Peruvian alpacas killed by snow, Norwegian oil and consumer citizens: Can we get back to class and global solidarity?

The political authorities in Caylloma province (department of Arequipa, Southern Peru) has today declared a state of emergency for eight highland districts, where heavy snowfall is killing animals and making life hard for the peasant farmers and herders living there. These people – as most of the population in the Peruvian Andean highlands – are living in extreme poverty. The high mountain area of the Andes has always been a harsh environment to live in; semi-arid and unpredictable weather, strong rain and landslides often threaten the highland communities.

But the heavy snow and rainfalls that have created social emergencies in the recent years are unprecedented. The seasons are getting more irregular and unpredictable: rain, snow, frost and drought come at times of the year when people least expect it and ruin the agricultural cycle and the food production. In spite of heavy rain and snow, however, the general picture is that of melting glaciers, drying springs and declining water supplies.

(Photo: Municipalidad de Caylloma)

These climatic changes in the Andean mountains are caused by global warming. The latest draft report from IPCC states that it is “extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010”.

I live in Norway, a country that boasts an environmentalist and peaceful attitude towards the world, and yet almost all our wealth comes from the extraction of oil and gas. But are Norwegians willing to sacrifice their wealth to save the global climate? The future of oil extraction is one of the heatedly debated issues before the upcoming elections. Norway’s oil company Statoil wants to expand the oil production to the scenic fishing area Lofoten and Vesterålen. Environmentalist movements and left-wing political parties are campaigning against this. The Green Party (Miljøpartiet De Grønne) has grown incredibly in popularity due to their unwillingness to compromise the earth’s future, and might for the first time get several candidates elected for parliament. The party that most clearly points to the connections between economic and environmental issues, however, is the Red Party (Rødt), who might succeed in getting elected one candidate from Oslo.

The Norwegian author Jan Kjærstad wrote today in thenewspaper Aftenposten about the shift from seeing Norway as a society to a company that should generate economic growth. The social democratic Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) used to be a workers’ party fighting for labour rights, solidarity, redistribution of goods, and equality of rights. Now that they have been in power for most of the last century, they are more concerned with saving the banks when they are facing financial crisis (which the banks caused in the first place). People are no longer seen as citizens, but as clients and consumers. This is a global shift. The sociologist Evalina Dagnino writes about how citizenship in Latin America used to be about rights and collective solidarity, but is now about individual responsibility as a private moral duty. The concept of citizenship that grew out of the social popular movements that fought for equality of rights in the 1970s and 1980s, has now acquired a neoliberal meaning and is now all about citizens as consumers. 

The anthropologist Anna Tsing also touches upon this problem of consumer identity in her article about global capitalism, which she calls “supply chain capitalism”, as a system that outsources production to diverse social- economic niches where goods and services can be produced more cheaply: “Such niches are reproduced in performances of cultural identity through which suppliers show their agility and efficiency. Such performances, in turn, are encouraged by new figures of labor and labor power in which making a living appears as management, consumption, or entrepreneurship. These figurations blur the lines between self-exploitation and superexploitation, not just for owner- operators but also for the workers recruited into supplier enterprises. Through such forms of exploitation, supply chain capitalism creates both great wealth and great poverty” (Tsing 2009: 171).

We remember Naomi Klein’s book No Logo about the power of branding. These issues are structural, and the world cannot be changed through shopping. Instead of changing consumer patterns, the whole system of how to organize the world economy would need to change. People shouldn’t be identified through consumption and brands, but according to what they do to make a living: as workers, artists, farmers, employees, students, informal labourers. In Peru and the rest of Latin America, also the self-employed, the market vendors, the small entrepreneurs in the informal sector, and the “precariat” identify with the working class and organize in union-like associations. In other words, we’re back to class. Why did we forget about class? Can we blame the postmodernists? 

(Thanks to Overheating-collegue Elisabeth Schober and the other participants in the Labour reading group for the inspiring discussions yesterday.)