth are outfitted with the means to extended life while non-contributors draining wealth from the system through usage of social services are stripped of their organs. The distribution pattern put in place by global organ trade is demonstrative of the status of divisible bodies under global capitalism, exemplifying the way in which radical inequality arising out of this system must be viewed as “not only a political matter, but also a biological matter” (Thacker 27). The practice of the global organ trade reproduces the systemic inequality that is inherent to capitalism directly and without mediation on the individual, physical body, rather than indirectly through economic deprivation and its eventual biological repercussions. For this reason, it is pertinent to speak so concretely of biopolitics and bioeconomics through a discussion of the global organ trade and to focus critical attention on this practice in an attempt to bring forth possibilities for change.

Works Cited
Al Jibouri, Saleh and Colin Freeman. “Black market organ trade is Baghdad's new growth industry.” The Sunday Telegraph 22 May 2005.
Balibar, Étienne. We, the people of Europe?: reflections on transnational citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Cazdyn, Eric. “Bioeconomics, Culture and Politics after Globalization.” Unpublished manuscript.
Cohen, Cynthia. “Public Policy and the Sale of Human Organs.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 12.1 (2002): 47-64.
Cohen, Lawrence. “The other kidney: Biopolitics beyond recognition.” Commodifying bodies. Ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant. London: Sage Publications, 2002. 9-29.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3-7.
Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.
Harrison, Trevor. “Globalization and the trade in human body parts.” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 36.1 (1999): 21-35.
Janabi, Ahmed. “Iraqi unemployment reaches 70%.” Al Jazeera. 14 August 2004.
Kass, Leon. “Organs for sale?: propriety, property, and the price of progress.” Public Interest 107 (1992): 65-87.
Lock, Margaret. “The alienation of body tissue and the biopolitics of immortalized cell lines.” Commodifying bodies. Ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant.London: Sage Publications, 2002. 63-91.
Munson, Ronald. Raising the Dead: Organ Transplants, Ethics, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Nelkin, Dorothy and Lori Andrews. “Homo economicus: Commercialization of body tissue in the age of biotechnology.” The Hastings Center Report 28.5 (1998): 30-40.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “The global traffic in human organs.” Current Anthropology 41.2 (2000): 191-224.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “Bodies for sale – whole or in parts.” Commodifying bodies. Ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant.   London: Sage Publications, 2002. 1-8.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “Commodity fetishism in organs trafficking.” Commodifying bodies. Ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant.   London: Sage Publications, 2002. 31-62.
Sharp, Lesley A. Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.
Thacker, Eugene. The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.
Waldby, Catherine and Robert Mitchell. Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
White, Doug. “Divide and multiply: culture and politics in the new medical order.” Troubled bodies: Critical perspectives on postmodernism, medical ethics, and the body. Ed. Paul Komesaroff. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Four Micro-Interventions into Neoliberal Globalization

Kiel Hume

Original URL

I. Spectacle and Theory’s Images

In 1936 Walter Benjamin published his widely read essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In it he ponders the new kinds of images available to the world, taking a curiously optimistic stance on the issue of film. He sees the world and politics becoming increasingly inaccessible, until “Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling” (Benjamin 236). Benjamin’s view of the revolutionary possibilities represented by the transformation of images and the earliest examples of spectacle can only seem naïve by our contemporary experience of what these changes have actually become. His essay poses fascism against communism, and the possibility of both to utilize the changes in visuality taking place in the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, Benjamin doesn’t recognize (at least here anyway) the potential the new state of images represents for the forces of global capitalism.

Today we are only too familiar with the role the spectacle plays in our lives and the world. Far from the liberating possibilities imagined by Benjamin, the spectacle operates by an excess that fundamentally transforms the conditions of subjectivity; this is a process of “immense accumulation” of representation, of a visuality that is valued solely for its form and lacking all traces of content (or is it perhaps all content lacking any form?). Life and politics become static, aestheticized into “an object of contemplation” in which perceiving is taken as experiencing: “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 12). We must be careful, however, not to elevate this phenomenon to the realm of the metaphysical; this is a material reality that is abstracted and experienced spectacularly. For Debord, “spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life” (13), that is, a cultural and social experience based on accumulation, distance, and alienation.

While life becomes increasingly constricted by its penetration on all sides, the spectacle itself transforms. The spectacle is materialized as it enters reality, functioning beside and throughout all aspects of life before it is deified, transformed absolutely into Debord’s trinity of “society itself…a part of society…and a means of unification” (12). Yet, even at this point the process is not complete. Debord himself retheorizes the spectacle’s evolution into an integrated state (Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle 8), bringing to mind prevailing contemporary models of integrated business solutions, that is, making—in the most productive sense—connections in the name of efficiency where before there were none.

But what has this to do with neo-liberal culture? To answer this I turn to another well known spectacle, yet one that is not generally characterized as such. Michel Foucault opens Discipline and Punish with the very public spectacle of the regicide’s torture and execution, noting the minutest details of bodily mortification and subjectification, both literal and symbolic. This disciplinary spectacle is quite different from Debord’s spectacle of global capital and accumulation, yet they are both concerned with transforming the body and mind at the very levels of subjectivity which one encounters and experiences the world. A spectacular reality is in many ways similar to Foucault’s notions of the panoptic society. The subject is still caught in a specifying spotlight, only added are sounds and images. Surveillance is not actually necessary as long she/he is constantly accessible to the images being projected into all corners of reality; in fact, the very principle of surveillance is reversed, since it is the subject of power who is now the viewer and no longer the viewed. The process of the spectacle’s hold over the subject is at once global in its totality, as well as completely individualizing, the ultimate corruption of democracy from which no individual is excluded, offering something for everyone, “such that all demands, all tastes are satisfied” (Bourdieu 68). The panoptic principle, transformed into a spectacular one, is ultimately an applied marketing model: the prison bars are replaced with the all-mediating image, the family television is the accepted way of encountering others, and the public is subsumed into the private.

It is only by a process of separation (of individuals from one another, from their material and conceptual conditions for the (re)production of the political, economic and cultural world in which they live) that has been almost completely perfected that allows for today’s global inequalities to exist. Like Foucault’s spectacle, today’s is also disciplining and pacifying, a unidirectional flow of power that seeks out subjects in the everydayness of their lives. Indeed, this system places the entire weight of the world on each person’s shoulders, with seemingly no solidarity or collective strength to resist. The spectacle functions by virtue of one of neo-liberalisms primary goals: by assessing and accessing individuals while diluting the idea of people. Thus, resistance can only be possible by seeking out and encountering real human beings and their real struggles.

II. Subsumption and the State of Capital Accumulation

Marx characterizes the phase of primitive accumulation as that “which precedes capitalist accumulation; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure” (873, my emphasis). Thus primitive accumulation is a transitionary phase, a point of rupture with past forms of political and economic organization. Preceding capitalism but leading directly too it, primitive accumulation is the originary moment the effects of which allow for capitalism to proceed and thrive. More recently, Hardt and Negri stress a break with the past represented in what they see as an entirely new phase of accumulation. Arguing against the highs and lows of a cyclical theory of capital’s development, they instead envision us as entering a new period, a fracture leading to a new form of capitalism, or a form that is at least fundamentally transformed in its field of operation and exploitation. Marx also notes that primitive accumulation, this “process…which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his labour” (874). It would seem that the neo-liberal moment is one of revisiting the underlying notions of primitive accumulation, that is, of subsuming under capital those aspects of (global) society that have until recently fallen outside of the direct control of a capitalist mentality, further divorcing the world’s producers and laboring classes from the means of social—indeed, in some cases biological—(re)production and subsistence. This process today takes the form of neo-imperialism on the global scale and privatization domestically (though privatization can operate on an equally global or transnational level). If these assessments are correct, then a new “point of departure” is at hand in a new kind of primitive accumulation.

The state’s role in this process is of central importance. David Harvey notes that the “chronic problems of overaccumulation of capital through expanded reproduction coupled with a political refusal to attempt any solution to these problems” has led to the current neo-liberal state mentality that if we just allow the market the freedom to regulate itself, it will at the same time resolve domestic economic and resulting social tensions. The question of overaccumulation, of what to do with bored capital (to put it crudely) is posed in capital’s own terms of expansion and profitability. The result is gluttonous amounts of accumulation channeled into the creation of new markets and domains of profitability, the desire to be able to sell absolutely everything to everyone. Of course new markets are not actually created (as if from thin air!) but rather are claimed from those existing aspects of society that are shared through state distribution. The accompanying result is a dismantling and subsumption of any and all social commons. Privatization allows for this new corporate owning of public goods and services, stripping the people of what they have traditionally owned collectively through the democratic state. The people find themselves continually engrossed within expanding networks of accumulation. The body’s conditions of existence increasingly exist within a realm firmly controlled by capital as scientific advances leading to cures are patented, and agribusiness’ bio-chemical sectors claim (legal!) ownership over the micro—genetic makeup—and macro—costs and subsequent distribution—aspects of the world’s food supply. Today advances that benefit humanity are quickly packaged and placed on a shelf too high for most of the world to reach.

What then is the role of the state today if it has freed itself of responsibility toward its citizens? The state is by definition part of the world stage, an entity that is both national and transnational in its occupations (in both senses of the word) and actions. If the state bows to the demands of capital and allows capital to freely express itself throughout the globe, then are we really witnessing Hardt and Negri’s claim regarding “the full realization of the relationship between the state and capital” (236)? It seems that capital is the privileged party in this relationship: capital takes on more and more of the characteristics, capacities, and responsibilities of the state, while the state becomes more and more a material and ideological apparatus for the maintenance of capital’s freedom. There is a hideous irony in the American example (to take just one) of a state that shakes the world with its hegemonic weight in the name of its citizens’ safety and security, while healthcare and education, those very apparatuses of the (re)production of a productive citizenry, are sold off to the benefit of corporate profits and at the expense of those citizens whose well-being is supposedly of the utmost importance. Freed from the yoke of its own citizenry, what distinguishes the state from the corporation if both are merely concerned with their own protection, reproduction and expansion?

III. Power’s (Global) Sphere and the Crisis of Biopolitics

Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that ‘explains’ them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims or objectives. --Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol.1, 95

Taking Foucault’s claim into account what can we say about globalization and neoliberal culture? If we know, or at least have an idea of what capital’s goal is in the current moment, then where do we begin to direct our theory or practice? If we understand that the “aims or objectives” are that of infinite accumulation, or perhaps a drive toward investing (in) every body and space on the globe with the hopes of extracting some type of return then what is there to say first?

The power relations functioning within globalization are a field of global corporeal relations; of bodies to one another, bodies to nations, bodies to corporations, and bodies to deprivation. The body, and its utility as a force productive and exploitable, is the site of both globalization’s generation and the constant threat of crisis. For a system with a goal of infinite accumulation, bodies must be effectively maintained to achieve maximum production. Sadly, however, the body’s productive capacities are often hindered by certain unproductive tendencies such as death and illness. When Foucault introduces biopolitics it is to theorize how power, traditionally concerned with the micro level of the singular body, expands to a macro level concerned with clusters of bodies: “Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem” (Foucault, Society Must be Defended 244). This does not mean that the macro subsumes the micro, but rather is an extension to accommodate new and changing conditions. Biopower invests in populations insofar as to maintain and protect capital’s investment in that population.

For it is the changing conditions in which the body finds itself early in industrial capitalism’s genesis that are at issue. The body, moving into a new system of capitalist and industrial relations (spatially and conceptually), finds itself amongst bodies as populations in and around urban centers representing complex new problems for power. Foucault locates the question of space and “control over relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live” (Foucault, Society Must be Defended 245) as central to biopolitical concerns; where and how people live, what relations they have to one another, and the conditions produced take on new importance for power.

It seems there is something of a crisis for capital in its relation to biopower. Biopower is a form of power that we can broadly attribute to the rise of capitalism, that is, of industrialization and urbanism and negative effects on populations. Here we have a number of crises that must be addressed, such as health problems due to working conditions and sanitation issues resulting from urbanism. Reforms must be made in the name of biopolitics to ensure the health and safety of populations; reproductive capacities must be secured. Yet, here is the crisis of biopolitics for capital: reforms disrupt the necessary flow and exploitation on which capital rests, disrupting the very mechanisms of an ever-increasing amount of return. The result is one of the primary factors behind the move towards globalization. As biopower begins to hinder capital, capital moves offshore to spaces not burdened by (biopolitical) labour reforms. Biopower and capital thus work for and against one another, are immanent in yet counterproductive to one another. While biopower ultimately manages bodies in their potential as productive forces, capital manages bodies as productivity and material output. A recent example of the crisis provoked by these two disciplinary mechanisms is the proposed Chinese labour reforms and the outrage voiced by U.S. corporations explored in a recent article in The New York Times (Barboza). Capital’s logic only distinguishes between addition and subtraction, losses and gains. While the biology of the producers can to some extent be taken into account for producing gains, the humanity of the producers will always equal a loss for capital.

IV. Utopian Desire and a World without End

What do we do when Utopia, this critical “literary Golem” (211) to use Jameson’s characterization, this savior form that we create out of the dust and dirt of an ever increasing planet of slums, is co-opted and subsumed under neoliberal discourse? If the “proper function of its themes lay in critical negativity, that is in their function to demystify their opposite numbers” (Jameson 211), imaging what is not and what could be, then the discourse of neoliberalism endlessly esteems what is and what will be in the future as envisioned by capital. It seems that there are two kinds of utopia at work today: that of the neoliberal capitalists, who tell us that the current system works, that it will only get better and make life better over time; and then there is the narrative of the post-capitalist utopia, that capitalism will implode and the world will be set free to explore new, more equitable realities. This latter utopia is a break that can only be brought about with the efforts of those who are willing to work toward the unknown, in the direction of an uncharted geopolitical order. If, as Jameson suggests it is indeed easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, then our task is to conceive the inconceivable and work, not towards a final goal, but towards a series of breaks that will lead us into the oblivion of an unshaped, unimagined future.

On the other hand, the first of these utopian narratives, the neoliberal capitalist version, is a teleological narrative: the world’s historical trajectory is firmly in place and building towards a time beyond time when capital will have solved all of the world’s problems (even those it is responsible for). This is of course is an impossibility, due to the very nature of capital’s logic. A utopia of capital and a utopia of humanity are incompatible since the human version would entail a harmonious static existence that excludes the continued growth necessary for capital; a human utopia is the end of all forms of overcoming, one of the necessary conditions for capital to continue to grow and expand. Capital’s vision of the future denies humanity any vision of its own; as much as capital continually denies most of the world’s population in the present in various ways, it hopes to also deny the future, by continuing to materialize its own narrative.

Utopia has seen itself worked into the very structures of neoliberal capital’s program. The utopian idea of “work-art-play, conceived as a single continuum or interchange” (Anderson 71) is already realized in many ways, with new forms of communication and affect that are central to biopolitical production. The social landscape interwoven at almost every point with capital has effectively deconstructed the public/private divide. Work can now be done from home or while on vacation, and companies no longer hire workers, but rather take on new corporate team and family members. Indeed the combination of work-art-play is very much the new corporate strategy for creating a symbiotic relationship between these, until now, different and divergent sites of social existence. Severed from the utopian dream of an un-alienated labour experience, work-art-play is now a principle structuring how capital invests in productivity.

In the present, the future is already a precarious notion. Neoliberal capitalism and privatization have made the future for individuals and populations subject to the whims of the market, an existence always structured around speculation at every level of life. How and whether one will be able to support themselves and their families? How to earn a living, or find food and shelter? These are questions that maintain much of the world in a condition of existence that is based on the perpetual fear of an uncertain future. For many people in the world today, tomorrow’s prospects are dismal.

There is a profound difference between a belief in and a desire for utopia. The neoliberal belief that we are moving towards a better future, or the more general belief that science will solve all of the world’s problems only works to disrupt the possibility of the unknown. Once all is known then there is little hope for hope. An uncritical teleology blunts the possibilities of resistance; if we are being carried toward better futures there will be no need to mobilize the present. It seems however that utopia is not an impossible future, because in many ways there are already places on Earth that have achieved dystopia.

For Jameson,

Utopian is no longer the invention and defense of a specific floorplan, but rather the story of all the arguments about how Utopia should be constructed in the first place. It is no longer the exhibit of an achieved Utopia constructed, but rather the story of its production and the very process of construction as such. (217)

The desire for utopia must be the desire to preserve the possibility of an alternative, whatever that may look like. Perhaps the best starting point to thinking through utopia is to consider the Christian prayer for a “world without end” in its temporal possibilities, a world that never ceases to change and never moves beyond the possibility of possibility.

Works Cited
Anderson, Perry. “The River of Time.” New Left Review 26 (2004): 67-77.
Barboza, David. “International Business; China Drafts Law to Empower Unions and End Labour Abuse.” The New York Times 13 Oct. 2006, late ed., sec. A: 1.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “New-liberalism, the Utopia (Becoming a Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation.” Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Trans. R. Nice. The New Press, 1998.
Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Trans. M. Imrie. Verso, 1990.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. MIT Press, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
---. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
---. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of the Political Economy – Volume I. Trans. B Fowkes. Penguin Books, 1990.

Toxic Sovereignty: Biopolitics and Cote d'Ivoire

Alex Means

Original URL

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. -Michel Foucault

Death has been sown in a voluntary or involuntary manner - justice will decide. -President Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast

In August 2006, 500-tons of toxic petrol chemicals were offloaded from a ship leased by Trafigura, a Dutch commodities firm, and then dumped in public places around Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire's largest city. In the wake of the toxic waste dumping tens of thousands have become ill and at least fifteen people have died from inhaling fumes from the open-air dump sites. The event makes visible the vulnerability of Ivorian citizens and the iniquitous structures of power responsible for such insecurity. This paper will take up the toxic crisis in Cote d'Ivoire as a point of entry into the intersection of global capitalism and the politics of human life. It discusses the erosion of Ivorian society since the mid-1980s and links the current internal political upheaval to this decline. I present a narrative of the events of August 2006, in which the various political and economic players are indicted for their complicity in this tragedy. Additionally, I situate the Ivorian catastrophe within several contemporary understandings of biopower. I address Michel Foucault, who first advances the notion of biopower, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who contemporise Foucault's theories within the framework of globalization. Lastly, Achille Mbembe locates biopower within a theory of necropower that exists ultimately as a decision over the right to live and to die. These approaches aid in mapping how events like that in Cote d'Ivoire are not isolated, and in fact point to a much wider state of emergency for economically marginalized people throughout the world.

Background

Cote d'Ivoire was once viewed as a model of development in West Africa. Although it was never completely free from its colonial relationship to France, and has never been an inclusive democracy, its well-managed agricultural economy and expansive social state had made Cote d'Ivoire one of the most stable and economically prosperous postcolonial societies in Africa. (BDHRL) During its first two decades of independence (1960-1980) it boasted astonishing rates of economic growth along with significant gains in employment, literacy, and civil infrastructure. (Ibid) When tropical commodities crashed on the world market in the 1980s the Ivorian government turned to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for support. In exchange for loans, the nation embarked on a path of structural adjustment aimed at the privatization and liberalization of their economy. Over the last two decades this switch to a market economy and adherence to structural adjustment policies has coincided with a downward trend in the quality life for the majority of Ivorians and increasing levels of state corruption and civil conflict. (HDR, 2006) During this period, life expectancy and literacy rates have dropped, access to clean water and medicine has been negatively affected, average incomes have declined, rates of HIV/AIDS infection have increased, unemployment has soared, and the once bustling tourist industry in Abidjan, once known as the “Paris of West Africa” for its skyscrapers, beaches, and nightlife, has been decimated. (Ibid)

The steady economic and social decline has coincided with the erosion of political stability in Cote d'Ivoire. In October of 2000, Laurent Gbagbo was elected president in a highly contested election. Controversy over the results sparked an internal conflict that has divided the country along political and ethnic lines, with a rebel army occupying the rural North, while the Gbagbo administration controls the densely populated south. (BDHRL) The country has had a tenuous cease fire and power-sharing agreement that has set up territorial integrity for both sides as well as creating limited political representation in the government for the northern rebels. (Ibid) This in-fighting stems from multiple causes including a compromised electoral process, deepening inequality, ethnic tensions, and a leadership mired by corruption, which has mercilessly suppressed dissent using all manner of coercion and violence. (Ibid) The Gbagbo administration and the Northern rebels have both been accused of severe human rights abuses including the institution of death squads, disappearances, torture, arbitrary arrests, and severe restrictions on civil liberties and personal freedoms. (Ibid) A complex set of economic and historical forces have shaped a moment where life for the Ivorian people exists under perpetual insecurity. It is within this context that a major environmental, political, and medical crisis has been unfolding in Cote d'Ivoire over the last several months.

The Event

On August 19, 2006, a ship called the Probo Koala docked in Abidjan’s main port. The ship itself is illustrative of the global network in which the story must be situated. The Probo Koala is Korean built, registered in Panama, and is owned by a Greek Company (Selva). When it arrived in Abidjan on the evening of the 19th the ship was under contract by a Dutch commodities firm but was taking orders from its British office. Trafigura had used the ship as an offshore gasoline refinery. After processing a load of fuel, the ship used 500-tons of a caustic chemical mixture, referred to generally as “toxic slops”, to clean out its tanks (Ibid). This industrial chemical sludge is extremely dangerous, likened to cyanide, and its proper disposal requires specialized technological and industrial capabilities. The Probo Koala had first tried to dispose of it in the Netherlands but the processing fee, around $300,000, was more than Trafigura was willing to pay. (AP, Oct 17) In early August, while Trafigura shopped for the best deal, the Probo Koala sailed from Amsterdam to Estonia and then to Nigeria. Finally Trafigura cut a deal with an Ivorian company named Tommy to dispose of the waste for around $20,000 dollars. Details still remain sketchy but it is widely believed that Tommy was a front company set up specifically to handle the waste by members of the Ivorian government (Ibid). This would imply that the British office of Trafigura was in contact with these governmental ministers negotiating the waste disposal. According to Trafigura’s public statements, they deny any and all wrong-doing, but conditions suggest that both parties were well aware that Cote d'Ivoire did not posses the facilities to properly dispose of the waste. (White)

During the early morning hours of August 19th tanker trucks offloaded the Probo Koala’s toxic cargo. The trucks proceeded to fan out across Abidjan, eventually dumping the sludge in at least 17 different public places including drains, ditches, and municipal dumps in some of Abidjan's poorest neighborhoods. (AP, Oct 17) The 6 million residents of Abidjan awoke to a thick, noxious, and choking chemical odor. As the stench of rotten eggs and garlic blanketed the city, sickness and misery quickly spread waking many people to bouts of nausea (Ibid). In the days that followed, at least fifteen died and up to 100,000 sought medical treatment for nosebleeds, vomiting, headaches, open sores, burning eyes, and fainting spells due to exposure (AP, Oct 17). The sludge was particularly harmful to children who made up the majority of the official deaths. Additionally, it is suspected that many deaths have not been counted in the official toll. For example, Marie Koko, says her eight-year-old granddaughter who died two weeks ago, was not among those counted. She says, her granddaughter was complaining of an aching head and stomach. She says, her granddaughter started to vomit over and over again. She says, she gave her medicine and took her to the hospital, but the next day she died (Wild).

With official figures in dispute and many residents unable to access medical care, it is nearly impossible to gage the true extent of the human destruction. It is extremely difficult to calculate how many years this incident will negatively affect the health of Abidjan’s residents. Similarly, the event has made an already shaky political situation more unstable as feelings of bitterness, outrage, and fear permeate the social fabric. Gbich, an Ivorian news paper, made the bold statement: “Ivorians have you understood? Your lives are worthless to our leaders” (AP, Sept 19).

Globalization and Biopolitics

Such tragedy calls into question the politics of human life within contemporary understandings of power, both in the national and international contexts. Michel Foucault formulated power as a force of production that circulates through the totality of social, economic, and political relationships. In Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France he outlined a history of power in which he describes a transition from a pre-industrial notion of sovereign power, to an industrial disciplinary state, to a Fordist society of control. In the society of control, power was transformed from an external mechanism of production to an internalized form of biopower where life itself became what was ordered and reproduced. (Foucault) Biopower in this context is understood to be the nexus where the body intersects with various productive and destructive forms of political power, which reach into the interior of life itself, and dictate its terms. Biopolitics then can be said to describe the political position of life in relation to the totality of social, legal, local, national, and international structures in which it is engaged. In Foucault's conception, biopower functioned to produce an equilibrium within the totality of these social relations (Ibid).

In their book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer a prescient reconceptualization of biopower within the context of globalization. They claim that although Foucault at times “grasped the horizon” of global capitalism, his entrenchment in a state socialist system prevented him from anticipating it in its current dynamisms. (Hardt and Negri, 2000) Hardt and Negri argue that the global reconfiguration of production with its flexible networks, liquid flow of information and capital, and its reliance on armies, has once again changed the way power operates. Power has been liberated from the circuits of the Fordist-state as public institutions and infrastructure have been sold off and national economies have become tightly interlinked (Ibid). Although the metaphor of the Fordist-state was probably never apt in the case of Cote d'Ivoire, the shift to a free market economy has coincided with a deepening level of economic hardship.

In 1999, 28 percent of Ivorians lived below the poverty level and now the figure is 44 percent, according to U.N. statistics, and is increasing. More and more Ivorians are having trouble finding enough food. This extreme poverty, in a country which was one of the best-off countries in West Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, has forced many people to live near or on garbage dumps in Abidjan because they are forced to survive by picking through trash for salable items (Dunkel).

Within the processes of global power, this kind of economic and social degeneration has become more common (Rifkin). Hardt and Negri claim that the reality of an interlocking global economy means that attaining equilibrium is no longer a primary function of power. Life is being produced and dictated within widening gaps of privilege and exclusion. Intense imbalances in wealth and resources have been exacerbated through a world of networks where power produces new forms of wealth creation and deepening levels of inequality. Hardt and Negri argue that new spheres of economic activity have to be perpetually created to forward the processes of growth and accumulation. This feature of global capitalism makes entire modes of production, labor, and existence irrelevant and disposable (Bauman). Hardt and Negri claim that as capital has become more abstract and fluid, racing across the globe defying time and space, human life has become increasingly determined through interconnected webs of information and technology. (Hardt and Negri, 2000) How do we understand such a theorization of global power within a national context like that of Cote d'Ivoire?

According to Hardt and Negri, as the ability of states to exert control over their national economic situations has deteriorated, the sovereign power of the nation state has declined. While the relative strengths and weaknesses of nation states remain open to debate, their argument concerning the erosion of civil societies and the rise of a militarized state under this global power is worth observing. They argue that social and legal structures that mediate between power and subjectivity have been demolished by neoliberalism, and that the state has been reduced to an emergency/security apparatus existing primarily to keep order for the uninterrupted flow of capital. (Ibid) Within this configuration of the modern state, citizenship has given way to biopolitical positions increasingly defined by widespread violence and marginalization. (Hardt and Negri, 2004) Absent any kind of social contract, citizenship is detached from the national context, and left to flounder within a web of naked power and profiteering. Hardt and Negri claim that as civil protections have been eroded, the body and the state remain linked only through a context of war and profit. In Multitude they argue that the sovereign authority of nation-states, even the most dominant nation states, is declining, and there is emerging a new supernational form of sovereignty, a global empire, the conditions and nature of war and political violence are necessarily changing. War is becoming a general phenomenon, global and interminable (Ibid, p.3).

This global empire makes war a general state of social existence for both the economically excluded as well as an increasingly paranoid and security-conscious elite. The collusion of the Ivorian government in the toxic waste dumping raises serious questions regarding the position of the citizen, state power, and global capital. If war is a general state of social existence then how do we interpret the event within this global modality of power? The toxic situation in Cote d'Ivoire should not be viewed in isolation but rather as part of an ongoing struggle in which the Ivorian citizenry and other populations throughout the world are engaged. Similar to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, even in the world’s wealthiest nation, the inefficient, the poor, the elderly, and the racially marginalized can no longer count on the concern or the competency of government. Reminiscent of the helplessness experienced by the captive citizens of New Orleans who could not afford to escape the Hurricane, an Ivorian woman who upon asking her doctor how to protect herself from the waste was told that: “the only cure was for her was to move away.” Her response: "I live in an affected area and I cannot afford to move, so what can I do?" (BBC, Sept 7). Eric Cadzyn has noted that within the cold economic ideology of global capitalism, who lives and who dies comes down to “simple affordability that cuts across national borders”, where the only justification that is needed for the destruction of life is a simple apology, “sorry we cannot afford to save your life” (Cadzyn, p. 17). Although existing in radically different contexts, the helplessness of citizens trapped by their poverty in the poisoned waters of News Orleans and the Ivorians choking on the toxic fumes in Abidjan can be seen as occupying a symbiotic field. Their fates are interwoven through the utter privatization of their life-chances in the face of a power that increasingly takes form in the destruction of social life.

Necropolitics

Achille Mbembe writes that Africa still occupies the western imagination as a place of “absence”, “lack”, “non-being”, “in short, “nothingness” (Mbembe, P. 4). These notions have deeply seeded roots in the racist imaginary of European colonialism and in the continued manifestations of western imperialism. Achille Mbembe’s interpretation takes this dynamic into account when conceiving biopower in the context of Africa. Influenced by Giorgio Agamben who has argued that it is necessary to approach biopower from the perspective of the state of exception, this conception offers a different angle from which to engage with biopolitics. Agamben argues that as the rights of the citizens are seized, life is reduced to a category of “bare life” where the right to kill functions as the primary mode of power (Agamben). Biopower then, in this context, is the power to rule over life, to take it at will, as it is no longer a productive force but a destructive meeting of body and violence. Mbembe labels this form of destructive power necropower. He is specifically interested in exploring these issues within the African context. In On the Postcolony, Mbembe states that within the current context of globalization, state power in Africa has shifted to a form of private indirect government characterized by decentered regimes of profiteering underpinned by privatized violence, social death, and terror (Mbembe). Mbembe claims that hope for a more just future resides in the recognition of this construct of necropolitics. If democracy is to have a chance, we must confront the destructive way in which power now excersises itself. Quoted from an interview with Christian Hoeller from Springerin Magazine, Mbembe states that:

Democracy as a form of government and as a culture of public life does not have a future in Africa - or for that matter, elsewhere in the world - if it is not rethought precisely from the crucible of necropower. By necropower, I have in mind the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, sovereign power imagines itself and is deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead (Hoeller).

These deathscapes are resultant from the emergence of nation states stripped of all social and legal structures where the sovereign power of the state is predicated on its application of violence within a state of exception. Mbembe claims that this sovereign power exists within a matrix of crisscrossing layers of capital flows that have made looting and terror the rule and has pushed populations into despairing positions, which Mbembe equates to living dead, or zombification (Mbembe). The toxic dumping in Cote d'Ivoire illustrates the level of insecurity facing African citizens where death is literally leaking into the very soil under their feet. In Mbembe’s analysis, a constant state of exception and the residual psychic and social scars of colonialism prevent life from ever really existing in places like Cote d'Ivoire. In the postcolony, life is bound with the perpetual the presence of death (Ibid).

In the wake of the waste dumping, there was a widespread recognition among Ivorians and the international community that profit had been placed before the lives of Ivorian citizens. Although the discourses of biopower that Hardt and Negri and Achille Mbembe describe are illustrative of a stark reality, and the situation in Cote d'Ivoire is dire, possibilities for agency and collective action still exist. As Jean Comoroff insightfully argues, although the “capricious power of structural violence are all too evidently capable of severing life from its civic endowment and social value, no act of sovereignty can perpetrate on human beings a total alienation from meaning and will” (Comoroff, p. 19). Despite having a government that has violently suppressed civil protest in the past, Ivorian citizens did not stand mute in the wake of the disaster. In the days following the catastrophe, thousands of Abidjan's residents took to the streets to protest. With wet rags tied around their faces to protect themselves from the stench, they expressed their outrage and frustration by setting up roadblocks, marching, and holding rallies. They carried placards in the streets reading: “they sold our health”, “they are killing us for money”, “it is a crime against humanity”, and “they sold away the lives of the people of this country, for crumbs” (BBC,Sept 7). These actions were directed toward the Ivorian leadership for their complicity in corporate greed and exploitation as well their indifference to the lives of their citizenry. Outrage has also been directed at the inability of the international community to enforce established rules governing the illegal trade in toxic waste which is slowly creating more deathscapes like the one in Cote d'Ivoire. Such acts of resistance, while offering hope that agency and collective action still exist even in the most difficult of circumstances, may not be enough to stem the tide of waste flowing into the developing world from the west. According to Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, who has monitored hazardous waste trade for 17 years, there is more evidence of illegal toxic waste dumping today than at any time in the past. (BAN, Sept 8) He claims that, “ironically today we have the international rules to control or prohibit such global dumping but we are lacking in the diligent enforcement and implementation of these hard won laws” and “unfortunately if it’s easy to poison the poor for profit, unscrupulous operators and businesses will do it” (Ibid).

The Cote d'Ivoire toxic waste scandal sheds light on a reality where the poison of the west is being dumped indiscriminately on the global poor. The incident in Cote d'Ivoire does not exist in isolation as developing nations are increasingly being used as a dump sites for western refuse. Many of these nations do not have the regulations, resources, or facilities to properly dispose of these waste products thus exposing their water, food, air, and citizens to an uncertain future. As demonstrated by the conditions in Cote d'Ivoire, this kind of activity has a profound impact not only on the environment and human health but on political stability as well. The United States alone is thought to be responsible for exporting many hundreds of thousands of tons of hazardous waste to the developing world every year despite international rules which forbid such trafficking (Kahn).

All down the West African coast, ships registered in America and Europe unload containers filled with old computers, slops, and used medical equipment. Scrap merchants, corrupt politi-cians and underpaid civil servants take charge of this rubbish and, for a few dollars, will dump them off coastlines and on landfill sites (AP, Oct 17). These activities are sowing death into the environmental and social fabric of these states. As the developing world scrambles to overcome an increasing digital divide, one of the biggest problems is the 20-50 million tons of “e-waste” that is being created and exported every year from the west. These old computers, cell phones, and television sets contain lead, mercury, cadmium, and other toxic compounds. Much of this waste is being burned, sending clouds of toxic smoke into the air, or it is being left to rot in large open dumps, leaking poisonous metals into the ground and water supply. The Basal Action Network, a global watchdog organization which monitors the trade in toxic waste, has recently turned its attention toward what they see as a coming “tsunami of electronic waste” ready to hit the African shore with the cross-over to Microsoft Vista. This toxic storm stands in contrast to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's charitable commitment "to bring innovations in health and learning to the global community." (BAN, Jan 30) Jim Puckett of BAN states,

Today with the release of Vista, Microsoft could bring both a massive digital dump and a perpetuation of the digital divide to the global community. It is shameful how little innovation and concern the electronics industry continues to demonstrate for the long-term consequences of their products in light of their abilities to innovate front-end gadgetry to encourage sales. A truly responsible industry will take steps to ensure that innovation does not automatically equate to obsolescence, toxic waste and a growing population of hardware have-nots. (Ibid)

Africa has long existed as a sphere from which the west could extrapolate wealth and resources. Now it appears that it increasingly exists to absorb the garbage when those resources have fulfilled their productive purpose. Despite the environmental and human consequences, the short term economic benefit of off-loading waste in places devoid of regulations and infrastructure to safely dispose of it, continues to win out for western companies.

Conclusion

Although some arrests have been made and several top government officials in Cote d’Ivoire have resigned, (only to be later reinstated) justice remains elusive, as who to blame for the disaster is unclear while accusations fly between Trafigura, the Ivorian government, and international human rights advocates. In February 2007, a court decision was handed down that required Trafigura to pay $200 million dollars to the Ivorian government. Ironically, a large portion of this money will go toward building a facility that will be able to handle such toxic waste disposal safely. The other funds will ostensibly go toward cleaning up the dump sites and compensating victims for medical expenses. The Cote d'Ivoire crisis could present an opportunity to question destructive practices within an international context of power that must be grappled with before anything like justice or democracy can take root in Cote d'Ivoire or elsewhere. If any good comes out of this, it will probably be that the incident has attracted so much outrage and attention. How can this be turned into productive action toward preventing such exploitive activities? Why can't international laws be enforced or new laws created to stem the flow of waste into these countries? A discussion of biopower is one way of trying to grapple with the complexities that exist between global capitalism and national and local realities. But this way of mapping power also brings up some fundamental questions regarding the connection between the breakdown of states like Cote d'Ivoire, exploitation like toxic waste dumping, and the logic of global capitalism. Is disorder and war really in the interest of capital? If not, then how do we theorize political conflict in places like Cote d'Ivoire? If we accept that there is a global capitalist system that operates through a logic of endless accumulation, how and why do these deathscapes function within this system? Why don’t or can’t local elites put these bodies to work? Is it because the space of the country is more valuable as a dumping ground? If the political strife is the result of economic inequalities, then are these conflicts not, in fact, organized against capital? If so, then nations such as Cote d'Ivoire may offer evidence of the fraying-at-the-edges of global capital, the impossibility and impracticality of creating the kind of seamless, all-encompassing economic logic that we all seem to have accepted as globalization.

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
Associated Press. “From Rich to Poor: Ivory Coast Tragedy Highlights Hazardous Trade on the Rise” October 17, 2006. Basil Action Network. Available online at: http://www.ban.org/ban_news/2006/061017_rich_to_poor.html
Associated Press. “UN Says Dumping of Waste clearly Violated International Agreements” September 19, 2006. Basil Action Network. Available online at http://www.ban.org/ban_news/2006/060919_violated_agreements.html
Bavier, Joe. “Ivory Coast Government Panel Releases Toxic Waste Findings” November 23, 2006. VOA News Aavilable online at: http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-23-voa22.cfm
Basel Action Network. (BAN) “Global Out Break of Toxic Waste Dumping Demands immediate Enforcement of International Law”September 8, 2006. Available online at: http://www.ban.org/ban_news/2006/060908_global_outbreak.html
Basal Action Network. (BAN) “Microsoft Vista Could Hurt Health in Developing Countries” January 30, 2007. Available online at: http://www.ban.org/ban_news/2007/070130_could_harm_developing_countries.html
Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. (Polity Press, 2003)
BBC News. “Help Urged for Ivory Coast Tragedy” November 24, 2006. Available online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6180604.stm
BBC News. “Ivory Coast: Collapse of the Government of National Unity” September 7, 2006. Available Online at: http://sociolingo.wordpress.com/2006/09/07/ivory-coast-collapse-of-the government-of-national-unity/
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. (BDHRL) Annual Report 2005. Available online at: http://www.nationbynation.com/Ivory%20Coast/Human.html
Cadzyn, Eric. “Bioeconomics, Culture and Politics after Globalization.” Unpublished Draft
Comaroff, Jean. “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: Aids and the Neoliberal Order.” Public Culture 19.1 (February 2007)
Dunkel, G. “Poverty and Struggle in the Ivory Coast” October 28, 2006. Workers World. Available online at: http://www.workers.org/2006/world/ivory-coast-1102/
Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France 1975-1976 (Picador, 1997)
Hardt, Michael. Negri, Antonio. Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)
Hardt, Michael. Negri, Antonio. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin Press, 2004)
Hoeller, Christian. “Interview with Achille Mbembe.” Springerin Magazine. Available online at: http://www.stanford.edu/~mayadodd/mbembe.html
United Nation Human Development Report 2006 (HDR) Available online at: http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/
Kahn, Jeremy. “How First World Garbage Makes Africans Sick” September 22, 2006. Slate Magazine. Available online at: http://www.slate.com/id/2150243
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. (University of California Press, Berkeley 2001)
Rifkin, Jeremy. “Capitalism's Future on Trial” July 22, 2005. The Guardian. Available online at: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0622-25.htm
Selva, Neera. “Toxic Shock: How Western Rubbish is Destroying Africa” September 21, 2006. Basil Action Network. Available online at http://www.ban.org/ban_news/2006/060921_toxic_shock.html
Wild, Franz. “Number of Ill climbs in Ivory Coast Toxic Waste Scandal” September 16, 2006 VOA News. Available Online at: http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2006-09/2006-09-15-voa27.cfm?CFID=83004253&CFTOKEN=37098782
White, Anne-France. “Dimas Outraged at EU Toxic Waste Shipment” September 28, 2006. Basil
Action Network. Available online at: http://www.ban.org/ban_news/2006/060928_dimas_outraged.html

Disciplinary Power, Transnational Labour, and the Politics of Representation in Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt

Y-Dang Troeung

Original URL

Stephanie Black’s important documentary Life and Debt contains a segment that focuses on a free trade zone established in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1980s. Black provides a compelling visual and narrative account of the processes of globalization leading up to the creation of this free zone and of the exploitive working conditions endured by the local Jamaicans within its military-style guarded walls. The Kingston free zone is represented as a site of transnational labour that exists outside the territorial and economic boundaries of Jamaica. Black shows how, inside this extra-territorial space, the bodies of the Jamaican workers become tools for capital accumulation by transnational corporations and how this exploitation is effected through the maintenance of a disciplined and subjected workforce. In these respects, Black’s representation of the Kingston free zone serves as a compelling example of the continuing operations of disciplinary power in current conditions of global capitalism.

However, in approaching an analysis of the Kingston free zone scene from this critical perspective, I am interested not only in what is signified about the power configurations of global capitalism but also in the kinds of stereotypes and tropes that are mobilized in Black’s representation of the group of Asian transnational labourers introduced into the Kingston free zone to displace the Jamaican workers. The issue that I wish to take up here has to do with the extent to which the film participates in an economy of representation that intentionally or unintentionally exports what has come to be an essential trope of global labour: the existence of a dispersed Asian labour community (and of a Asian female worker more specifically) that possesses certain “innate” characteristics suitable to labour in sites of transnational production. Building on Laura Kang’s analysis of the representations of Asian women as transnational labour, this paper will argue that Black’s representation of the Asian female transnational worker relies on two representational patterns that are frequently employed in various descriptive and critical accounts of labour exploitation in globalization. These tendencies, as identified by Kang, include a spatial-temporal distancing and a visual fixing of the Asian woman at transnational sites of labour, both of which contribute to the discursive production and circulation of the Asian woman as natural labour power for global capitalism (165-166). This paper will explore the extent to which these representational limits in Life and Debt affect the film’s overall critique of existing regimes of transnational capital, and will thus use the film to illustrate some of the challenges facing cultural criticism today.

Historical Background

It is useful to situate Black’s representation of the Kingston free zone within a broader historical context related to the creation of “export-oriented industrialization” (EOI) programs beginning in the 1960s. Swasti Mitter, in her book Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy, explains how the EOI model, encouraged by international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, was conceived of as a way to reduce the national debt of non-European countries—labeled as “Third World”—by having these countries sell their labour power and by having transnational companies from “First World” countries provide the necessary capital (7-8). A common arrangement under the EOI model would involve the provision of loans from the IMF or the World Bank to developing nations. These loans, sometimes referred to today as “tied-aid”—would be contingent upon conditions such as the “elimination of import tariffs that [would] protect domestic industry but hamper multinationals, tax breaks for foreign investors and the creation of free trade zones . . . control of wages, abolition of price controls and any subsidies for food and other necessities” (Fuentes and Ehrenreich 37-38). This international industrial restructuring had the effect of allowing transnational corporations (TNCs) to dictate to a large extent the work conditions of workers within a particular nation-state—exploitive conditions that were often enforced rather than contested by local military institutions (Mitter 9). This configuration was apparent in “export processing zones” or “free trade zones,” strategically chosen areas where a transnational corporation would relocate production in order to evade local economic controls and to employ a low-paid workforce.

As Mitter observes, “in free trade zones—the enclaves reserved for the export-led production of the subsidiaries and subcontractors of transnational corporations—nearly 80 per cent of the workers are women” (14). Mitter argues, however, that this disproportionate gender representation must be understood not in terms of any kind of biological suitability on the part of women, but in terms of an active recruitment strategy on the part of corporate management to compose its workforce of individuals already socially and economically marginalized, and who are thus more easily lured into accepting exploitative work conditions (13). The most common of these conditions include poor-pay, job insecurity, and the prohibition of assembly.

These material consequences of economic globalization policies are explored in Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt through the example of Jamaica, a country that has emerged from a history of colonialism to enter into what is shown to be in many ways a comparably dark period of globalization. While it is important to note that Jamaica entered into its first IMF agreement in 1977, and that it presently owes $4.5 Billion to the IMF and to other international lending agencies, a comprehensive summary of Black’s portrayal of the devastating impact of free trade, international lending, and structural adjustment policies on the everyday lives of Jamaicans is outside the scope of this paper. Rather, I wish to address more specifically Black’s treatment of the damaging effects of free zones on the people of Jamaica.

In the segment focused on the Kingston free zone, the viewer is introduced to the workers who sew five days a week to earn $1200 Jamaican dollars, which is equivalent to $30 U.S. per week. The heavily-secured free zone, for which the Jamaican government is still paying back loans, consists of garment factories owned by American corporations who “are not liable to local controls” (Life and Debt). These corporations are able to evade import tariffs on garment materials, which arrive by the shipload from the U.S., are assembled by the free zone workers, and are then put back on ships, “never in effect having touched the shores of Jamaica” (Life and Debt). Such impediments on local economic flows contradict the official rationale that the free zones provide an economic and social benefit to the nation-state of Jamaica. The inequities of free zones are also apparent in work conditions imposed on the Jamaican workers, who are forbidden from unionizing, and are frequently fired without cause. When the workers at the Kingston free zone eventually organize a work stoppage to protest their exploitive situation, a group of Asian labourers are brought into the free zone to finish the required work before the factory is closed down and relocated to another area.[1] In depicting the social and economic crisis incited by the shifting presence of transnational capital in Jamaica, Life and Debt attempts to capture a sense of the lived effects of globalization in general, and of free trade zones in particular, on the people who these social-historical formations purportedly benefit.

Disciplinary Power and Sites of Transnational Labour

Michel Foucault’s ideas about the operations of modern disciplinary power—and about the disciplinary ordering of space in particular—are useful to understanding Black’s representation of the Kingston free zone in Life and Debt. The first image of this free zone is an image of enclosure. The viewer sees a large number of Jamaican workers walking through the barred-metal gates of the zone structure, which is surrounded by concrete and barbed wire walls that extend beyond the perspective of the camera. An overhead shot of the free zone depicts a vast walled-in compound, complete with its own internal streets and composed of identical-looking factory buildings. As Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, “discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself” (141). He goes on to argue that the “principle of enclosure” functions through “elementary location or partitioning. Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual” (143). Foucault’s understanding of the disciplinary ordering of space to enhance visibility and supervision is apparent not only in the architectural design of the free zone compound as a whole, but also in the interior spatial organization of each individual factory. The viewer sees the open interior of the factory as the camera pans across seemingly endless rows of women seated at garment workstations. Presumably, this arrangement is intended to maximize productivity by keeping workers within close enough proximity to invite self-monitoring but not close enough to invite communication.

Foucault’s concept of partitioning is illustrated by the anecdotal account given by one of the Jamaican workers. She describes her work conditions as the following: “You can’t talk to nobody. You can’t eat. You can’t get up to go to the bathroom. They’re watching you . . . It’s like you’re working under slavery” (Life and Debt). Like the “analytical space” of the enclosure, the factory space of the free zone factory corresponds “not only to the need to supervise, to break dangerous communications, but also to create a useful space” (Foucault 144). In the example of the Kingston free zone, we see that space is ordered to maximize the utility of disciplined bodies, which themselves become places for capital accumulation. To an extent, Black’s depiction here of a contemporary labour situation in which the intense regulation of physical bodies is more primary than the molding or disciplining of subjectivities suggests a return to an almost feudal system of wage-slavery. Thus, a strict application of Foucault’s concept of disciplinary society to an analysis of the situation Black represents would almost appear to be a mischaracterization. What Black conveys in this scene is the way in which subjectivities have been stripped down to bare labour within the space of free zones. In any case, Black’s overall representation of the Kingston free zone in Life and Debt lends itself to a Foucauldian explication of disciplinary power as operating through the ordering of space.

Other critics, however, have argued that such modes of representing the space of free zones can create a sense of spatial-temporal distancing that further estranges the workers within these zones. Laura Kang, for instance, discusses this representational tendency specifically in relation to the critical discourse surrounding the condition of Asian women within transnational factories. She argues that even in the discursive forms that seek to “uncover” or “report on” the hidden realities of this situation, “often these women workers are not only relegated to a distinct locale in a faraway place, but this geographical distance is mutually reinforced by figuring them as living in a belated moment of both global capitalist progress” (176). One example that she uses is the representation of transnational sites of labour that transcend territorial, social, and economic boundaries (177). While Kang acknowledges that many free trade zones and export-processing zones “have borne little correspondence to actual delineations of geographical contiguity or international borders,” the emphasis in critical discourse on representing these zones as extra-territorial spaces “has the effect of producing an estrangement” that detracts from the local and global corporate alliances responsible for the very real exploitation in these zones (178).

In Life and Debt, the impression of geographical remoteness is effected through the visual and narrative representation of the Kingston free zone as socially, spatially, and economically demarcated from the rest of Jamaica. The restricted accessibility of the Kingston free zone is illustrated by the security procedures that the workers are subjected to. We see that, once they pass through the metal gates of the compound, the workers must then proceed single file through another set of gates where they undergo a security check. The gateways in the Kingston free zone are guarded by “zone police” who verify the “special passes” of each person passing through the gates. The signs hanging on the concrete walls of the compound also work to symbolically demarcate the space of the free zone. One sign specifies that “all persons entering and leaving the Kingston free zone are subject to be searched”; another sign states that “no children under 17 are allowed on the free zone compound”; and finally one sign specifies that “no food or any other goods should be taken in the Kingston free zone for sale” (Life and Debt). These signs highlight the social fragmentation wrought by the free zone through the tight control of bodies and of the goods moving in and out of the zone.

The free zone’s spatial demarcation is conveyed not only through powerful overhead shots of the walled-in compound but also through the commentary preceding these images. One Jamaican worker describes the free zone as an “area . . . like a state within a country” (Life and Debt). Later in the scene, the viewer sees even more expansive overhead shots that depict the free zone’s geographical positioning on the coast of Jamaica. The following commentary is overlaid with the images of ships leaving and arriving at these coastal ports: “The free zone operates within the theoretical thing that is not even part of Jamaica. It is a separate entity. So the goods come in in a container and go through guarded gates. After it leaves the free zone it goes back onto the ship never in effect having touched the shores of Jamaica” (Life and Debt). As a “separate entity,” the free zone is exempt from the usual economic “laws or the systems that normally govern a country’s operations” (Life and Debt). While such visual and discursive accounts paint a picture of the political-economic autonomy of the Kingston free zone from the rest of Jamaica, they also imbue the free zone with an aura of alien remoteness that casts the exploitation of workers within these zones as removed from the motivated and material agents of power responsible for this exploitation. This mode of representation does more to circulate the image of the free zone as a broad symbol of globalization than it does to address or probe the question of what can be done to contest those corporate powers who are accountable.

This tendency in Black’s film to produce an estranging effect with respect to the Jamaican workers is also true with respect to the representation of the Asian transnational labourers who are brought into the free zone to displace the Jamaicans. While the documentary’s paralleling of the situation of Jamaican labourers and Asian labourers within the Kingston free zone effects a critique of globalization by suggesting the international scope of labour exploitation in present circumstances, this documentary construction also further illustrates the problem of spatial-temporal distancing within the film’s representational framework.

Referring to the Asian transnational labourers, one Jamaican worker describes: “these workers are brought in hundreds. And they live in what we consider to be a “camp situation”. They’re all housed in one place” (Life and Debt). Not only are the Asian workers brought to a place that is unmoored from the nation-state of Jamaica but they are relegated to a demarcated area within the free zone itself. The “camp situation” in which the Asian workers live functions as a kind of ethnic enclave that separates them from the local Jamaican workers. What is occluded in the documentary is a depiction or a discussion of the physical “camp situation” itself. Instead, the viewer primarily catches glimpses of female Asian workers in brief camera flashes showing them crowded into transport vehicles. The only explanation given for this representational impenetrability is one provided by a voice over from a Jamaican news broadcast: “We were not allowed into one of the main factories. But our camera caught a glimpse of the interior” (Life and Debt). Even more than the Jamaican workers, then, the Asian transnational workers are imbued with a sense of remoteness or mysterious other-worldliness that “privileges the mobile, disembodied agency of capitalist accumulation” (Kang 176). This tendency to “sight” the female Asian transnational labourer but to simultaneously refuse to go beyond a surface-level representation of her situation in global capitalism is a point I will return to shortly.

Disciplinary Power and Sighting Transnational Labourers

In addition to his theorizations about the disciplinary ordering of space, Foucault’s explication of the discursive construction of “docile bodies” is relevant to the understanding of the condition of workers within transnational sites of labour. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how “discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (138). A “docile body,” according to Foucault is one that “may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136). Many feminist theorists have taken up Foucault’s concept of docile bodies to explain the operations of modern patriarchal power in terms of the disciplinary regimes of femininity that work to inscribe an inferior status on the surface of women’s bodies.[2] The inscription of a specific biological status on the bodies of women employed in transnational factories is particularly evident in the corporate discourse that delineates various groups of women as naturally suited to the types of labour within these environments. In this context, disciplinary discourses work to justify the wage exploitation of the workers within the space of the free zone on the basis of a natural suitability on the part of the workers.

A clear example of this kind of justification is apparent in the wage exploitation of the Jamaican female labour force in Life and Debt. A Jamaican woman employed at the free zone encapsulates this exploitation in the following account: “a lot of pressure; they pressure you a lot; they tell you you have to go fast fast fast . . . We have to work five days a week to get 1200 Jamaican dollars, which [is] valued 30 US dollars” (Life and Debt). In addition to being economically exploited and physically over-worked, the Jamaican workers are forbidden from unionizing. The requirement of the Jamaican workers to perform repetitive and demanding physical labour under military style conditions, to accept unfair wages, and to be forbidden from assembling are strategically planned measures of control implemented on the part of management to maintain a docile and subjected workforce.

These overt disciplinary measures are conjoined with the discourses of global capitalism that work to discipline the subjectivities of the Jamaican workers. One of the male commentators explains why the free zones were initially established in Jamaica: “The free zones came into Jamaica in the 1980s. The US government decided on a Caribbean-based initiative with the idea of creating a lot of employment at the lower level bases” (Life and Debt; my emphasis). Implicit in this rationale is the attribution of inferior biological characteristics on the bodies of the Jamaica labourers. “Lower level” of course implies the level of un-skilled or semi-skilled labour—designations which are attached to the region and the Jamaican workers as a priori characteristics rather than as historically specific effects of global capitalism. The “low-level” Jamaican workforce, which is shown to be overwhelming female in proportion, becomes a naturalized attribute of the region rather than one that is discursively prescribed. This gender and racial encoding of bodies as means of justifying labour exploitation becomes even more apparent in Life and Debt when we see that not only are transnational corporations prepared to “move the production to areas that are cheaper for them” but they are also prepared to bring in “cheaper” workforces to production areas.

Before returning to a specific discussion of the film, I would like to situate Black’s representation of the Asian transnational workforce in Life and Debt in relation to other texts that have dealt with this topic. In her study of Malay women workers in transnational factories, Aihwa Ong identifies the often-paired traits of “nimble fingers” and “slow wit” that are assigned to Asian women workers in transnational factories. Ong quotes a Malaysian investment brochure to illustrate the management literature that is typical of this discourse: “Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care. Who, therefore could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench assembly production line than the oriental girl?” (qtd. in Ong 152). The infantilizing label of “oriental girl” implies passivity and docility, as if these traits were naturally inherent to the Asian female worker. Laura Kang notes that to the extent that such descriptions about the youth of Asian women workers are accurate, they seldom convey the fact that “the heavy concentration of young female workers is the effect of a consciously pursued recruitment, hiring, and promotion strategy on the part of the firms” (192). In addition to the emphasis on youth, the justificatory logic at work in the Malaysian investment brochure is based on ascribing the biological traits of dexterity and super-human levels of patience to the female Asian assembly-line worker. Semi-skilled labour somehow becomes something that the Asian women worker is naturally suited for, when in effect these are “feminine” traits that Malay peasant women are required to adopt in order to gain employment (Ong 152). These examples illustrate the way in which the bodies of Asian female workers are encoded with the inherent characteristics of passivity, docility, dexterity, and infinite patience to perform assembly-line labour.

To an extent, the appearance of Asian workers in Life and Debt mobilizes this stereotypical trope of the Asian female labourer. I have already discussed the representational problematics pertaining to the spatial and temporal distancing of the Asian transnational workers in the Kingston free zone. This emphasis on remoteness is combined with an equally problematic tendency to represent the female Asian transnational worker as a natural embodiment of labour power for global capitalism. In this respect, Black’s representation bears some similarity to the representational patterns employed in many texts that aim to expose and criticize the deployment of Asian women as transnational labour. Laura Kang makes this claim:

The unexamined identification of “Asian women” with its assured aura of both racial commonality and continental distinction could work to reinforce . . . naturalizing figurations. While these laboring subjects are granted a degree of socioeconomic agency, they are figured as enabling corporate exploitation by “accepting” or being “willing” to work under such terms and conditions. The inferior conditions under which their bodies and labour power are mobilized are rendered as inevitable even for those who would vociferously decry their exploitation.” (191)

Without denying the importance of exposing global inequities, Kang is concerned with unexamined assumptions about Asian women workers that get circulated in “the most well-intentioned representations” (165). She argues that in these texts there is often a visual or textual “fixation” on the Asian female working body that eclipses “a larger scene of transnational coordination” (164). Rather than interrogating the historical and material specificities of this figure, those texts that are avowedly the most critical of the exploitation of transnational workers in global capitalism often fail to go beyond a certain level of iconic fixity in their representation of the female Asian transnational worker.

It is through this kind of visual fixation that, I would argue, the Asian female working body is figured in Life and Debt. The first image that we see of the group of Asian transnational labourers brought into the Kingston free zone—rumored to be 800 in number—is a close-up of a young Asian women in the window a transport vehicle. She appears to be a teenager of no more than seventeen years of age. Her small hands are held beneath her chin, and she stares right at the camera with an almost expressionless gaze. The camera follows her moving image in the transport vehicle. She remains an anonymous figure in the documentary. If, as Laura Kang argues, the representation of a faceless Asian women bent over a tiny Ricoh watch part has become “one of the emblematic images of the global assembly line,” (164) then I would suggest that the representation of a young Asian girl being shuttled to an undisclosed work site has arguably become an emblematic image of transnational labour under global capitalism. While this image of the Asian girl in the window may be visually compelling, it conveys little about this subject’s historical materiality. From where exactly, and under what circumstances was she, and the other 800 Asian labourers, displaced? What kinds of conditions were these labourers forced to endure once inside the free zone? What network of global alliances were responsible for bringing them there? These important questions are elided in Black’s documentary composition of the Kingston free zone sequence. Admittedly, there are narrative limits to the film, and Life and Debt is clearly a film in the main about Jamaica and about the lived effects of globalization on Jamaicans; thus, a full account of the story of the Asian transnational labourers in Jamaica cannot realistically be expected from the film. This being said, however, I question how well the film treads that crucial line between including narrative emplotments that buttress the overall politics of the film and mobilizing stereotypical images and tropes that undermine its political objectives in the end.

One aspect of the film that suggests the latter of these two possibilities is the film’s uncritical portrayal of “racial commonality and continental distinction” among the Asian transnational workers (Kang 191). In Life and Debt, one female Jamaican worker comments, “they [the Asian workers in the free zone] don’t object to nothing because they are getting paid in US.” While such statements belie the Jamaican women’s internalization of the gender and racial stereotypes about Asian workers—stereotypes about obedience and willingness that have long been dessiminated by global capitalists as a way to attract foreign investment—I wonder whether Black’s representational patterns serve to dismantle or to reinscribe such essentialist stereotypes. Near the end of the free zone sequence, a male commentator who is presumably involved in the economic initiatives of the local government, states: “Obviously we’re trying to provide employment for Jamaicans, not Asians. They claim that they couldn’t get the people in Jamaica with the skill level they needed for that job” (Life and Debt; my emphasis). The film’s naming of the 800 transported labourers simply as “Asians” is highly problematic in that it ascribes one homogenous label to a population of over 3 billion people.

Furthermore, while this troubling claim that the Asian workers are more naturally suited to semi-skilled labour than the Jamaicans is clearly a motivated figuration disseminated by management, the discursive problematic in Life and Debt resides in the fact that this stereotypical claim is not clearly dispelled. What is shown instead is an image of a group of smiling Asian women in the back of a transport vehicle. The depiction of their smiling, giggling demeanor is reminiscent of the characterization of the “Oriental girl” in the Malaysian investment brochure. Also, the context of this shot suggests that the Asian workers are now being transported out of the free zone after its closure. The implication is that these workers are now happily moving off to the next transnational production site to be exploited all over again. The depiction of the smiles on the women’s faces mobilizes the stereotype of the Asian transnational worker as bearers of an innate indifference to hardship, particularly when it comes to matters of transnational relocation to work. Black’s representational pattern is symptomatic of the tendency in other discursive texts to uncritically circulate the image of the Asian worker, and the Asian woman worker in particular, as a naturalized embodiment of transnational labour.

Granted the film’s limitations in this respect, Black’s representation of the Asian transnational labourers fits in with the overall narrative of Life and Debt, which shows a relentless process of “accumulation through dispossession”[3] at every scale of Jamaican society: independent businesses, farmers, labourers. In examining the mechanisms of this process and in mapping Jamaica’s place within the broader circuits of power in global capitalism, Black depicts the Asian transnational workers as a part of this general process that will stop at nothing to further the ends of capital accumulation. In the Kingston free zone sequence, Black shows how labour power has become commodified to the point that even $30 a week in wages for the Jamaicans is too much for the system to accommodate. It has to bring in workers that it can exploit even more. The appearance of the Asian workers in this portrait of the contemporary labour situation highlights another aspect of Harvey’s notion of the process of accumulation through dispossession, which involves the “displacement of peasant populations and the formation of a landless proletariat” (145). The film shows how the Asian transnational workers have become a constitutive component of the global mass of “landless proletariat[s]”—workers whose mobility sadly places them at the bottom of the global system of transnational labour, and thus most vulnerable to its exploitive effects. Thus, while there are some significant limits in Life and Debt with respect to the representational strategies that I have already discussed, the film’s depiction of an indifferent exchange of labouring bodies in the Kingston free zone at the hands of an inhumane system of exploitation reinforces the film’s overall critique of globalization.

Conclusion

Unlike any other periodizing concept, the concept of globalization has dominated critical discussions in both academic and public discourse. In critical theory, the trend in analyzing the complex transformations that have taken place under globalization has tended to emphasize an emergent cultural dominant characterized by “new” forms of capitalism that have replaced the disciplinary orderings of the past.[4] Without denying the importance of such analytical approaches, this paper has attempted to trouble the notion that capitalist discipline has given way entirely to newer, more diffused forms of capitalist domination by examining textual and visual representations of sites of transnational labour and of transnational labourers. In particular, the analysis of the Kingston free zone sequence in Life and Debt highlights the continuing collusion of capitalism and disciplinary power under globalization.

Stephanie Black’s critically acclaimed documentary can be read not only as a discursive text that compellingly examines the lived effects of globalization and free trade zones on the citizens of Jamaica, but also as one that is itself partially disciplined by the discourses of global capitalism. I have argued that in its representational composition of the female Asian transnational worker, Life and Debt may inadvertently re-inscribe, rather than contest, certain ideological notions about the role of this figure in the economy of transnational labour. To a certain degree, then, Black’s documentary participates in a wider discursive field of sympathetic texts that, as Laura Kang identifies, implicitly privilege the logic of “transnational capital over and against the ‘natural’ Asian female working [body]” (187). Despite its representational limits, however, the film’s inclusion of the Asian transnational workers in the construction of the Kingston free zone sequence reinforces the film’s overall critique of existing regimes of transnational capital by showing how labouring bodies become exchanged and exploited within these regimes. The broader question that Life and Debt raises is the question of how to engage in cultural criticism that grapples with the discourse of neo-liberalism without affirming the inevitability of its goals. As critics and producers of public discourse, we must be attendant not only to the multiple forms of class and gender exploitation taking place in globalization, but also to the modes visualization, description, and critique that we use to convey present circumstances.

Notes
[1] It is telling that such displacements of Asian peoples under global capitalism bear an uncanny parallelism to the forced migrations of Asian indentured labourers to the Caribbean during the colonial period. See Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 184-87, for a discussion of the history of Chinese indentured labour in Jamaica.
[2] See Sandra Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," in Feminism and Foucault: Paths of Resistance. Ed. Lee Quinby and Irene Diamond. (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988), pp. 61-86.
[3] See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford UP, 2005) for a full account of his notion of “accumulation by dispossession.”
[4] See Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscripts on the Society of Control” October 59 (1992): 3-7; Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2006); James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear, The New Work Order: Behind the Language of New Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

Works Cited
Bartky, Sandra Lee. "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Feminism and Foucault: Paths of Resistance. Ed. Lee Quinby and Irene Diamond. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988.
Boltanski, Luc and Ève Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliot.New York: Verson, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans A. Sheridan. Oxford, England: Vintage, 1979.
Fuentes, Annette, and Barbara Ehrenreich. Women in the Global Factory. INC Pamphlet # 2. Boston: South End Press, 1983.
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Gee, James Paul, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear. The New Work Order: Behind the Language of New Capitalism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.
Kang, Laura. Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. Duke UP, 2002.
Life and Debt. Dir. Stephanie Black. Narr. Jamaica Kincaid. Tuff Gong, 2001.
Look Lai, Walton. Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
Mitter, Swasti. Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy. London: Pluto Press, 1986.
Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

‘Lovers and Political Movements’, A Review of Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Story

Deborah Jordan

Original URL

Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Story (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007).

Jeff Sparrow’s Communism: A Love Story is an engaging intervention into historical and literary global debates about love and activism, and is a new development in Australian biography. Written with an enviable talent for dramatic narrative, Sparrow will find a new generation of readers for the life story of this rebel and his commitment to an international/transnational/global movement: communism. Guido Carlo Luigi Baracchi (1887-1975) has been waiting in the wings, especially since the late 1960s with the advent of New Left criticism, and we now have him centre stage, his life and loves, political thinking and praxis. Communism: A Love Story raises questions about the relationships between lovers and political movements; shared intellectual passions and radical sexual politics; about being centre stage and off in the margins; and the function of the Soviet Union and its transformation of communism into ideologies in the service of power. Sparrow portrays Baracchi as a leading Marxist theorist of the Australian left in the period after the Great War, and this large claim makes this new biography particularly significant.

Born in 1887 in Melbourne to a renowned astronomer and meteorologist father, Baracchi was one of the generation that grew up in the radical tide of Australia’s white democracy. As adolescents they saw the new century and Australia’s federation; some of them took up the challenge of Bernard O’Dowd, the prophet and militant poet, to partake of the dawning of the new age. In student circles, literary circles, free religious circles, and Marxist grouplets a number of young men and women including Lesbia Harford and Esmond Keogh, Percy Earsman, Percy Laidler, Christian Jollie Smith and Katharine Prichard challenged, explored and resisted the previous generation’s Victorianism, its religious rituals and its Puritanism. What matter that Baracchi stepped out of the schoolboy networks of the elite private grammar school in which he was educated, did not sit for his exams at the University of Melbourne or was arrested and served a prison sentence, when Australia could be ‘an augury of a new democracy’ or the ‘Delos of a coming sun-God’s race’.[1] Baracchi’s education, like Esmonde Higgins’ and Vance Palmer’s, continued in London through close contact with Fabian and guild socialist ideas, and the London School of Economics. The heady days before the implosion of the Great War are explored by Sparrow to frame Baracchi’s intellectual development. When does Baracchi have his moment of intellectual revelation about the vision of Marxism? Tens of thousands of Australians have done so, Sparrow finds. In Baracchi’s case, it was partly through his relationship with women.

Baracchi was both an extraordinary lover, and a cosmopolitan theorist. The book opens with his arrest on the Yarra Bank for campaigning against First World War recruiting. Baracchi was extremely active in the anti conscription campaign and his opposition to the war was based on a class analysis The disruption, the disjunction of the Great War in this generation’s lives, was a forcing time for their political positioning and this is explored in depth in the chapter ‘You don’t want to be disloyal do you?’ As a founding member of the Communist Party in in 1920, Baracchi co-edited the Proletarian. In 1922 he left for Europe with Neura, his second wife, edited an English version of the Communist Party paper in ‘Weimar’ (Chapter Six), and by 1924 was a member of the party of . Back in Melbourne, after advocating the dissolution of the Communist Party there, he was expelled. After a visit to Asia with Neura, Baracchi went on to lecture through the auspices of the Victorian Labor College and co-edit the Communist and the Communist Review. Sparrow unfolds the course of Baracchi’s life as he again works for the communist press in the 1930s with Betty Roland in ‘Russia’ (Chapter Eight), attempts to return to the fold of the Communist Party and does so in , but is finally out of the Party again over its support for World War Two. The rich texture of the social history of the period provides the frame through concrete example, iconic images and thick description.

In assessing recent trends in literary studies in universities, David Carter finds a move towards ‘post theory’: not anti theory but an added focus on context, function and audience.[2] Communism: A Love Story can be located within the advent of creative non-fiction, and interest in narrative and life writing. With exemplary skill, Sparrow’s text shifts scenes, draws on a huge range of historical sources – from intimate letters and interviews to plays and government archives and, through all that, as the novelist Amanda Lohrey suggests on the cover, has all the passion and drama of a novel. There are moments of close focus on a particular dramatic incident in Baracchi’s life followed up by questions and exposition. The general reader is given handles in the form of well known iconic figures from world history. Emily Davison, the British suffragette who was killed by the royal horse, for instance, becomes an exemplar for suggesting the passion and commitment of some of the New Women who appear in the text.

This kind of reading, this kind of recuperation, has some similarities to the challenge which feminist historians and literary critics have been working with for some time, with a clear focus on subject, agency and action, working with the wounded. Biographies of some significant left intellectual women have appeared – Jean Devanny, Marie Pitt, Lesbia Harford and, soon, Edna Ryan and Aileen Palmer. The examination of their work and lives is both detailed and critiqued. The biography of Charmian Clift by Nadia Wheatley reached a high point in presenting a fascinating and illuminating story with dramatic plot underpinning the structure of the study. Fewer Australian male activists on the left have had their life stories told – the New Left of the late 1960s sliced up the old men for their theoretical failures and left them dissected for their colleagues. Stuart Macintyre’s history The Reds: the Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality exposed many of the pet vanities in the search for ideological purity. With the demise of the Soviet Union, has Western ‘progressivism’ – that linked the social demands of Western countries, and especially those of the labour movement, with support for the Soviet Union and the Communist parties, – collapsed as Alain Touraine[3] argues?

It was rare for the historical biographer in to write with the need to create an audience, with the need to capture the passion and sacrifice of their subject, but Sparrow has done this. With skilled exposition and exegesis, he considerably extends our understanding not only of Baracchi himself and the issues facing communists, but of many of the key women in the early days of the Communist Party, both in and overseas. Take the case of Lesbia Harford, poet and committed activist, and her relationship with Baracchi, all told with skill and verve which makes us want to ponder further on these remarkable men and women. Sparrow draws the threads together from a careful reading of Lesbia’s poems, working out the exact timing of their writing to cross-correlate so as to contextualize them in a biographical frame which certainly elucidates their meaning. The shipboard affair with Katharine Prichard, the significant Australian novelist, is apparently based in original research and new material. His reading of the sexual politics of these lovers and equals, these activists and intellectuals, is full bodied and nuanced, encompassing emotion and desire. And yet, it is partly the story told from the male gaze. Sparrow is rather conventional in many of his authorial intrusions, given the revolutionary sexually liberated future for which they hoped. Wasn’t Lesbia, for instance, a sexual radical (as her poetry indicates she aspired to be); hence it is hardly fair to cast her in the stereotyped roles of femininity. Why would she feel ‘betrayed’ when Baracchi, her current lover, marries another? Surely she would hardly see the new wife as her ‘rival’? Presumably she shared Baracchi’s critique of marriage and understood its links with property, capitalism and the family, for they had all read Galsworthy and Marx, presumably Engels. And while they may not always have managed to sustain these kinds of open relationships and lifestyles, surely Baracchi and his lovers are best seen in these terms, not as flawed conventional men and women.

There are dangers and strengths in Sparrow’s immersion in past sources. When the focus is on the key actor, as in biography as a genre, all others fall by the wayside. Take for instance the case of Vance and Nettie Palmer, who appear in the text as friends and colleagues and on whom there is an extended literature suggesting their adherence to different cosmopolitan socialist ideas, yet who are too often castigated as repressed nationalists. Why on earth would Vance Palmer like the wonderful transnational and free thinking Baracchi, asks Sparrow, reverting to and perpetuating the bushy myth of Palmer’s philosophical positioning. Yet, Sparrow does often reach through the closures in cultural nationalisms by his close use of primary sources, never too far from the truth as represented by the subjects themselves. Baracchi surely went out of his way to cultivate the Palmers because of their shared experience both locally and globally, their common long term engagement with socialist theory and practice even as it took them in different directions. Socialism is ‘one of the few things I’ve been hot about’, Nettie told Vance in 1909 in their early exploratory letters of friendship.[4]

The main thrust of Communism: A Love Story is a sensitive and engaging rendition of Baracchi’s relationship with communism both inside and outside the Communist Party in key locations. The account of the growth and changes in the Communist Party and communism in its various tendencies is humanized, refracted through the lens of the warm and generous personality of Baracchi and the key women in his life. What we know about fellow travellers, popular fronts and Trotskyites comes alive as they are embodied in key individuals in their kitchens, workplaces and bedrooms. As we become aware of the strength of Baracchi’s commitment; some of his story resonates with those present day environmentalists who step out of the corridors of their careers to live on platforms high in trees to save them from logging long after the media have gone.

One of the main themes in the book is Sparrow’s comparison and contrast of Baracchi’s two grand passions: for various women and, as Sparrow implies, his more important love of a political and intellectual belief structure, communism. Communism was and is, of course, notoriously weak on the equal participation of women, before (and after) initial revolutionary phases, and is flawed in its focus on the paid, as distinct from the unpaid worker. Perhaps this opposition between love of women and love of political action is merely a way to hasten the story and integrate the two supposedly disparate aspects of Baracchi’s life, yet it is conceptually slight and needs more interrogation. Recent interest by sociologists on forms of identity and action associated with social movements extending the work of the Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni on nascent and institutional stages has much of interest to add here. Similarly, Sparrow’s claims about communism and its key place in Australian radical traditions offering the only alternative to capitalism, may merely be paraphrasing Baracchi to strengthen the interpretation, but allows Sparrow to write out the revolution going on in Australia in the interwar period for the rights of women, and the persisting influence of the new social movements from the late 1960s. He begins to meet an urgent need ‘to make political action meaningful once more’ but stalls when reverting to conventional divides between the identity of men and women.

‘What is to be done with your relish for versing?’ Nettie Palmer, who was Australia’s finest nonacademic critic in the interwar period in , once queried Baracchi. ‘I like to see everything you write in this way,’ she continued, ‘yet it’s incomplete without its background. I can sort of see them all in a big book – rambling, whimsical verse accompanied by its exploratory and explanatory prose. To be published – I fear – posthumously.’[5] Baracchi’s response, when he reminisced with Nettie’s daughter, was how ‘she had seen, however, by no means everything.’[6] With our heightened interest in Baracchi after reading his story, we might have been able to demand, in the 1970s, to see more of Baracchi’s theoretical writings and versifying – in a companion volume to Communism: A Love Story, and we might have got it. Now, given the state of Australian left publishing, at best we can trust Sparrow will post a bibliography of Baracchi’s writings on the web. Communism: A Love Story is a remarkable achievement in illuminating the past passions for real socialism, especially given the past is so often aligned with Tradition.

Dr Deborah Jordan is working with Carole Ferrier and Maryanne Dever at the University of Queensland on the correspondence between Vance and Nettie Palmer. She has published widely on the Palmers especially in Nettie Palmer: Search for an Aesthetic.

---

[1] Bernard O’Dowd, ‘Australia’ in W. Murdoch, (intro.) The Poems of Bernard O’Dowd, (Melbourne: Lothian, 1941), p. 35.
[2] Ramona Koval (Presenter), ‘The Death of Australian Literature: The Bookshow’, ABC Radio National, 15/06/2007.
[3] Alain Touraine, Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference, trans. David Macey, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 288.
[4] Nettie Higgins to Vance Palmer, March 1909, Ms 1174/1/152, National Library of .
[5] Nettie Palmer to Guido Baracchi, n.d. Guido Baracchi Papers, Ms 5241, Box 1, National Library of .
[6] Guido Baracchi to Helen Palmer, 10.1.1965 Helen Palmer Papers Ms 6083, Box 1, National Library of

Buku Terbaru Goenawan Mohamad

Buku terbaru Goenawan Mohamad telah terbit dalam dua bahasa Indonesia dan Inggris.

TUHAN DAN HAL-HAL YANG TAK SELESAI
Penerbit: KataKita, Jakarta, September 2007
Tebal 162 halaman
Harga Rp 50.000.

Versi Inggris:
ON GOD AND OTHER UNFINISHED THINGS
Terjemahan Laksmi Pamuntjak
Tebal 162 halaman
Harga Rp 75.000.

Buku Goenawan Mohamad terbaru ini berupa 99 esei liris pendek yang berangkat dari aforisme, mengikuti jejak Percikan Permenungan karya Roestam Effendi di tahun 1930-an. Angka "99", dengan berasosiasi kepada 99 nama Tuhan menurut tradisi Islam, juga mengesankan ketidak -selesaian.

Isinya pada umumnya merupakan eksplorasi saat-saat religious,
pengalaman puitis, juga renungan tentang Tuhan, iman, kematian dan kekuasaan.

Dalam mengembangkan pemikirannya, Goenawan Mohamad mengolah dan mengritik percikan filsafat Eropa (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Marion, dan Badiou, misalnya), dan filsafat Islam, khususnya, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali serta Ibn Rusdh.

Ia juga memakai bahan-bahan dari sastra Jawa klasik. Salah satu
eseinya menunjukkan persamaan Serat Cabolek (khususnya tentang pertemuan Bima dengan Dewa Ruci) dengan meditasi Cartesian tentang subyek.

Kutipan dari buku Goenawan Mohamad, "Tuhan dan Hal-hal yang Tak Selesai"

**

Demak: Pada suatu hari yang mungkin tak sebenarnya terjadi di abad ke-16, dengan sabar sembilan orang wali mendirikan mesjid pertama di kota pantai utara Jawa ini. Beratus-ratus tahun kemudian cerita terus beredar, bahwa salah seorang dari mereka, Sunan Kalijaga, menyusun tiang mesjid di Demak itu dari tatal: serpihan kayu yang tersisa dan lapisan yang lepas ketika papan
dirampat ketam.

Saya bayangkan dengan takjub: sebuah mesjid yang ditopang oleh yang terbuang, yang remeh dan yang tak bisa disusun rata -- bukan sebuah rumah Tuhan yang berdiri karena pokok yang lurus dan kukuh, dengan lembing dan tahta..

**

Dari riwayat yang rusak, manusia membayangkan satu titik di depan yang sempurna. Titik itu seringkali jelas ditegaskan, tapi sebenarnya ia adalah, untuk memakai kata-kata Laclau, sebuah "penanda yang kosong".

Kekosongan ini bukan berarti sesuatu yang sepenuhnya negatif. Justru penanda itu begitu menggetarkan dan menggerakkan kita, dan lahirlah damba. Dengan damba itu kita membuat sejarah untuk mengisi penanda yang kosong itu dengan sesuatu yang bisa yang ditandai secara memadai.

Tak mudah dijelaskan dari mana datang ajektif dalam penanda kosong yang melahirkan dan menggerakkan damba itu -- katakanlah nilai "adil" dalam kata-kata "masyarakat yang berkeadilan". Mungkin sebab itu orang berbicara tentang wahyu.

Cerita tentang wahyu adalah cerita saat manusia jadi makhluk yang
terbatas: ia mengalami persentuhan dengan Yang Tak Terbatas. Ketika wahyu datang pertama kali, demikianlah kisah Nabi Muhammad yang kita dengar sejak kanak-kanak, ia terguncang, ketakutan, dan menutup diri dalam selimut. Kefanaan dipaparkan dalam hubungan dengan yang abadi.

**

Iman lebih kaya ketimbang kemurnian. Iman adalah bianglala yang
semarak. Yang menghendakinya sebagai sehelai pembalut putih yang steril lupa bahwa manusia bukan cetakan tunggal mumi Adam di atas bumi. Bahkan tak ada mumi, juga dalam kotak kaca, yang tanpa sejarah, tanpa ketelanjuran kebudayaan.

Yang kekal selamanya saling membelah dengan bumi yang guyah.

**

Yang menyangka ada jalan pintas dalam iman akan menemukan jalan buntu dalam sejarah. Tiap masa selalu ada orang yang mengembara dan membuka kembali pintu ke gurun pasir tempat Musa -- yang tak diperkenankan melihat wajah Tuhan -- mencoba menebak kehendak-Nya terus menerus. Di sana tanda-tanda tetap
merupakan tanda-tanda, bukan kebenaran itu sendiri. Di sana banyak hal belum selesai.

Gurun pasir tak sepenuhnya dialahkan, dan cadar selalu kembali
seperti kabut.

Manusia bisa tersesat, tapi sejarah menunjukkan bahwa iman tak pernah jera justru ketika Tuhan tak jadi bagian benda-benda yang terang.

**

Tiap doa mengandung ketegangan. Doa selalu bergerak antara ekspresi yang berlimpah dan sikap diam, antara hasrat ingin mengerti dan rasa takjub yang juga takzim. Di depan Ilahi, Yang Maha Tak-Tersamai, lidah tak bisa bertingkah.

Bila ada agama yang memusuhi syair, itu karena ia lupa bahwa puisi
juga sejenis doa. "Di pintu-Mu aku mengetuk/aku tak bisa berpaling", tulis Chairil Anwar, antara lega dan putus-asa. Puisi, bahkan dalam pernyataannya yang tersuram, adalah rasa hampa tapi juga sikap bersyukur yang tak diakui.

Rekonsiliasi Fakta dengan Fiksi

oleh : Savitri Scherer

Kompas, Senin, 20 Agustus 2007

rubrik : Pustakaloka; resensi
judul buku : Kalatidha
Penulis buku : Seno Gumira Ajidarma

 

Meminjam judul puisi Ranggawarsita dari abad ke-19, yakni Kalatidha, Seno, penulis abad ke-21, merangkum cerita yang berkisar tentang peristiwa kekerasan di Indonesia pada sekitar tahun 1965.

Dituturkan melalui pandangan bocah laki-laki berusia tujuh tahun yang mempunyai kebolehan masuk-keluar dunia bayangan yang berkabut.

Kebolehannya mengikuti usianya yang menjadi dewasa, hingga dunia tersebut terkadang bercahaya gemilang, ataupun merupakan samudra dari titik-titik kristal yang berkilauan.

Bocah pengamat pasif, dari suatu kejadian ketika rumah tetangga diserang penduduk setempat dan dibakar. Bocah itu sempat melihat satu dari gadis kembar penghuni rumah lolos dari pengepungan, sedangkan kembarannya tewas.

"Aku tidak mengerti, tetapi kuketahui betapa nasib keduanya sangat berbeda. Yang satu menjelma bayangan yang kadang tampak dan terkadang hilang, yang lain masih berkeliaran di muka bumi dengan diri yang kadang hilang kadang kembali" (hlm 46). Suatu kekayaan imajinasi penulis yang berpotensi untuk dikembangkan ke sana kemari.

Korban dari sistem

Seno memakai kesempatan ini untuk menyinggung berbagai segi spiritual dari dunia istimewa yang diakrabi bocah tadi dengan meramu unsur-unsur budaya spiritual Jawa yang memasuki dunia nyata, dan berbagai dunia kehidupan yang dijatahkan kepada si gadis yang lolos, tetapi terguncang jiwanya.

Ditambah selingan dari dunia Johnny Malin Kundang, pasien di rumah sakit jiwa tempat mereka berdua dirawat dan ditambah lagi dunia yang penuh perkibulan dari pengusaha serong (bocah ketika dewasa?).

Penyiksaan yang sempat di terima gadis, korban politik waktu itu, dan penyiksaan dalam cara merawat-menatar, baik di rumah sakit maupun di kantor polisi dan di penjara untuk semua narapidana, digambarkan untuk menunjukkan situasi yang sejajar bagi semua warga yang telah kehilangan hak untuk hadir dalam peradaban manusia.

Peradaban yang aturan dan kodenya dibuat oleh setiap penguasa zamannya, Neraka dunia ini, penjara dan rumah sakit jiwa sudah dijabarkan ahli filsafat Perancis Foucault (M Foucalt, Naissance de la clinique, Paris, PUF, 1963 dan Surveiller et punir, Paris, Gallimard, 1975) Dalam Kalatidha, gadis simbol yang mewakili korban dari suatu sistem, tanpa rasa dan pikiran. Pengarangnya kemudian mengembangkan tubuh si gadis menjadi sosok yang dititisi arwah kembarannya dan membuat gadis tadi menjadi jawara wanita yang mengacu pada garapan Seno yang terdahulu, Perempuan Preman di Melawai (Dunia Sukab, 2001, hlm 145-155).

Jawara dalam Kalatidha, setelah diisi arwah kembarannya, menghancurkan semua deretan sosok yang pernah menyiksanya, kecuali Johnny yang sempat berambisi untuk menjadi pemain sepak bola. Dia hanya menendang-nendang si gadis, tanpa memperkosanya.

Dalam adegan lain, yang sempat dialami bocah, ia dan kakeknya mengalami suatu peristiwa spiritual yang canggih digambarkan Seno dalam bab 12 berjudul: Perburuan (hlm 93-97).

Bagian ini dirancang seolah menjadi pembuka jalan atas suatu pertanyaan si pengarang: apakah pembalasan selalu lebih kejam? yang dirangkumnya di bab 13. Misteri ini dijawabnya sendiri dengan merangkum bab 19: Sang Mata di Tepi Pantai (hlm 163-171). Jawara preman Melawai itu menyelamatkan dua bocah yang sedang bermain di laut (hlm 171). Hanya saja samudra tadi dengan kekuasaannya selalu mencoba menelan bocah-bocah lain yang bermain di situ yang tidak menggubris pengalaman dua bocah yang sempat terselamatkan.

Seno mencoba mengutarakan harapan bahwa ada kemungkinan gadis yang dititisi kembarannya berubah menjadi jawara penyelamat. Walaupun si pengarang ataupun pembacanya tahu bila pergantian peranan dari jawara preman (pembalas dendam) menjadi jawara Sri Asih (sosok garapan RA Kosasih) tidak otomatis menyelamatkan seluruh bocah di dunia dari bahaya.

 

Berpikir positif

Seno sebagai pengarang, yang telah merancang-rancang dunia bayangannya yang kejam, berdarah-darah di mana hutan bambu digusur menjadi pasar toserba raksasa, tetap membawa suatu harapan positif terhadap semua kemungkinan yang terburuk dari peradaban.

Ia percaya ada warga dunia yang peduli dan berkapasitas memperbaiki nilai kemanusiaan kita semua. Pandangan positif ini dibutuhkan bagi pembaca untuk memperbaiki lingkungannya. Bahwa manusia berkapasitas mempunyai welas asih, suatu unsur terpenting dalam sejarah peradaban dunia.

Seno mengakhiri ceritanya begini, "Miliaran sosok kristal yang mengalir membentuk suatu arus menyilaukan ke balik sebuah lembah yang penuh dengan cahaya di baliknya." (hlm 226). Ada cahaya di balik cahaya. Pilihan Seno untuk berpihak pada cahaya didukung oleh fakta, tanpa matahari seluruh ekosistem jagat kita akan bubar.

Sebagai pengarang yang menggarap suatu insiden dalam sejarah Indonesia yang kontroversial, di mana dia terlalu muda ketika peristiwa 1965 terjadi (dilahirkan 1958), usahanya membawa nilai khusus bagi pembaca Indonesia untuk memikirkan prioritas apa saja yang harus didahulukan dalam memajukan kesejahteraan kehidupan bersama di tengah dunia yang selalu rancu. Keganasan di Rwanda, atau di Kamboja di bawah Pol Pot, di Irak dan Palestina tidak perlu terjadi. Semua terletak pada itikad manusianya sendiri.

Punya rasa sendiri

Rahasia hidup memang membawa pesona khusus. Hal ini digarap Seno dengan dua cara. Pertama, secara faktual dengan memasukkan berbagai dokumen arsip dari periode yang dia bayangkan, yaitu guntingan-guntingan surat kabar. Ini untuk mengingatkan publik pemikiran apa-apa saja sebetulnya dilontarkan di periode itu yang memicu kejadian.

Cara kedua adalah membandingkan kejadian yang sempat mewujud di sekitar tokoh fiksi karangannya itu dengan, misalnya, isi kepala pasien Johnny Malin Kundang. Semakin gombal bayangan dunia Johnny, yang menyangkut peranannya sendiri dalam suatu insiden, semakin rancu pula ramuan di kepalanya antara si pelaku, si pengamat, atau korban yang dipaksakan bertanggung jawab.

Yang masih bisa diandalkan sebagai "fakta" di dalam kepala Johnny hanya sisa-sisa ingatannya yang berbentuk "rasa" dari sederetan makanan, seperti tempe mendoan atau botok teri (hlm 86-90). Gamblangnya, peristiwa yang sudah lewat itu masing-masing mempunyai rasanya sendiri. Tidak semua hambar dan tidak selalu harus sesuai dengan kenyataan perasaan sensasi pada waktu kejadian. Rasa pada waktu kejadian dan rasa dari ingatan mengenai kejadian itu tidak mungkin sama.

Melalui sisipan Johnny ini, Seno seolah ingin membawa pembacanya menerima segala kontradiksi kehidupan sebagai urusan yang tidak akan selesai diuraikan. Fakta atau kebenaran tidak dapat diramu melulu melalui ingatan, apakah itu ingatan seorang gila, seorang korban perkosaan, ataupun seorang pengarang.

Setiap zaman edan dalam setiap era sejarah menghasilkan segepok orang-orang gilanya sendiri yang dengan logika masing-masing, meluruskan versi sejarah kehadiran mereka. Sebaliknya, pelurusan tersebut bukanlah suatu proses acak yang diramu hanya bedasarkan makian yang menyebut berbagai macam makanan Jawa; walau sudah seluruh makanan diucapkan.

Dengan Kalatidha, Seno menawarkan gaya penulisan untuk mengungkapkan bagaimana menyelaraskan sebagian dari bunyi-bunyi sumbang ke dalam rangkuman dunia tanpa melupakan betapa hidup ini sesungguhnya kocak, acak dan edan.

Keputusan itu yang diambil Johnny, "Aku bukan pembunuh. Aku hanya membebaskan jiwa yang terikat kepada tubuh dan otak yang mengharukan, yang diperas seperti apa pun untuk berpikir tidak akan pernah mampu mengenal dunia dalam arti yang sebenar-benarnya. Gulai Otak. Bedakah rasanya otak pintar dan otak bodoh jika di goreng dalam bungkus telor?" (hlm 90).

(Savitri Scherer, Jurnalis Bermukim di Paris)