What is datsu-bôkoku? A note on Japanese environmentalism

This is just a brief note on a small curiosity, namely the word bôkoku (亡国, dead country or national death) which I've encountered a couple of times during anti-nuke demonstrations in Japan. The first time was one evening in December 2012 when I went to the weekly Friday demonstration outside the prime minister's residence (the "kantei-mae" demonstration). As I stood there with the others, a guy with sun glasses who looked like Jake in The Blues Brothers crossed the street and came walking briskly towards us, carrying a sign hanging over his stomach with the words “datsu-bôkoku” (脱亡国) written in big letters. I remember liking the expression for its touch of ambiguity. It seemed constructed in analogy with the common slogan "datsu-genpatsu" (Stop nuclear power!). Most likely, it was meant to meant something like "stop the national death" or "leave behind the state of being a dead country". Literally, however, it could be taken to mean the provocative "Leave (or get out of) the dead country!". In other words, it could be taken to mean either to revive the country or to leave it!

Considering that many people had left the Fukushima-region and even Tokyo itself in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, turning themselves into "nuclear refugees", this double meaning may very well have been intended. It really corresponded to a debate going on in the anti-nuke movement, between those who left and those who chose to stay on. Leaving, some argued, was the only sensible option. It meant prioritizing life and safety, regardless of the government's assertions. It was also connected to the "zero becquerel"-slogan, the determination not to tolerate any radiation (cf. Yabu 2012a, 2012b). Staying, by contrast, was urged by them who saw a value in preserving or rebuilding the communities and economies of the Fukushima region.

The term "bôkoku" itself has an interesting history in the Japanese environmental movement. As I read through Robert Stolz' Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014), I realized that its use in anti-nuke activism must be a reference to Tanaka Shôzô, known as the father of Japanese environmentalism and famous for his engagements in the protests against the Ashio copper mine pollution and his solidarity with the Yanaka villagers. It appears that he developed his ideas on bôkoku in his Diet speeches in 1900, following the so-called Kawamata Incident in which the police had clashed with protesters marching to Tokyo (see Strong 1995: 115f for a vivid description). In the incident more then 50 protesters were injured and 69 were arrested. Many others fled. Following this violent suppression Tanaka made a speech in which he put the following question to the prime minister:

To kill the people is to kill the nation. To despise the law is to despise the nation. This is the end of the nation. If its resources are abused, its people killed, and its laws overturned, no country can survive. What will the government do about it? (quoted in Strong 1995: 119)

As Stolz points out, Tanaka saw the incident as evidence that the government had been overrun by private interests, above all the Furukawa zaibatsu running the mine. The police had become servants of private gain and hence Japan had ceased to exist. Because of this, the polluted lands were now “lawless regions”, stripped of the rights granted by the constitution (Stolz 2014: 71). "Bôkoku", in other words, meant that the ideal of the country enshrined in the constitution had died, betrayed by the government and the state. The victims of this betrayal were the people, the rivers and the land.

Tanaka's drawing (from Stolz 2014:73)

Later in 1900 Tanaka wrote a poem on bôkoku in a letter to a fellow activist along with a drawing showing a dancing skeleton next to a pile of corpses fed on by dogs and demons. He entitled the poem “The Mark of the National Death” (Bôkoku no ato):

The spirit in the hearts of governance, justice, and law has died
There are those eaten by dogs
and those reduced to dancing skeletons
All that remains for the starving survivors is death
The mark of bôkoku.
(quoted in Stolz 2014: 73)

Interestingly, the idea of death also occurs in other examples of political rhetoric during the Ashio protests. For instance, some of the pollution victims began calling themselves “himei no shisha” (非命の死者), himei standing for the opposite or negation of the Confucian tenmei or “Heaven’s decree” (ibid. 72). Similar self-designations also appeared in later episodes of the environmental movement, such as in the protests against the Minamata mercury poisoning.

But maybe I'm wrong. To some people, the term bôkoku doesn't seem to connote Tanaka Shôzô. Another occasion when I encountered the term was in 2015. Again I was at the weekly Friday demonstration, where I met a man with a Hinomaru flag and a sign saying "Nuclear power is the energy of bôkoku" (「原子力は亡国のエネルギー」). When I expressed interest in the slogan, he explained that the meaning was that nuclear power would ruin the country. To my surprise he said that he had taken the word bôkoku from Mao Zedong, who had apparently once said that Mahjong would ruin China (「麻雀は亡国の遊戯」).  　


References

Stolz, Robert (2014) Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950, Durham: Duke University Press.

Strong, Kenneth (1995[1977]) Ox against the storm: a biography of Tanaka Shozo - Japan's conservationist pioneer, Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library.

Yabu, Shirô (2012a) Hōshanō o kue to iu nara sonna shakai wa iranai, zero bekureru-ha sengen, Tokyo: Shinhyōsha.

Yabu, Shirô (2012b) 3.12 no shisō, Tokyo: Ibunsha.

Sadness as COP15 ends

This is not a report from the COP or the activism here in Paris, so much as a report on my feelings. An undeniable feeling of sadness is gripping me. Sadness for the earth and the climate. But also sadness for this movement, parts of which I’ve been able to observe at rather close range over the last week and a half. For the activists who are trying so hard to keep up hope. Who struggle, in almost every conceivable way, to find ways of being effective – either by influencing the text or, despairing of that, by groping for ways to stave off catastrophe or at least healing some wounds without having to rely on the politicians colluding with business that make up the elite dominating the climate summit. They do so by discussing strategies for how to show their displeasure despite the repression legitimized by the state of emergency. They call for support for frontline communities, for blockadia, for real solutions, for an end to colonialism and racism, for system change, for a stop to the madness and the injustice done to nature and to so many people. They have learnt from Copenhagen not to place too much hope in the politicians. They know that a long struggle awaits them, us. But despite this, there is this sadness in the air, at the palpable feeling that the system is moving, unstoppably, in the wrong direction.

Can sadness go along with action? Yes, I believe it can. Sadness is not resignation. There are people – people who are like angels or boddhisattvas – for whom action and sadness go well together. But for most activists, I suspect that sadness is not an 'appropriate' or at least not a very effective feeling. Anger is perhaps better, or rather: a particular mixture of anger, hope and confidence. To all activists, therefore, I want to end by quoting the end of a speech I heard last Sunday at La Parole Errante in Montreuil, at the People’s Summit. The speaker is Kumi Naidoo. I can’t quote it verbatim, but here is, more or less, what he said. I leave the word to him:

The planet does not need saving. We will be gone, but the planet will still be here. It will be greener without us. Make no mistake about about it!

Whatever happens here, please don’t be sad. Remember Copenhagen! What we got there was not a fair deal, but a flab deal – full of loopholes and bullshit. We were devastated. But the struggle will continue.

When I was 20 years old I fled South Africa into exile. That was a time when there were many burials. My friend said: “Kumi, what is the biggest contribution you can make to justice?”. Then she said: “No, it’s not giving your life. It’s giving the rest of the your life!”.

Two years later she was brutally murdered by the regime.

Struggles for justice – climate justice, gender justice, economic justice, social justice – are marathons. They are long-term struggles.

Do not give up hope!

If you are courageous, victory is certain!

What we can note here is that substantive issues are only briefly alluded to in the vaguest and most general of gestures. Instead, the speech plays almost entirely on an emotional register. Clearly Kumi Naidoo's aim is to intervene in the emotions of the listeners. He wants to raise spirits and inspire courage and confidence. But at the same time, his speech bears testimony to the sadness, the anxieties and the fatigue that he senses already exists in the audience, or at least will exist once the summit is concluded, and which function like a dark, inescapable fond against which his own forceful words shine forth like stars.

Anti-politics

Here are some reflections on what might be called the "anti-political" discourse among some social movement activists. I bring together a few impressions from a conference I recently atttended in Zurich on contemporary activism in Japan with another set of impressions from a book I've just read on activism in central and eastern Europe: Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe (Ashgate 2015, edited by Kerstin Jacobsson). My hope is of course that the two sets of impressions will cross-fertilize.

During the conference, I was struck by the fact that many presentations concerned forms of activism that weren't overtly political, such as consumer initiatives, collective housing, "invisible" forms of transnational network building and some forms of DIY. Although these activities were motivated by a wish to change the world for the better, they lacked conspicuous elements of struggle, conflict or confrontation. It was hard to detect any attachment to specific political ideologies. In many cases I got the impression that participants seemed to prefer to frame their engagement as rooted in personal circumstances related to daily life or to their families, rather than as politically driven.

The question of to what extent such ostensibly apolitical activities can be regarded as social movement phenomena is familiar to most students of social movements. Since most definitions of social movements involve a reference to conflict, it's not easy to categorize activities where the conflict element is submerged, invisible or denied, i.e. where it isn't publicly stated by the activists themselves.

Social movement scholars have long recognized that there's an important non-public side to social movements - a side that's been theorized using concepts like latency or abeyance. Alberto Melucci, for instance, stressed the importance of focusing on this latent side for understanding the culture of a social movement, which he described as a "laboratory" where activists could experiment with alternative lifestyles and identities - i.e. activities that at first sight may appear unpolitical. But usually this "latent" side has been considered to be a supplement to the movement's more "manifest" or publicly visible activities. So-called free spaces, for instance, are considered to be important to movements not only as cultural laboratories but also as incubators of protest and bases for more overt political action.

But what about cases where even the manifest side of movements is presented as apolitical? Why do many activists seem to prefer to frame their activities as apolitical even when they appear in public? After all, there's nothing especially hidden about consumer initiatives or collective housing - or, for that matter, transition towns and local sharing economies. Instead of engaging in another round of discussion about what forms of activism should be classified as political or not, the crucial quesiton to investigate would seem to be: what are the circumstances that make people reluctant to label their activities political?

This question seems especially pertinent in the case of Japan. This is a country where the traumatizing experience of the New Left in the 70s didn't just lead to a decline of radical protest but also a general and long-lasting stigmatization of all political activism. The result was the so-called "ice age of protest" which didn't really end until the big anti-war demonstrations in the early 2000s on the Japanese mainland (Okinawa being a different story). However, as many conference presenters pointed out, activism didn't disappear even during this ice age. Everything didn't just freeze over. Rather, activism became submerged and invisible. Some of it took the form of engaging in establishing transational networks. Other activists tried to preserve their political ideals in less political forms, such as setting up collective houses. As I myself discuss (Cassegård 2014), there's a fascinating history of submerged freeter groups in the 1990s that helped prepare the way for the resurfacing of youth protest in the last decade in Japan. It seems reasonable to believe that the avoidance of the label "political" among these activists was partly the result of the stigmatization of overt political activism in the general public. Partly, it also stemmed from disillusionment with the political establishment among activists and the general public. Especially among more radical activists, this disillusionment explains their reluctance to address mainstream political parties and their tendency to stress personal factors rather than public committment in explaining their involvement in activism.

As Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe makes clear, Japan is not unique when it comes to the tendency for activists to adopt an "anti-political" discourse. It is from this book that I've borrowed the term "anti-politics". As becomes evident from several of the chapters, there are striking similarities between the "anti-political" discourse among activists in Japan and central/eastern Europe. Examples treated in the book include bicycle activists in Belgrade (Kopf 2015), elderly people guarding their dachas in winter-time in Ukraine (Leipnik 2015), and "playful" forms of resistance in Vilnius (Lindqvist 2015). Intriguingly, these similarities appear to have emerged despite considerable differences in historical background. Instead of the legacy of the New Left, it was the post-socialist transition that played the cruical role in shaping this discourse in the case of central/eastern Europe.

This isn't the place to summarize this book, but there are a few points that seem relevant to highligh. As Kerstin Jacobsson points out in her introduction, there's a need to get away, firstly, from the tendency of many Western scholars to expect social movements in a post-socialist context to follow the same repertoire as in Western Europe or North America; secondly, from the narrow focus on contentious action in the form of protests and demonstrations that risks missing other forms of activism more related to local struggles of everyday life; and, thirdly, from the picture of advocacy-oriented NGOs as the main civil society actors in a post-socialist context (Jacobsson 2015a:4f, 9). It strikes me that all these three points deserve to be stressed also in regard to Japan.

Below is a handfull of quotes from the book that, from various angles, illuminate the theme of anti-politics:

The ‘anti-political’ tendencies of activists in the region, too, show their double rootedness in the socialist experience of living under an overpowering, repressive state and in the post-socialist experience of living with corrupt and unresponsive authorities. Against this backdrop, anti-politics are positively associated with a right not to be ‘political’… by engaging in moral rather than political resistance… Thus, while many urban movements in the region… show an anti-systemic orientation, some of them deliberately refrain from framing their action in political terms. (ibid. 2015b:283)

[Dissident thinkers like Adam Michnik, Václav Havel and György Konrád] were also influential in promoting the stance of ‘anti-political politics’, favouring an ethical rather than political understanding of civil society... Nevertheless, the anti-political sentiments among activists in the region also stem from experiences of corrupt and repressive authorities. (ibid. 2015a:14)

It can be argued that if most countries of the region today represent hyper-versions of global trends such as neoliberal urbanisation, this is not so much despite as because of post-socialist legacies... Neoliberal, individualist subjectivity, for instance, goes very well with the anti-collectivism that followed from the state-socialist experience. As Hirt has argued: ‘socialism did not obliterate the private; it obliterated the public…’, socialism paved the ground for what she calls the post-1989 privatism. (ibid. 2015a:15)

[T]he activists speak about making an intervention even if they are not inclined to call their practices for ‘politics’. Instead, they make clear that they mistrust political leaders. (Lindqvist 2015: 44)

Although the bike activism takes up political questions… it is framed as ‘anti-politics’, an issue that ‘has nothing to do with politics’, by Belgrade’s activists. Instead, the bike activists define themselves as gradani (‘citizens’ or ‘city dwellers’) who just aim to make Belgrade a greener and more livable city. (Kopf 2015:100).

Furthermore, the bike activists also distanced themselves from NGOs since some of the negative characteristics, such as corruption, nepotism and inefficiency which the bike activists associated with the political sphere were also attributed to the NGO sector. (ibid. 114)

[Many of] the bike activists believed that any politicization of their interests and especially the intermingling of their activism with those of the LGBT community would cause a loss of credibility and thus weaken the public’s acceptance of their activities. [Instead they prefer] playing down the political dimension of their engagement by emphasizing the funny and peaceful character of the bike ride (ibid. 116)

Are these social movements rooted in local grassroots initiatives and in the protest participants’ daily life then ‘political’?... [A] move of grassroots movements towards something more openly ‘political’ may indeed become possible.... All of this is incipiently political – although not about politics ‘high up’, but about politics ‘from below’, pursued in a collective act of self-empowerment by ordinary people prompted to action by their everyday concerns. (Clément 2015:191)

To many readers, I think the similarities to Japan are obvious. Japan too is often said to have weak civil society, an institutionalized NGO sector lacking in independence vis-à-vis authorities, a public distrustful of “dirty politics”, and activists eager to try out forms of empowerment that emphasize direct and practical action related to everyday concerns.

Collective housing in Tokyo

Comparing Japan and central/eastern Europe, is there anything in general we can say about what historical circumstances tend to favor the rise of "anti-political" discourses? At first sight, the circumstances in these two regions seem very different. In the one case, we have a country that achieved democracy in the early postwar years and that has already experienced at least two great waves of social movement protest; in the other case we have group of countries whose turn to democracy is more recent and that in some cases are still ruled by repressive regimes. In Japan, it is hardly fear of repression, but rather the fear of being associated with the stigmatized legacy of earlier protest that appears to underlie the reluctance of activists to appear "political" in public. In central and eastern Europe, by contrast, it is the legacy of the communist regimes that appear to be the main factor. As Piotro Sztomka writes, these regimes pushed civil society underground, producing “strong stereotypes of the state as something entirely alien, imposed and hostile” and leading to an idealization of the "private" (Sztomka 1998: 193).

Therefore those for whom passive withdrawal (‘internal emigration’) was not enough, and who wanted to participate in authentic political life, had to constitute it outside official politics. The leaders of democratic opposition have couched characteristic notions: ‘non-political politics’..., ‘parallel polis’..., ‘alternative society’, ‘the power of the powerless’..., ‘the strength of the weak’... (ibid. 194)

But there are also similarities between Japan and central/eastern Europe. In both cases, there is a tendency to equate politics with party politics, with the "dirty politics" that mainly takes place between institutionalized actors and with little participation of ordinary people. In both cases, the framing of activism as apolitical seems grounded in a desire to achieve respect and legitimacy among people in general.

I should point out that the "anti-political" discourse I've discussed so far has been that of grassroots groups, i.e. mostly rather small groups composed of non-professional activists that haven't been very institutionalized (e.g. activists engaged in guarding dachas to protect their crops or activists engaged in setting up or running a collective house). Although the "anti-political" discourse seems to be a symptom of the more general conditions in the Japanese and central/eastern European societies, we shouldn't generalize from these rather small grassroots groups to those of other movement actors in these societies where we can certainly find other, more "political" discourses.

Finally, I'd like to mention two questions that might be interesting to pursue in future research:

1) What happens to the anti-politics discourse when grassroots groups become part of big mass-demonstrations, such as the kanteimae demonstrations in Tokyo or those at Maidan Square in Kiev? Do they shift to a more political and confrontational discourse? If so, to what extent is the discursive shift accompanied by a reevaluation of the historical legacies that previously made them adopt more "anti-political" stances?

2) How does the anti-politics discourse of grassroots groups relate to the "depoliticized" or "post-political" discourse associated with very institutional actors, such as NGOs deeply embroiled in partnerships with authorities? Here we're obviously talking of two distinct phenomena that shouldn't be confused. The anti-politics discourse is typically employed by activists who are most disgusted with the corrupt world of ordinary politics - a world that NGO "partners" of the governments are often considered to be part and parcel of. In contrast to the depoliticized discourse of institutionalized actors, grassroots groups can at least in some cases contribute to politicizing issues by addressing problems people experience in daily life and which authorities often prefer to keep invisble. Despite their explicit disavowal of politics, they thus have the potential to become quite political in the emphatic sense intended by authors such as Zizek, Mouffe or Rancière, namely that of questioning and disrupting the institutionalized field on which the politics of established actors is played out. This point is important, for it touches on the real political possibility and potential of this form of activism. It implies that the "anti-politics" discourse isn't necessarily only adopted out of meekness, out of the fear of repression or social sanctions. Sometimes it can be the very opposite.


References:

Cassegård, Carl (2014) Youth Activism, Trauma, and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan, Leiden: Global Oriental.

Clément, Karine (2015) “From ‘Local’ to ‘Political’: The Kaliningrad Mass Protest Movement of 2009-2010 in Russia”, pp. 163-194, in Jacobsson, Kerstin (ed.) Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate.

Jacobsson, Kerstin (2015a) “Introduction: The Development of Urban Movements in Central and Eastern Europe”, pp. 1-32, in Jacobsson, Kerstin (ed.) Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate.

Jacobsson, Kerstin (2015b) “Conclusion: Towards a New Research Agenda”, pp. 273-288, in Jacobsson, Kerstin (ed.) Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate.

Kopf, Sabrina (2015) “Urban Grassroots, Anti-Politics and Modernity: Bike Activism in Belgrade”, pp. 99-118, in Jacobsson, Kerstin (ed.) Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate.

Leipnik, Olena (2015) “The Elderly as a Force for Urban Civil Activism in Ukraine”, pp. 79-98, in Jacobsson, Kerstin (ed.) Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate.

Lindqvist, Beatriz (2015) “The Playfulness of Resistance: Articulations of Urban Grassroots Activism in Post-Socialist Vilnius”, pp. 33-54, in Jacobsson, Kerstin (ed.) Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate.
Sztompka, Piotr (1998) “Mistrusting Civility: Predicament of a Post-Communist Society”, pp. 191-210, in J. Alexander (ed.) Real Civil Societies: Dilemmas of Institutionalization, London: Sage

Towards a post-apocalyptic environmentalism?

Just some thoughts on what looks like an interesting development in environmentalist discourse. For a long time the environmental movement has talked about the catastrophe in the future tense. Its rallying cry has been that we must act before it's too late. Even when protests have been directed at ongoing examples of environmental destruction, the tendency has usually been to stress the fundamental threat against nature and human life in general that will follow if business goes on as usual. As Thörn points out, the environmental movement stands out compared to most other movements through its "future-oriented pessimism": Utopia is less important as a mobilizing tool than the coming catastrophe or collapse (Thörn 1997: 322, 372).

Apocalyptic imagery is still regularly invoked in environmentalist discourse, not only by activists and NGOs but also by establishment figures (think Al Gore). Indeed, so often have we heard about melting polar caps, coming water shortages, hurricanes, floods and growing chaos that we are increasingly starting to see all this as part of an establishment discourse. Instead of being oppositional and system-critical, invoking the apocalypse increasingly seems to be part of a standard jargon, the comme-il-faut of respectable discourse. Or as Timothy Luke puts it: “Climate change now appears to be a collectively acted, globally produced, and continuously staged new disaster movie without a single director, but with billions of producers following simple scripts” (Luke 2015:291).

However, recently I've come across quite a few voices offering a different perspective.


Apocalyptic imagery and depoliticization

Let me start with the geographer Erik Swyngedouw, who believes that apocalyptic imagery has become part and parcel of a post-political framing of the climate. Rather than radicalizing or politicizing the climate issue, it coexists with depoliticization. "At the symbolic level, apocalyptic imaginaries are extraordinarily powerful in disavowing or displacing social conflict and antagonisms”, he points out (Swyngedouw 2010:219). The environmental movement itself is not innocent of this depoliticization. Along with its endorsement of the organs of global governance (the UNFCCC process, the Kyoto Protocol etc), it has become integrated as a stakeholder in the negotiations, abandoning contestation and replacing politics with management.

Swyngedouw further argues that in response to the apocalyptic establishment discourse, one ought to point out that to many people the apocalypse is already here, especially in the global south. To him, it is this insight that is mobilizing. People today increasingly protest not only out of fear for the future, but also out of anger at an already ongoing catastrophe and to demand justice.

In the face of the cataclysmic imaginaries mobilized to assure that the apocalypse will NOT happen (if the right techno-managerial actions are taken), the only reasonable response is "Don’t worry (Al Gore, Prince Charles, many environmental activists...), you are really right, the environmental apocalypse WILL not only happen, it has already happened, IT IS ALREADY HERE". (ibid. 2013:15)

Bringing this message home also means to redirect the struggle, which has to become an anti-capitalist struggle as well. It is simply not true that "if the ship goes down, the first-class passengers drown too". As on Titanic, many of the first-class passengers will find themselves a lifeboat. "The apocalypse is combined and uneven. And it is within this reality that political choices have to be made and sides taken” (ibid. 17).

Next, let me turn to the political scientist Chris Methmann. Like Swyngedouw, he observes that the evidence is mounting that alarmist reports invoking future catastrophes are insufficient to move politicians to take the necessary steps to curb the environmental destruction. Despite the apocalyptic imagery, environmentalist discourse rarely results in exceptional or extraordinary measures.

Why then does this apocalyptic discourse fail to produce extraordinary measures? Following Foucault, Methmann asks what is served by this seeming failure. Taking the CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) as an example, he argues that:

... the failure of CDM serves carbon governmentality to enfold its actual function. It brings about a way of governing the earth’s carbon cycle which purports to save the climate but in fact protects business as usual from climate protection. The failure of the CDM is the success of a depoliticization of climate change politics. (Methmann 2013:71)

He adds that “understanding the failure of the CDM as a success in depoliticization may enhance our understanding of the poor performance of present-day climate governance” (ibid. 86). Rather than destabilizing the hegemonic order, the apocalyptic imagery helps integrating environmentalist discourses into that very order without changing the basic structures of the world economy (for this more general argument, see also ibid. 2010). 

 

According to Methmann, then, the apocalyptic rhetoric is highly successful - if not in reducing emissions then in deflecting criticism of the system. This feat is achieved by constructing a "universal threat on a planetary scale" and invoking "humanity as a collective victim" while leaving the enemy unspecified. Meanwhile the discourse articulates climate change as "overstraining the capacity of political actors, and thus as ruling out exceptional measures" (Methmann & Rothe 2012:324, 329).

 

Both Swyngedouw and Methmann offer a critical perspective on the conventional environmental message about the coming catastrophe. That even established actors use an apocalyptic rhetoric does nothing to show that the climate summits are not depoliticized. On the contrary, as both Swyngedouw and Methmann show, this rhetoric is symbiotically connected to depoliticization.

Combined and uneven apocalypse

 

The picture offered by Swyngedouw and Methmann of a world in which apocalyptic destruction is allowed to play itself out unperturbed by an official "green" discourse which has become system-functional gives us glimpses into what could be called a post-apocalyptic sensibility. In literary theory, the "post-apocalypse" is already a well-established notion. James Berger, for instance, writes as follows:

Modernity is often said to be preoccupied by a sense of crisis, viewing it as imminent, perhaps even longing for, some conclusive catastrophe. This sense of crisis has not disappeared, but in the late twentieth century it exists together with another sense, that the conclusive catastrophe has already occurred, the crisis is over (perhaps we are not aware of exactly when it transpired), and the ceaseless activity of our time - the new with its procession of almost indistinguishable disasters - is only a complex form of stasis. (Berger 1999:xiii)

By a post-apocalyptic sensibility I mean a sensibility that becomes dominant when people start to experience themselves as powerless to prevent a loss which they once feared, when no-one hopes any longer that the ship mentioned by Swyngedouw can be saved. When that happens the loss is no longer experienced as a shock that needs to be averted or mastered, but is rather internalized as an inescapable fact which must be taken as the point of departure for all future political action, including attempts to salvage what can still be saved and demanding redress and settling wrongs. 

 

The third voice I would like to introduce here illuminates this stance. It is that of Evan Calder Williams, author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (2011).  The title is a pun on Trotsky's notion of combined and uneven development. Here is the key sentence:

The world is already apocalyptic. Just not all at the same time. To be overcome: the notion of apocalypse as eventual, the ground-clearing revelatory trauma that immediately founds a new nomos of the earth. In its place: combined and uneven apocalypse. (Williams 2011: 149)

The book is an exploration of “the apocalyptic fantasies of late capitalism” as revealed in film and literature. It also provides a useful way to expand on the arguments on environmentalist discourse made by Swyngedouw and Methmann. It does so through its much more thorough exploration of the idea that the apocalypse is already occurring, the "conviction… that disaster is not just around the corner but that the corner has already been turned" (ibid. 4). 

 

Williams stresses that the post-apocalypse is not a simple reflection of actual and future destruction. It is not an "image of that-to-be" but rather "a perspectival stance to be taken up now" (ibid. 157). "We become post-apocalyptic", he writes, "when we accept the present as rubbish" (ibid. 9). 

Central to his argument is the distinction between catastrophe and apocalypse. The catastrophe is "end without revelation" (ibid. 4f), the sad, meaningless destruction we all dread even as we see it all around ourselves. What then is apocalypse? A central trope in the book that clarifies this is that of salvagepunk. This is a vision of the world as broken and dead, "a world of stealing from the ruins, robbing the graves, and making do" (ibid. 70). In this world "the cataclysmic catastrophe… has already happened" and the work is to "uncover the revelations that never showed themselves: they are buried in all the rubble" (ibid. 11). 

 

The salvaging activity Williams evokes here is reminiscent of that of Benjamin, who advocated a "tactile" getting used to the dream-world of capitalism as a first step in order to dispel it (Benjamin 1977a:167). This was a strategy, not of subjecting the dream to an external critique, but of groping one’s way inside it in search of the dialectics of awakening at work within it. Just as for the Jews “every second was a small gate through which Messiah might enter” (ibid 1977b:261), so for Benjamin every piece of rags or refuse was a potential “dialectical image” which might trigger the sudden flash of recognition, the involuntary memory, which would help dispel the nightmare.

 

The revelations that Williams hopes to salvage, however, do not  bring about a clarification “allowing you to know fully where good and evil stand” as in the Judeo-Christian model. To him, “apocalypse is not the clarification itself but a wound of the present that exposes the unseen… from which after-work can begin to dig out all the failed starts, possible histories” (Williams 2011:6). This unseen is no ineffable mystic matter, but that which remains unseen within capitalism, all that escapes the logic of surplus-value – “everything that is worth a damn yet which does not produce value” (ibid. 8).

 

He affirms the political potential of this attitude, which he describes as a lens that helps bring out the weak possibilities for counteracting the ongoing catastrophe: “until we think of ourselves as the post-apocalyptic agents of this system’s ongoing apocalypse, we cannot counter this bleak trendline toward catastrophe” (ibid. 13).

 

Williams stands out by his attempt to theorize the post-apocalypse in the light of the "combined and uneven" way capitalism is wreaking havoc with the earth. That the crisis is over doesn't mean that all is peace. On the contrary, life in the rubbles is seldom peaceful. One way to bring this out is through another of the book's tropes, that of the zombie - the emblem in popular culture for “the terminal crisis that never ends or resolves” and the projection of the fear for the hungering masses and anxieties about overpopulation (ibid. 11). Passing through a variety of incarnations - from the mindless laborer to the mindless consumer and back - he ends with evoking another, that of the accuser:

We start here with the bloodied, one-eyed glare of the accusing, raised up to get beaten down again, the endless cycle of not being allowed to die and being blamed for the fact. Not the campy schlock of the mass moaning ‘brains…’ but the quiet rage and planning of the group in formation. Bourgeois, you have understood nothing. (ibid. 75)

 

Five varieties of contemporary post-apocalyptic environmentalism

 

With differing emphasis the texts mentioned above suggest that what needs to be put in focus is the ongoing "uneven" catastrophe (Swyngedouw, Williams) rather than the future catastrophe evoked by an apocalyptic rhetoric which deflects attention from socio-economic inequality and depoliticizes the climate issue (Swyngedouw, Methmann). Taken together they form part of a common discourse, which is suited to an environmentalist movement driven more by outrage at catastrophes that are already happening than by fear of future catastrophes. 

 

This discourse is admittedly fragmentary and its contours hazy. Yet it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that it has assumed somewhat clearer form in recent years. The widespread disappointment generated by the failed negotiations at the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen 2009 may have been one factor behind the growing skepticism regarding mainstream established environmentalism, the institutions of global climate governance, and the discourses associated with them.

 

Meanwhile, almost all well-known waves of protest that have infused fresh anti-institutional energy in the environmental movement in recent years seem to be nourished by already ongoing rather than future catastrophes. Let me mention five examples:

 

(1) The wave of environmental activism referred to as "blockadia" by Naomi Klein. “Blockadia is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines” (Klein 2014:294f). The wave of youth activism associated with names and labels like 350.org, Power Shift and the Keystone XL pipeline to a considerable extent seems driven not by fear for the future so much as concern at what is being destroyed here and now, in specific locales and in a way that victimizes specific groups, in order to put new technologies of extraction to use. As Klein points out these technologies all depend on the creation of clearly identifiable sacrifice zones – “places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed, for the supposed greater good of economic progress”. These places are often “bound up with notions of racial superiority, because in order to have sacrifice zones, you need to have people and cultures who count so little that they are considered deserving of sacrifice” (ibid. 169f).

 

(2) The struggles of indigenous peoples for whom the attempt to defend their autonomy and the rights of mother nature are a prolongation of their resistance against colonialism. Let me quote Arundhati Roy here: "If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them" (Roy 2010). For an example, take the Rights of Nature Tribunals, which were introduced an event I attended last year at the Cumbre de los pueblos in Peru, at the time of the COP20 in Lima. These are tribunals set up by activists, treating cases such as polluted water, oil spills, hydroelectric dams that will flood communities and cause major displacement, murdered anti-mining activists, "man-made earthquakes" caused by fracking, the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, the oil extraction in Yasuni in Ecuador, and attempts to commodify nature such as REDD+. It's impossible for me to do justice to the eloquence of the people presenting these cases. Suffice it to say that a message that was repeated, in various forms, by all speakers was this: we are suffering. Not in the future, but right now, already. Clearly what bothered them was not so much the threat of a catastrophe to come so much as the exploitation already going on, of nature as well as of the people living at the sites of extraction. 

 

(3) In the Japanese post-Fukushima anti-nuke movement, the catastrophe is certainly less perceived as a future possibility than as one that has already occurred. The disaster actualized a host of latent problems, not all of them environmental in a narrow sense. The impact on individuals, communities and economies was traumatic. Controversy engulfed reconstruction efforts, not least in regard to corruption and the involvement of organized crime in recruiting day laborers for the sanitation efforts. Fear of discrimination (similar to the discrimination of people who suffered radiation in Hiroshima or Nagasaki) also resurfaced. Mirroring the diverse array of issues, the anti-nuke movement is also heterogeneous. As one of its most sizable and visible contingents, it contains a "democracy movement" in which the role of freeter activists, many with a background in the precarity movement, has been central. Enraged in particular by the power of the nuclear establishment (the so-called "nuclear village") and more generally by the way power is exercised in Japan, many of these activists see the high-handed state as the prime enemy, rather than the threat to the environment per se. Also visible as distinct and forceful currents in the anti-nuke movement is a movement to support the destroyed Tōhoku communities through volunteerism and consumer initiatives, and a "zero becquerel" movement conducting radiation measurements in food, schoolyards and playgrounds. What fuels all these protests and activities is above all outrage at a catastrophe that has already occurred. To the extent that the future figures into the motivations it is in the form of fear of a repetition and anger at the persistence and survival of a deadly system in which the catastrophe may be repeated.

 

(4) In cultural movements like Dark Mountain, the catastrophe's arrival is accepted as inevitable. Even if it is still regarded as a future event, the basic stance expressed in documents such as the 2009 Uncivilisation manifesto is that since we can't stop it we'd better accept it and prepare ourselves. This too seems to be a stance that partakes of the post-apocalyptic sensibility, as one of its possible inflections or modifications. The founders of Dark Mountain are quite explicit that what motivated them to start the movement was disappointment in established environmentalism - the fact that none of its campaigns were succeeding and that environmentalists were not being honest with themselves. Instead of fearing the coming climate change with its attendant decline, depletion, chaos and hardships, they embrace it:

Together we are able to say it loud and clear: we are not going to 'save the planet'. The planet is not ours to save. The planet is not dying; but our civilisation might be, and neither green technology nor ethical shopping is going to prevent a serious crash. Curiously enough, accepting this reality brings about not despair, as some have suggested, but a great sense of hope. Once we stop pretending that the impossible can happen, we are released to think seriously about the future. This is what the Dark Mountain project is doing next. (Kingsnorth 2010)

Like in Williams, here too one seems to find a belief in salvage, that it is precisely by accepting the catastrophe that hope and possibilities for real action can be gained.

 

(5) In addition, the increasing weight given to adaptation and loss-and-damage at the expense of mitigation in the UNFCCC process can be seen as a weak reflex of the wider shift towards mobilization happening less because of the wish to prevent future catastrophe and more because of ongoing catastrophes or catastrophes regarded as inevitable. "Mitigation" in the UNFCCC parlance stands for emission reductions done to limit global warming, "adaptation" for efforts to adapt to the coming warming by limiting one's vulnerability, and "loss-and-damage" for efforts to compensate for the damage that will occur or that has already occurred.

 

 

The genealogy of post-apocalyptic environmentalism

 

If something like a post-apocalyptic environmentalist discourse is gaining sharper contours today, what is the genealogy of this discourse? It seems to me that there are at least two important sources. One is the shift towards a posttraumatic or postapocalyptic sensibility in film, literature and popular culture which I mentioned above (see Berger 1999, Cassegard 2007). The paradigmatic references here are probably cyberpunk and films like Blade Runner in the US and anime like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and AKIRA in Japan. This cultural current per se, however, is hardly a politicizing discourse. Being more linked to melancholia, sorrow, grief, and a vague longing for recovery and consolation, it is far from obvious how such a discourse plays in with movement activism.

 

Another and more politically energizing root of post-apocalyptic environmentalism can be found in early attempts, often by Marxist critics, of bringing back the issues of class and inequality into environmentalism. An early example is Cindi Katz, who in 1995 lambasted environmental apocalypticism for being "politically disabling", for disregarding inequalities of class and gender, and for focusing only on Malthusian solutions such as “limiting population and technology rather than attacking the social sources or resource inequality” (Katz 1995:276).

 

This argument is further developed in Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, a book written jointly by Sasha Lilley, Eddie Yuen, David McNally and James Davis. In this book, they offer a whole battery of arguments against what they call "catastrophism", the idea that society is headed for a collapse from which a new, better society will be born. As for capitalism, they deny that crises must presage its end. Indeed, capitalism lives of crises which fuel the system and open up new rounds of capital accumulation (Lilley et al 2012:6). They also criticize the idea, embraced by catastrophists, that the rhetoric of disaster will awaken the masses from their slumber. Instead, catastrophe can often be paralyzing rather than mobilizing. The environmental movement  misses that fear can hinder rather than help preventing the disaster (ibid. 2, 16). Instead of "the cold porridge of climate catastrophe”, they argue that the Left needs a spirit of joyful rebellion, such as expressed in the slogan "caviar for all" (ibid. 39, 43). Furthermore, they criticize the “we” or “everybody” so often invoked by catastrophism for erasing meaningful class and geographic differences - "Beware of plutocrats speaking of Spaceship Earth” (ibid. 26).

 

The message in Catastrophism isn’t post-apocalyptic by itself. The book's message is above all that we should refrain from apocalyptic rhetoric because it is counter-productive and politically incapacitating, not that the apocalypse is already here or that it must be the starting point of struggle, protest or salvage work. However, there are passages where the book does come close to Swyngedouw or Williams, as when Eddie Yuen writes: “The question is no longer whether there will be environmental catastrophes, but for whom. To paraphrase William Gibson, ‘the catastrophe is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed’” (ibid. 130 n2).

 

                                                             *

 

The rhetoric of the coming catastrophe has been a major mobilizing force behind the environmental movement for a long time. While apocalyptic imagery still dominates much of environmentalism, my interest here has been drawn to those voices that see the apocalypse as something that is already occurring and to those forms of activism that are fuelled less by the risk of a future catastrophe than by the experience of catastrophes that are already here.

 

If these voices and forms of activism are indicative of a larger shift in the environmental movement, then we may need to rethink several assumptions about the latter. For instance, the prominent role of natural scientists in the environmental movement may be changing. If the apocalypse is already here, movements may no longer need to rely so much on the authority of science as before and can be grounded more in the lived experience of people. Furthermore, since the apocalypse is indeed socially and geographically uneven, issues such as justice and inequality may well become permanent features of environmentalist discourse.  

 

Lastly, might we not also expect "recovery" to become a major goal of much environmental activism, along with older goals such as preserving nature or limiting damage? To me this seems like a development that is both likely and reasonable. By "recovery" I mean forms of activism that take as their point of departure a damage already done. When a nuclear reactor has suffered a meltdown, your home is destroyed by a hurricane, or your children develop cancer because of fracking, then mere preservation becomes a senseless goal. Post-apocalypse doesn't mean that it won't get any worse. It may certainly grow worse. But while preventing that, people must also redress wrongs, help victims and do what they can in the ruins.

 





Motoda Hisaharu, Ginza

 

References

Benjamin, Walter (1977a) “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, pp 136-169, in Illuminationen, Ausgewählte Schriften 1, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Benjamin, Walter (1977b) “Über den Begriff der Geschichte”, pp 251-261, in Illuminationen, Ausgewählte Schriften 1, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Berger, James (1999) After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cassegard, Carl (2007) Shock and Naturalization in Contemporary Japanese Literature, Folkestone: Global Oriental.

Katz, Cindi (1995) “Under the Falling Sky: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and the Production of Nature”, pp 276-282, in Antonion Callari et al (eds.) Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order, New York: The Guilford Press.

Kingsnorth, Paul (2010) “Why I stopped believing in environmentalism and started the Dark Mountain Project”, The Guardian, April 29.

Klein, Naomi (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Lilley, Sasha & McNally, David & Yuen, Eddie & Davis, James (2012) Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, Oakland: PM Press.

Luke, Timothy W. (2015) “The climate change imaginary”, Current Sociology 63(2) 280-296.

Methmann, Chris Paul (2010) “'Climate Protection' as Empty Signifier: A Discourse Theoretical Perspective on Climate Mainstreaming in World Politics”, Millennium - Journal of International Studies 39(2): 345-372.

Methmann, Chris Paul (2013) “The sky is the limit: Global warming as global governmentality”, European Journal of International Relations 19(1): 69-91.

Methmann, Chris Paul & Rothe, Delf (2012) “Politics for the day after tomorrow: The logic of apocalypse in global climate”, Security Dialogue 43(4): 323-344.

Roy, Arundhati (2010) “The Trickledown Revolution”, Outlook Magazine, September 20.

Swyngedouw Erik (2010) “Apocalypse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change”, Theory Culture & Society 27(2-3): 213-232.

Swyngedouw, Erik (2013) “Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 24(1): 9-18.

Thörn, Håkan (1997) Rörelser i det moderna: Politik, modernitet och kollektiv identitet i Europa 1789-1989, Stockholm: Tiden Athena.

Williams, Evan Calder (2011) Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Winchester: Zero Books.

New book on social movements in Japan

 

So now it's out, my new book on social movements in Japan. I do like it. It's a bit expensive but I do wish it bon voyage. Thanks to everyone who helped me finish it - above all everyone who agreed to be interviewed, and everyone who gave me criticism or comments. Thanks also to Sekine Masayuki-san, who let me use his photo of the 246 Conference of Expressive Artists for the cover!

Cassegard, Carl (2013) Youth Movements, Trauma, and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan, Leiden: Global Oriental
http://www.brill.com/youth-movements-trauma-and-alternative-space-contemporary-japan

The volume provides a detailed study and assessment of social movements among young Japanese from the late 1980s until the present day. Discussing anti-war mobilizations, freeter unions, artists in the homeless movement, campus protest, anti-nuclear protest and activists engaged in support for social withdrawers, the author documents how new forms of activism developed hand-in-hand with experiments in using alternative spaces outside mainstream public areas and a struggle with the traumatic legacy of the failure of earlier protest movements. Despite the relative absence of open protest during much of the 1990s, the author demonstrates that this was an important preparatory period, full of experimentation, in which the foundations for today’s protest movements were laid. This book will be welcomed by students of sociological theory relating to Japan as well as those studying the trends and dynamics of contemporary ‘post-Bubble’ Japanese society.

Table of contents: 

Preface
Introduction

1. Trauma, empowerment and alternative space
- Collective trauma
- Empowerment and the role of alternative space in social movements

2. Japan’s lost decade and two recoveries
- The end of the bubble and the arrival of precarity
- The sense of closure and the legacy of previous protest
- Lost decade, regained activism?

3. The new cultural movements
- The storm of autumn
- The league of good-for-nothings
- Anti-war protests and the prehistory of sound-demos

4. The rise of movements against precarity
- The General Freeter Union and the ‘precariat’
- ‘Life’ and ‘survival’ in the precarity movement

5. Space, art and homelessness
- Public space, counter-space and no-man’s-land
- Art beyond the pleasure principle: The Shinjuku cardboard village
- Anti-poverty and Viva poverty
- “Waking up from the dream”: Nagai Park’s theatre of resistance
- Miyashita Park: Can a no-man’s-land be defended?

6. Alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment
- Support groups for social withdrawers and NEET
- Freeter Unions: narratives of recovery

7. Campus protest 

8. The recovery of activism
- Three innovations of freeter activism
- The importance of space – contestation and bracketing
- Fukushima and beyond

On the notion of the precariat

Academics

San Precario, patron saint of
all flex workers

The notion of the precariat - derived from "precarity" and "proletariat" - has made quite a career. For a long time I was used to hearing it primarily in street demonstratons, but nowadays it has become academically respectable. I suspected that this might happen already when I read Guy Standing's 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. But, still, I was quite stunned earlier this month, when I read in the news (here) that a team of British sociologists had employed it in its analysis of the results of the BBC's Great British Class Survey of 2013. The "precariat", they declared, was one of seven classes in British society, the one that was most deprived in terms of economic, cultural and social capital. Towering above it were the other six classes: the elite, the established middle classes, technical experts, new affluent workers, the traditional working class, and emergent service workers.

The results featured prominently on the BBC site, where the results were summarized by two of the team members, Mike Savage and Fiona Devine. Visitors to the homepage were also invited to take a simple test - in the "Great British class calculator: What class are you?" - to see in which class they would fit in. Curiously, precarity of employment appeared to play no role as a factor in this class calculation. Neither, as far as I could see, was it much of a criterion in the survey analysis itself (see Savage et al 2013). The "precariat" is simply the label used for the category of people who score lowest on all forms of capital. Why then did they use the term? This, they state, was largely due to inspiration from Standing (ibid 243).

More than any other, Standing has paved the way for the academic respectability of the term precariat. Unlike the analysts of the BBC survery, he is careful to link the precariat to the global shifts in production processes that engender precarization. But very much like them, he sees the precariat as belonging to the bottommost rung of the class ladder (below the elite, salariat, proficians, and the old manual working class, and flanked by the unemployed and social misfits). Like them, he also stresses that members of the precariat are deprived in many ways apart from job insecurity: they lack work-based identity, career prospects, self-esteem and social worth, and are insufficiently integrated in society and community (Standing 2011:9, 12, 21f, for a summary see Standing 2012).

 

While the definitions used by Standing and the analysts of the BBC survey are different, both locate the "precariat" at the bottom of the class ladder.　Apart from suffering economic insecurity, members of the precariat are also prone to be socially isolated, culturally impoverished and lacking feelings of self-worth. This means that their notion of the precariat is rather narrow, since it leaves out a lot of people whose job situation is precarious but who might not be as deprived in other respects. To be sure, Standing acknowledges considerable variety in the composition of the precariat - which can contain migrants, people who drift into precarity from the "old" working class, as well as young people "over-credentialised for the flexi-jobs on offer". Still, as far as I can see the following groups would fall outside his notion of the precariat: students or young post-graduates (who may have careers), art workers (who often have a strong work-based identity or ”calling”), middle-aged dismissed workers (who also often have work-based identities), social withdrawers and mentally ill people (who often have support from families or institutions), day laborers (who again often have strong work-based identities), and many migrant workers (who may have communities supporting them).

Precariat or not?

Activists

It is not my intention here to criticize these scholars, but I'd like to counterpose their use of the notion to another one - a notion more common among activists. The term precariat was not invented by Standing. Without citing any references, he claims that it was first used by French sociologists in the 1980s to describe temporary or seasonal workers (Standing 2011:9). Be that as it may, the term only gained wide popularity though the EuroMayDays beginning in 2004. At that time, no-one really seemed to know where the term came from, except that it was said to have originated as street graffiti in Italy in 2003.

The sense in which the term was used by the EuroMayDay activists was well expressed by Alex Foti. Cross-cutting traditional class boundaries, he wrote that it included “chain-workers” as well as “brain-workers”, free-lancers as well as manufacturing temps. Unlike similar terms, like “flex worker”, he stressed that the term carried strong connotations of political agency: “The precariat is to postindustrialism as the proletariat was to industrialism: the non-pacified social subject" (Foti 2004, 2005).

A striking trait of this notion of the precariat is that it cross-cuts class, rather than designating a class by itself. Rather than limiting the notion to the most deprived, an effort is made to invite students, artists, actors, and others in the knowledge industries to identify with the precariat. People can be in the precariat even if they score high on cultural and social capital, provided that they lead precarious lives. Why, one might ask, is the term is not limited to the most deprived? I think there are two reasons. Firstly, what Foti and other activists in the Euro Mayday tried to do was not to pinpoint a new stratum so much as to suggest how widely different stratas were affected by precarization in contemporary capitalism. "We are hirable on demand, available on call, exploitable at will, and firable at whim. We are the precariat" (Foti 2005). Secondly, they sought to use the term polemically, to help forge a sense of solidarity among those people. What mattered was not what strata you belonged to so much as your realization that neoliberalism had created your predicament.

To bring out a little bit more of how the term has been employed by activists, let me illustrate with some material from Japan, where the media activist Sakurada Kazuya was the first to popularize the term through events at the NPO Remo in Osaka in 2005 (see Sakurada 2006). It gained wide currency when a special issue on the precariat appeared in the journal Impaction in early 2006. Soon afterwards it was picked up by the General Freeter Union (Furîtâ zenpan rôdô kumiai), which used it for its May Day street party (the "Freedom and Survival May Day") in Tokyo the same year, the term's first appearance in a street demonstration in Japan.



One of the early "Freedom and Survival May Day"
demonstratons (photo Mkimpo Kid?)

As one activist in the General Freeter Union pointed out, part of the attraction of the term was that it had originated from the worker movement itself, not from the corporate world or academics: “The word ‘precariat’ differs from, for example, the word ‘multitude, since it didn’t come into being as an academic term but was born from anonymous wall-graffiti” (Settsu 2006).

Interestingly, in Japan, the term came to take on a wider meaning than in the Euro Mayday. Apart from people forced into a state of uncertainty because of the labour market, it has also come to include mentally and physically disabled, social withdrawers, wrist-cutters, the homeless, overworked regular workers and even small shop-owners. A good example of this wide definition is this forceful announcement of a street party in 2006, written by an icon of the precarity movement in Japan, Amamiya Karin:

You to whom living is hard, freeters, NEETs, social withdrawers, paupers, working poor, workers on the verge of death from overwork, temp workers, illegal overstayers, regular employees without insurance, you who long for suicide, all kinds of addicts, all you with physical or mental handicaps, wristcutters, or in other words: all members of the precariat – let’s roll out on the street and demonstrate! (Amamiya 2006)

It should be noted that “precariat” is only one in a "family" of similar terms used in the Japanese precarity movement. Some groups stick with terms like “good-for-nothing” (dame) or “losers” while others prefer the simple “pauper” (binbô). Others terms appearing from time to time are those of “rabble” (uzômuzô), “desperados” (narazumono) or “unstable poor” (fuantei hinmin), all connoting lowly social status as well as a heterogeneous composition.

Students protesting against high university fees

The term precariat should, I think, be grasped in conjunction with these other terms. Common to them is, firstly, a self-deprecating humor lacking in the official or academic terminology. Secondly, the terms stress material and social deprivation, and imply identification with the underdog. Thirdly, they imply rebelliousness. Denigrating terms are taken over, but only to be turned into objects of polemical affirmation. When activists use terms like “losers” they are at the same time signaling their rejection of the value judgments inherent in it.

The polemical nature of these terms is connected to the fact that they so often appear fuzzy, ambiguous or paradoxical. To understand this, I think it is useful to recall Rancière’s suggestion that politics is quintessentially about “improper” names, or “misnomers”. According to him, the political act par excellence is what he calls subjectivation, an act whereby subaltern groups make themselves visible by polemically rejecting given identities, often in favor of new categories that appear unreasonable, “impossible” or paradoxical. Conversely, politics dies whenever groups submit to given, unambiguous categories, through what he calls “identification” (Rancière 1999). When demonstrators call themselves the “precariat” or “good-for-nothings” or “paupers”, then this is subjectivation, not identification. Flex workers may be submissive, but not the precariat.

To summarize, the "precariat" as used by activists differs from the academic notion by being used polemically by people recognizing themselves in it, instead of being imposed scientifically from above. It is not limited to the most down-trodden or worst-off, but is deliberately turned into a wide, elastic and ambiguous category capable of attracting many different kinds of groups and of being flexibly deployed according to the needs of the situation.

 

When academics like Standing or Savage et al use the term, there are few or no traces of the term’s activist roots and its subversive connotations. In their texts they seem to address a general non-precariat audience, without ever trying to get across to the people they refer to as the precariat. I am not accusing these academics of being apolitical or of aspiring to the impossible positivist dream of neutrality. As far as I know, they are progressive and probably even favorably inclined to the precarity movement. Standing, as is well known, has played an important role in promoting the idea of basic income. But the fundamental gesture of imposing a term from above remains - what Rancière saw as the provision of categories readymade for identification. 

My intention is not been to criticize the academic usage of the term "precariat", but rather to throw light on the other, activist usage which also still exists. Maybe it's a good thing that the term has become academically respectable. But academics should be clearer than they are now about the history of how the roots of the concept were nourished in activism - roots which are still alive, and which mustn't be run over by terminological Juggernauts. I hope that the day will never come when activists who use the term will be told by academically inspired besserwissers that they are not the "real" precariat.


References

Amamiya, Karin (2006) “Demo da, demo da, mô sugu demo da!” [Demonstration coming soon], Sugoi ikikata, entry for 2006-08-01.

Foti, Alex (2004) “Precarious Lexicon”, pp 18-20, Greenpepper Magazine (special issue: Precarity) 2 (Amsterdam, Greenpepper Project)

Foti, Alex (2005) “Mayday Mayday! Euro Flexworkers,Time To Get a Move On!”, EIPCP 04.

Rancière, Jacques (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.

Sakurada, Kazuya (2006) “Purekariâto kyôbô nôto” [Conspiracy notes for the precariat], Impaction 151 (April): 20-35.

 

Savage, Mike et al (2013) “A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC's Great British Class Survey Experiment”, Sociology 47(2):219-250.

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Daruma-san has fallen

Woodblock by David Bull
(copyright M. Schumacher)

“Even if you fall, don’t worry. Just rise to your feet again.” This is a saying attributed to Bodhidharma, a legendary monk said to have introduced Zen (or Chan) Buddhism to China in the 5th or 6th century.

Bodhidharma is often depicted in Japan as a cute doll, known as Daruma-san. Sold in temples with blank, round eyes, you're supposed to fill in an eye and make a wish when you buy it and then fill in the remaining eye when the wish comes true. Apparently these dolls started to be made in the 18th century. Many are tumbler dolls, made in a round shape with a weight attached to the bottom so that the doll will automatically "rise to its feet" as soon as it is toppled over.

A friend of mine who is fluent in German once claimed that the doll expressed an important Zen truth: "unten schwer, oben leer". That may be true or not, but the popularity of the doll probably has more to do with the fact that it works as a symbol of recovery from illness or injuries and for rapidly overcoming difficulties. This symbolism is also expressed in a popular proverb connected to Bodhidharma, nana-korobi ya-oki, literally meaning "falling seven times, rising eight times", which is used to express the attitude of never giving up.

By Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768)

There are also some gruesome legends about Bodhidharma which are connected to feet and eyes. According to Chinese legends, he is said to have meditated facing a wall for nine years until his legs atrophied and fell off. According to more recent Japanese legends, he is also said to have torn off his own eye lids in anger over having fallen asleep during meditation.

Being in bed with a calcaneus fracture, I guess it would be easy for me to be ironic about people talking about how easy it is to rise again. But actually, these legends about feet, falling and recovery made me look around for a little bit more to read about him and doing so proved to be a very pleasant pastime. 

One thing I found out through this nice collection of Buddhist artworks with commentaries by Mark Schumacher was that these stories about falling and rising were sometimes given a phallic symbolism. What falls and then quickly rises again is the male sexual organ. I'd really recommend interested readers to have a look at some of the artworks on his site - like so much else produced in Edo period Japan it is quite delightful and sure to guarantee a few laughs (as they were meant to do already then). Meanwhile, let me quote the relevant passage from Schumacher's text:

As shown above, Daruma artwork lent itself easily to phallic symbolism without any need for folkloric references. Yet, there is little doubt that Daruma's metamorphosis into the male organ was pushed along by the widespread use in the late Edo era of the armless and legless Daruma tumbler doll talisman against smallpox. When knocked on its side, the doll pops back to the upright position and therefore symbolizes (1) a speedy recovery from illness, akin to "getting back on one's feet;" or (2) resilience, undaunted spirit, and determination. Such imagery can be easily employed to describe the down-up, soft-hard nature of the male sexual organ. With only a little imagination, one can easily understand why Daruma paintings and talismanic representations fell naturally under the same phallic sway. Says scholar Bernard Faure: "Until the Meiji period, phallic representations of Daruma in stone or papier mache were sold. The name 'Daruma' was also a nickname given in the Edo period to prostitutes, perhaps because, like the doll, these specialists of tumble could raise the energy of their customers........ There is also in Zen iconography a representation of the 'erect Bodhidharma.' The sexual symbolism is played out in the ukiyoe [woodblock prints], where Daruma appears as woman — a courtesan, or a transvestite Daruma and Okame" (the quote is from this text by Faure)

One reason I liked this passage was that Schumacher here confirms so much about the phallic or yang associations connected to Bodhidharma that I myself once tried to excavate with the help of a few old artworks. I could have saved myself at least some of this interpretative toil by reading this earlier! (See my previous entries: "Big eyes" and "White and red").


Totem pole

Incidentally, the phallic symbolism also helps explain this -Takewo Yoshizaki's "Daruma-san totem pole", one of the few three-dimensional artworks produced by the young artists engaged in creating art in the "Cardboard Village" of homeless people living in the underground passages near the west exit of Shinjuku Station in the mid-90's (For a look at the artworks, see this site or Sakokawa Naoko's recently published photo collection, Shinjuku danbôru-mura). Take Jun'ichiro, another of the artists, often spoke about the underground passages as a womb. Perhaps the totem pole could be seen as a phallus that would impregnate this womb? In fact, many of the artworks depicted births or newborn babies. 

I once wrote a text on this cardboard village in which I pointed out how one of the most famous paintings - the "Shinjuku Left Eye" - was also connected to the Daruma-san motif. The painters had decided to paint it to supplement an existing art work, the "Shinjuku Eye" (a rather monumental glass eye located nearby that was made by Miyashita Yoshiko in the late 60's), thereby repeating the gesture of filling in a missing eye. The artists spoke about it as signifying the birth of a huge living creature, a monster living in the underground passages ready to howl its resentment and "turn its fangs against shit-Japan", symbolized by the Metropolitan Government skyscraper at the foot of which the passages ended.



Shinjuku's Left Eye

So here again the Daruma-san motif is connected, if not to a phallus, than to a kind of fertility idea and to the idea of a rectification of the world. Such symbolism was also present in artworks depicting Daruma-san in premodern Japan, where Daruma-san was for instance sometimes depicted as a namazu, a giant subterranean catfish through to cause earthquakes and used to symbolize the idea of yonaoshi, the rectification of the world, the punishment of the greedy and the redistribution of wealth (see Gregory Smits's site here or his "Shaking up Japan: Edo Society and the 1855 Catfish Picture Prints", Journal of Social History 39:4, 2006). 

Daruma namazu, 1855 woodblock print
(courtesy Univeristy of Tokyo, via M. Schumacher)

Perhaps it's time to leave the phallic symbolism. The saying about just rising again if one happens to fall is one which I like and which I think may have some truth even outside the phallic context (however hard it might be for some to rise). Let me end by quoting one of my friends, who has a special talent for paraphrasing and détourning quotations. Once in a letter she wrote: "We are ridiculous! Disarm your enemies by laughing (AND THEN RISE!)". On another occasion she was feeling a bit blue and said: ”Even if you fall, don’t worry. Just stay in bed.”  Now there's some good advice which I will follow!