The Tumultuous Politics of Scale

Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux

Donald M. Nonini, Ida Susser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367186265
• eBook ISBN: 9780429536724
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary politics, this book contends, depend upon the turbulent

struggles and strategies around scale. Confl icts over scale can be seen

as opaque class struggles. Political projects, whether from the ground up

or representing corporate or state interests, continually contest the scale at

which authority is vested. This volume looks at the way global corporations

redefi ne the scale of power and how working- class and other movements

build alliances and cross scales to develop political blocs. What injustices

are perpetrated or, more hopefully, redressed in this process? The book,

consisting of contributions from anthropologists, geographers, and cultural

studies scholars, explores theoretical issues around contested temporal and

spatial scales, and around variations in scale from the body to the global.

Part I focuses on bodies in motion, entangled in battles over new boundaries

and political coalitions, and the ways in which migrants and refugees

are disrupted by intersecting time scales. Part II on the nation- state addresses

the shifting responsibilities assigned by law at diff erent historical moments

and the impact of global energy trade on national austerity policies. Part

III, on rescaling sovereignty, discusses the misleading media discourse on

"Brexit" and reconstructs the class bases of the move to the Right in Eastern

Europe that threaten the EU. Part IV on the histories of changing scales of

movements revisits historical debates on uneven and combined development,

and sets out the transnational labor movements of the eighteenthand

nineteenth- century Atlantic, which prefi gure contemporary struggles of

labor in a world which is still one of uneven and combined capitalist development.

Finally, Part V considers ways in which some social movements are

constrained by scale while others reshape parties and traverse nations in their

eff orts to build class alliances and political blocs.

Chapter 1

Introduction – The Tumultuous Politics of Scale

History, Class, and Agency Revisited

Donald M. Nonini and Ida Susser

Unsettling Politics

In 2012, Lone Pine Corporation, a U.S. fossil-fuel corporation, threatened the riverine ecologies of the St. Lawrence River and the livelihoods of people living on it by its plans for hydraulic fracturing of the river’s banks and subsurface. On the basis of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the U.S. company challenged the sovereignties of the Canadian government and Québec Province for limiting its “investor’s rights” and thwarting its quest for “expected profits.” This claim was brought before a global tribunal consisting of three unelected arbitration attorneys.¹ A global trade agreement thus established the capacity for a corporation to override the laws of two established nation-states, the United States where the corporation was based, and Canada where it was operating.

Since the 1990s and the adoption of NAFTA, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and numerous other international trade agreements, corporations have claimed the right to despoil environments and destroy livelihoods, legally in the name of “expected profits,” regardless of national law. Far from protecting national populations, or even expanding health and safety regulations to poorer nations, such agreements in their shift of decisions to the global scale have allowed international business to overrule long fought-for national environmental and labor protections and other legislation. In the name of quarterly stock market returns and “shareholder value,” they have thus contributed to the distress and turmoil associated with an expanding global economy and the processes of financialization.

In this book, we examine social actors who seek to determine the scales at which power is exerted. We see the analysis of attempts to change scales of regulation or policy implementation as an interrogation of power, especially in relation to the current global regime of financialization and corporatization of nation-states. If local social movements or local states could pass laws setting labor and environmental standards with jurisdictions that applied to the extractions by international corporations, then they would be effective; but when regulations at the global or nation-state scales pre-empt local laws, then these corporations have a free hand at fracking, polluting, and depriving workers of their livelihoods. Determining scale means determining the mechanics of power, including the possibilities for working- class actions and confrontation. For example, if a union is more powerful at the national level, companies fight to ensure that union locals cannot call on the national union or on a group of unions to support a local fight (Carbonella 2014; Kasmir Chapter 11, this volume). In this case, enforcing small-scale decisions weakens the power of employees. A contrary example where upscaling power led to progressive change occurred in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In response to national movements by African Americans and women, federal laws were implemented which superseded state laws. This allowed for path-breaking decisions in terms of civil rights and reproductive choice, which, in fact, continue to be fought over state by state by a conservative backlash. Determining scale can be seen as an important strategic advantage in struggles for power. To develop a theoretical approach to scale which incorporates anthropological insight, we need to analyze the historical context of scalar decisions, in other words, the historical shaping of power and its implication for working-class as well as corporate contestations.

Strategies of powerful actors include not only attempts to shift the spatial scale of action, but also temporal scale. Such shifts occurred precisely in the days following 9/11, when the new security state of emergency and the “Global War on Terror” were declared. Time “sped up” within the U.S. nation-state – monumental changes like the Patriot Act had to be made, and they had to be made immediately (Harvey 2003). In another case, the restructuring of New Orleans post-Katrina through the privatization of public schools, and the seizure of African-American properties for financial investment as “rebuilding” (i.e. gentrification), had to take place immediately, or so at least the George W. Bush administration claimed (Klein 2007). Changes in temporal scale have occurred irrespective of (although related to) the generalized “space-time compression,” in which space has shrunk and time has sped up, which Harvey (1989) associates with flexible capitalism; as Doreen Massey (1993) has indicated, this has been more true for certain classes, races, and genders than for others. The key point is that “shock doctrines” and war declarations impose new demands on the structuring of time – such as rhythms, speed – for some groups differently from others as a means of exerting class power against them. Similarly, labor unions have successfully staged “go slow” campaigns through “work-to-rule” actions that have significantly slowed down industrial production and gained them victories. When actors engage in strategic shifts of temporal scale, this can massively disadvantage antagonists. This has been evident in systematic delays in the provision of government services to working-class populations experiencing austerity (cf. the United States, Britain, and Western Europe).

When there are simultaneous shifts in both spatial and temporal scales, as when the George W. Bush administration both used the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pre-empt local laws and put New Orleans on an emergency footing, there was the double assault associated with the shock doctrine prized by the new financial regime and representing a new form of spatial/temporal dispossession. Pryke (1999: 252–268) in his analysis of the “dominant economic rhythm” of structural adjustment in African and Latin-American cities has noted shifts that have arisen in the subjectivities of time, as have, more recently, scholars studying austerity in Europe (Powers 2019).

In the case described above, known as Lone Pine v. Canada, we see the deployment of resources and people at many different scales. Several of these are immediately apparent, such as the “global” or “super-regional” scale of NAFTA governance and its arbitration tribunals, the national scale of the corporation of Lone Pine (as “American”) in contrast to the transnational scale of its operation, the national scale of the government of Canada, the provincial scale of Québec, the bioregional scales of the riverine ecologies and geologies of the St. Lawrence River, and the local scale of the working-class people living on or near the targeted fracking, whose livelihoods as sailors, fishers, and tourist workers depend on a river free of fracking chemicals and methane leaks from extraction drilling. Less visible constituents at other scales include the First Nation peoples whose territorial sovereignty encompasses the waters of the St. Lawrence and its watershed, in addition to all the people and riverine organisms susceptible to toxins from fracking. Thus, conflicts over the scale of decision making are crucial political struggles.

In the historical centers of capital, the nation-state has generally been the place where the working class has been able to fight for people’s health and safety. In the United States, the instantiation of working-class power was represented in the creation of such national monitoring agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. After these institutions were established through the historic victories of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, the environmental movement, and others in the 1970s, U.S. corporations attempted to overrule the agencies both globally and through more provincial battles around “state’s rights.” The current situation arises from the corporate shift in scale from the national to the global, and the undermining of protective national legislation through global trade agreements, which are artifacts of “state capture” by corporations.

In some ways, we can understand battles over scale as the current representations of an opaque class struggle. Political projects, whether from the ground up or representing corporate interests continually contest and redefine the scale at which authority is vested. We ask what injustices are perpetrated or, more hopefully, redressed in this process? We address both the theoretical issues of time and space and the variations in scale from the body to the global. This volume focuses largely on the United States and Europe with one chapter (Chaturvedi, Chapter 4) on shifting legal scales under neoliberal policies in India. While we have opened up the discussion within the historic centers of capital and the remnants of the welfare state, we see this as one effort among many to unpack the politics of scale in regimes of financialization and states undergoing corporatization today.

Structural Power and Political Projects

At times, contending political projects are carried out through long-standing social, economic, or political relations operating at pre-existing scales, previously condensed in institutions such as markets and law courts. At other times, political projects construct and produce new scales that define the limits and scope of conflict.

As scale is not static but strategically employed in context, the analysis of scale is best situated within theorizations of political economy, history, and historically-informed ethnography. Such an endeavor must investigate race, class, and gender formations and re-formations, and the making of states – class projects that extend over space and through time.

Scalar projects may take surprising forms at different historical moments. Corporations such as those Kasmir describes in this volume (Chapter 11) conduct campaigns among workers to reinforce localist ties that repudiate national labor union goals. Social movement activists may range widely across nations and continents to gain support from dissident communities. In the nineteenth century, the great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass leveraged trans-Atlantic support (see Carbonella this volume, Chapter 9), while activists today, battling virtual corporate control through online apps, such as Uber, are working toward building cooperatives across Europe (Susser this volume, Chapter 12). Temporal rhythms of labor in France cause stress among transnational working-class migrants separated not only by distance but also by time from their children in China (see Lem this volume, Chapter 3). In the effort to deflect the influx of refugees from previous African colonies, the European Union extends its functional borders deeply into Northern and sub-Saharan Africa in ways that reflect new forms of empire, abuse migrants, and undermine supposedly independent African states (see Cobarubbias this volume, Chapter 2).

Scale in Political Projects: Both Discursive and Material

Anthropology has long distinguished between structure and agency. We do not in any way mean to blur these distinctions, although that has been one trend in the field, but are rather using the concept of scale to question the permanency of structure and to show the ways in which, in fact, agents are able to transform structure over time.

Fundamentally, we assume that the scales at which political projects occur are not “out there,” existing in some isolated “material” universe, but are instead conceived, created, implemented, modified, and transformed in material forms through human action in intentional, collective strategies to achieve class and other objectives (see discussion in Herod 2011: 1–58). Scale has its discursive or ideational dimensions, but it is not reducible to them. Moreover, the scale or scales at which political projects are undertaken and the processes through which multiple scales intersect within political projects, are historically framed, knowable, disputed, and contentious. The legitimacy and reinforcement of regulation at a particular scale, such as national or international law, bear on the rights of working-class people, define the terrain of battle, and are not neutral but rather a fundamental aspect of contested power relations, and related to regimes of accumulation.

Scalar projects are collective endeavors that always have a projective or imaginary aspect to them. They seek to bridge the past, the present, and the future (cf. Sider 2015). Past scalar projects leave their historical products, in the form of institutionalized structures, brownfields, or infrastructures such as the streets of cities along which people walk every day and the power lines that carry them electricity, and which reflect the histories of class struggles around social and environmental injustices (Castells 2002). The mechanisms that frame unequal power are institutionalized by past successful projects which include how people work, are paid and housed, and their access to the material conditions of life. Not only city infrastructures but also law codes and union regulations, for example, are institutional features of political life, and take the forms they do due to past raced/class/gendered projects which have “left their mark.”

Battles over scale are part of most political projects (Smith 1992; Smith and Dennis 1987; Marston 2000). They occur around labor movements (Herod 1991, 2001; Marston 2000), political parties (Agnew 1997), identity-based movements of the urban poor, homeless, HIV/AIDS, and peace activists (Brown 1995; Marston 2000; Smith 1996; Susser 2009); local, urban, and regional states (Brenner 2004; Marston 2000; Smith 1992); and around consumption and gendered labor related to social reproduction (Marston 2000; Marston and Smith 2001, Susser 2012). As a result, struggles over scale divide and constrain or promote working-class alliances and the development of wider political blocs in any particular historical conjuncture.

Our focus on collective projects around scale explains why we find much of the meta-theoretical discussion about “scale” from the cultural geography of the 1990s to the 2000s and the call for the abandonment of scale in the interests of a “flat ontology” (Marston, Jones and Woodward 2005) misdirected. As noted above, we are not arguing that scale is “natural” or eternal. In contrast, we take into account the historical structuring of scale and the power of contemporary institutions to maintain those inequalities, particularly around enforcing collective projects of race, gender, and class.²

“Virtual” Scale: Platform Capitalism, Labor, and Social Media

The advent of platform capitalism since the 1990s has been a particularly crucial factor in the capacities of corporations to shift the scales of their operations, and needs to be situated within the broader processes of the accumulation of finance capital and the corporatization of nation-states that has marked the last three decades (for an early analysis of this, see C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction – The Tumultuous Politics of ScaleHistory, Class, and Agency Revisited
• Part I Scales of DominationTransnational Migration and its Discontents
• Part II Problematizing the Nation and the Nation-State
• Part III Rescaling SovereigntyThe Case of the European Union and its Outside Insiders
• Part IV The Longue Durée
• Part V Social MovementsTransforming the Scales of Conflict
• Index