Exterminating Angel

by George M. Chatzistergiou

A full-page article in the Financial Times (30.4.13), written as the chronicle of an imminent social disaster, foretells the mass evictions of thousands of Irish people from their homes. The article’s extensive technical details (charts, percentages of unserviced loans, etc.) make it look like a weather forecast about the inexorable advent of a Katrina-type hurricane. What it lacks, however, is data to demonstrate any economic benefits —in favour of society and growth— from these developments. Finally, despite the article’s dramatic tone (typified by the large photograph of a young couple and their baby standing at their front door waiting for the catastrophe), there is no mention of any measures for the relief, if not the protection, of victims as in the case of a natural disaster. Only a sub-paragraph expresses the fear of “social unrest”, i.e. a reaction from the victims of this manmade ‘calamity’!

It is not just Ireland

It is clear that similar developments are taking place all over the planet and affect large parts of the population. Private property is almost penalised throughout Europe in the age of Memoranda and the so-called ‘bailout package’. In Greece, for instance, this takes the form of an additional, obligatory annual levy on all properties: not a tax on any income from letting, but even on people’s own homes. Another case in point is the bedroom tax introduced in Britain, an unprecedented measure against the unemployed whose benefits are drastically reduced if their homes (usually almost derelict council houses) have more bedrooms than the number of claimants. The Guardian interviews unemployed individuals like Peter Browne, who is desperately looking for a smaller flat where none are available. He says: "You can physically see the fear and the worry in people and you can sense it in the area. […] It's like trapping an animal in a cage. There's nowhere to go, and that's that."

In The Guardian of 6.11.2013, Angelique Chrisafis reports from Paris: "The French capital may be tolerant of the homeless, but increasing numbers of people are down and out in Paris… A 2009 poll found that 56% of French people felt they could one day be homeless themselves".

Processes of removing property from the hands of its owners are already evident also in the large poverty-stricken cities of Asia. As Le Monde Diplomatique recently revealed, the World Bank (the erstwhile “good cop” of American post-war economic supremacy, as opposed to the “bad-cop” IMF) lends small sums to shanty-town inhabitants with the theoretical aim of fostering micro-entrepreneurship (for starting a barbershop, for instance); the mortgage, however, goes beyond the borrower’s small property to include the entire neighbourhood! If the loan cannot be paid back, the foreclosure includes the broader area, which means, among other things, that solidarity among the weak is forcibly turned into a collective burden.

Although the approach to land ownership differs widely among different countries (in the European Union it remains one of the last ‘sacred cows’, as yet untouched by common policies), the World Bank and the IMF are pushing for “uniform rules” which essentially pave the way towards the faster accumulation of land internationally. A new law of international scope on land taxation currently debated in Britain (Financial Times, 29.9.13) proposes an annual tax on land based on its maximum potential for development irrespective of any properties already built on it.

If these developments can be seen to stem from the world banking crisis of 2008, the tendency to seize property appears in other contexts as well. In the chapter "Blanking the beach – The second tsunami" of her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes the forcible relocation inland of native Sri Lanka populations so that their land can be developed for tourism, after the 2004 tsunami which took the lives of 250.000 people and left 2.5 million people homeless throughout the region. As Seth Mydans reported in the International Herald Tribune of March 10, 2005: "The tsunami that cleared the shoreline like a giant bulldozer has presented developers with an undreamed-off opportunity and they have moved quickly to seize it". Such targeted relocations of populations on a regional scale resemble the practice of ethnic cleansing at the time when national states were created—only here the motive is blatant speculation.

An article in The Guardian of 12.9.2013, "No democracy, no right of abode: Britain and US squeezing the life out of Ascension Island", talks about the remote British colonial outpost in the mid-Atlantic and the processes of removing the native population and replacing them with cheap labour. Similar developments have taken place on the Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean.

Yet such processes occur also on a national level. Concepts such as “de-territorialisation”, used to promote the political agenda of globalisation, now assume their harsh meaning as peoples are stripped of their collective rights to the land they inhabit as well as its underground resources. In the age of Memoranda, European countries begin to experience situations hitherto limited to Africa and parts of Asia. At the same time, in what is a crucial turning point in human history, states are losing an invaluable asset: their “geopolitical benefits". Until recently, even the weakest state had an exploitable asset, a ‘weapon’ in the international competition, that stemmed from its unique geographical location. In the new era, this now seems to be coming to an end, along with the mass democracy of consumers.

Of course, it is not just urban land that ends up in the hands of the few as a new global regime is built. It is farmland, too, which in countries like India is hyper-concentrated away from producers via the patented, genetically modified seeds of the multination Monsanto concern. It is also money (witness the media’s belated interest in tax havens around the globe), precious metals (the market price of gold tumbles down at will in a game with crooked dice), energy sources.

Why?

If there is indeed a new kind of mechanism at work here, what is its purpose? If we focus back on land and real estate, we must note some new global trends of a speculative nature. Global concern over food sufficiency and rising food prices, coupled with the uncertainty over energy and the frenetic search for rare ores, gases or minerals in both land and sea, make it desirable for major interests to acquire all kinds of territories for future exploitation.

Yet is speculation really the key issue here? If, as Massimo de Angelis suggests, we focus on a definition of capital as social relationship rather than monetary surplus, the aim is more complex than just that of “capitalists making more money". We are living in a time of change in the model that generates and structures this social relationship which combines with the processes of primitive accumulation as they are described in Marxist bibliography. According to de Angelis, “It is not just that accumulation may occur as 'accumulation by dispossession', as in David Harvey's (2003) formulation. It is that the dispossession of life-time (that is labour exploitation) required by accumulation, can sustain itself only through periodic dispossession of alternative means of life reproduction and destruction/decomposition of correspondent communities.”

The way to achieve this aim is through strategic enclosures, akin to the fencing of common farming land that left British farmers in the age of Industrial Revolution with no alternative for survival but to flock to the cities, offer their labour and turn into industrial proletariat. Yet while the nature of today’s enclosures needs further investigation, it appears from the outset to have a dramatic difference: where the old productive model relied heavily on labour, the current model’s emphasis is on unemployment. This is a peculiar kind of unemployment, in the sense that while the system seems to disregard employment —characteristically, while the problem of unemployment tends to become a humanitarian crisis in several European countries, it does not figure on the agenda of structural adjustment programs (SAP), just as it was in third-world countries for decades— it still remains fully dependent on labour. To George Caffentzis the “end of work” is as unthinkable as the idea of “perpetual motion machines”. Thus the way in which unemployment is posed by the system today points more to labour being driven out of the official economy and certainly not to its abolition. Since, according to Caffentzis, of greater value than the productive system today is the attendant system of maintaining the conditions of production, it is the latter that today’s bankrupt masses are called upon to support, working under conditions of “informal economy” in all sectors, from healthcare to all kinds of “inferior activities”, from street sweeping to caring for the elderly, burdened with all the weight from the absence of a welfare state. It is such populations that enclosures aim to create.

However, imposing the enclosures would be neither easy nor achievable by sheer violence. The amount of violence would be monstrous, and even if the system could provide it it would jeopardise its future prospects. Since brutal force must be exercised with restraint, it will have to be combined with other means. The most prominent among these is biopolitics. A full examination of the many aspects of the biopolitics of the power system which is currently trying to establish itself lies beyond the scope of this article; however, the question of “home”, of the abode in the broader sense, is a key aspect.

Until recently, in the “golden half-century" of post-war Europe the “home” was for the powers-that-be the vehicle for implementing the biopolitics of that time (bearing the flag of consumerism, they came into your house with the fridge, the washing machine and the car and kept you in your living room to “mould” you through television); for citizens, on the other hand, the “self-owned” home could serve as a refuge or a springboard.

In our time, however, the biopolitics of power seems to present some infinitely more savage traits. Not only is there no provision of offset benefits for those “below”, but as labour and production have lost their central place, large parts of the population, even in Europe, are first made “unemployed” and then rendered “homeless” through confiscations until they are forever banished to society’s “landfill”. We hardly need to emphasise how, stripped of the ownership of their abode —won centuries ago in Europe by the bourgeois revolutions against feudalism— people are completely helpless against the whims of authority. This is what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein exposes some facets of the way in which the mechanism that drives things towards the “new age” moves on a planetary level. It is a violent process of hyperconcentration of resources and power —warlike in nature, albeit often without the use of conventional weapons— which in terms of how people are treated cannot but correspond to a regime of paroxysmal totalitarianism. This is not an ordinary crisis after which things will go back to "normal", but a savage rupture after which nothing will be the same as "before".

The case of Greece

Although practically the whole of Europe faces the same predicament —caught in the vortex of an undeclared yet savage war whose instigators’ aim is an unprecedented (in recent history, at least) change of the social map throughout the continent— when it comes to managing the situation through the strategy of enclosures each country emerges as a different case. This hinders a uniform and hence effective handling of the problems from the viewpoint of those “below”. Nevertheless, the study of a specific country as a special case but within a common context with the rest of them can help in arriving at broader conclusions. Greece is a country that lends itself to this purpose.

Geopolitics, history, ideology —for centuries the concept of "Greece" has been central to the mainstream European ideology— or even pure circumstance have brought this country to the front line of this peculiar war. In this sense a study of developments in Greece is important in many ways, especially as it serves as a test bed for methods which affect other countries as well.

If one could describe in two words the situation in Greece since 2009 and the advent of the “age of memoranda”, one could say that its economy has been forced to immobility —much like the clamping of illegally parked cars in London— while a ‘vacuum cleaner’ collects all available resources, public or private, be they bank accounts, pension fund reserves or profitable public entities which are sold off. And while on the social level the effects of explosive unemployment and an increasing economic inertia point to an ecosystem like an “open prison” without the prospect of any kind of growth to the benefit of society, personal property has become the main target of this policy. In Greece today land and house owners are persecuted through heavy taxes, in much the same way in which the Turkish government during WWII devastated the Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities with the discriminatory wealth tax known as Varlik Vergisi.

The construction industry, however, is of vital importance in Greece. Whole generations of Greeks lived, worked and planned their lives on the precept that in an otherwise fluid world land and personal property were not only a constant value but a fruitful investment for the future. In this context, construction was the main Greek industry—what the motor industry, for example, was for other countries. A peculiar industry, of low concentration and with several subdivisions, which in the years after WWII operated in an equally peculiar regime of popular capitalism which distributed the gains from this activity to a very large part of the population. The industry was funded by a variety of sources: the savings of Greek seamen or those who emigrated en masse to Germany or Australia after the war, tourism, the expansion of the domestic market in Keynesian terms and, of course, the external lending and the EU funds of recent decades. The mass entry of migrants, first from Albania after 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and then from Asia, provided cheap labour and gave the construction industry a further boost. Although its growth was not without problems, mainly associated with the environmental impact and the impaired functionality of Greek cities, it was nevertheless a highly efficient machine which ensured the highest rate of home ownership in Europe. Moreover, these buildings —or at least those of recent decades— are strongly built and highly resistant to earthquakes, since the Greek Schools of Engineering have attained a very high level of knowhow in this area, as reflected in the rigorous building regulations.

Yet exactly because construction and personal property had been the spine of the economy, in terms of production and employment but also as the basis for transactions and the foundation of the households’ “wealth”, its complete annihilation leads to the loss of what was hitherto the productive base and its attendant knowhow (with no other growth model replacing it), as well as to the destruction of personal property as a “currency equivalent” for domestic transactions. It is a dramatic turn of events, in many ways worse than a heavy devaluation of the currency of Greece.

Exterminating Angel

These days an exterminating angel hovers over the buildings in Greece as a tidal wave of confiscations threatens to include even main residences. Many people are wondering amidst the dust and the rubble in Greece: "What use is a rundown apartment in an Athenian neighbourhood to a bank or the state?" "Or are they trying to get hold of the old buildings and speculate by tearing them down to build new, luxurious cities for their own kind?" Yet the notion of tearing down Greek cities —Athens, first and foremost— to rebuild them and make them attractive to the international affluent class seems more like science fiction, at least as far as large-scale plans are concerned.

It is vital to understand that production has taken a back seat in the age of “casino capitalism”. Production requires organisation, planning and some sort of structured understanding with those “below”; in any case, its fruits —if it succeeds— are mid-term rather than immediate. Building is this kind of productive activity. In Greece the functioning of the construction industry was violently and abruptly interrupted, not as a result of market conditions (as in the US or Ireland with the housing bubbles) but mainly because of a combination of the scarce economic resources of the severely impoverished population and the very heavy taxes levied on property. Indeed, it must be stressed that Greece’s sui generis construction industry remained linked to the real economy so that it could not burst like a bubble, unlike the so-called real estate which is more about the securitisation of housing, i.e. the evaporation of its tangibility.

So what will happen to the repossessed apartments of Athens? Given the goals of the biopolitics we saw earlier, which is the main driver of current developments, they are most likely to serve as the tangible basis for intangible securities to be sold on stock markets internationally as “Athens real estate”. In other words, the future envisaged for Greeks —unless they find a way to change it— is to wander among ruins which won’t even be theirs anymore! Significantly for the nature of this process, in legal terms it is known as "dematerialisation of property rights"!

It is noted that these intangible securities emerged mainly after the year 2000 in the context of “casino capitalism”. In the field of property they form the core of the so-called real estate, which has nothing to do with the ‘traditional’ nature of property-related transactions. These new stock-market products enable one to obtain asset-backed lending but also lending and sales on the basis of future revenue via securitisation, i.e. the creation of fictitious assets and fictitious capital.

What next?

The decline of social and financial conditions for the majority of people around the planet, and certainly in Europe, is escalating. But why don't the victims react to their devastation? Luis Bunuel’s masterpiece film The Exterminating Angel (1962) gives us some good insights for approaching a state of entrapment, as a group of people, instead of attaining freedom merely by crossing a dividing line that only exists in their minds, are ultimately led to mutual destruction. Similarly, an imaginary boundary keeps the affected societies from reacting effectively; this line, together with the confusion and the terror brought about by the unending changes, is the illusion that we are still living in the “normality” of the previous decades or that we are on a temporary break from it. McLuhan has written on this: "There are very many reasons why most people prefer to live in the age just behind them. It’s safer. To live right on the shooting line, right on the frontier of change, is terrifying." The monstrous consequence of this illusion is that we continue to entrust our fortunes to the same system that brought us where we are.

There is no doubt that we need to resist what is coming. But in order to act effectively and comprehensively we need to fully understand the nature of developments. In this sense, there is certainly much to be done in the area of theory. Groundbreaking books such as Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts —that demonstrates the relation of the emerging planetary system of power in the late 19^th century with the magnitude of natural disasters and the creation of the so-called Third World— are vital today if we are to grasp the importance of current developments. Ideally, organisations like the UN could help by providing a solid foundation of pragmatological data, like that used by Mike Davis in writing another seminal book, the Planet of Slums.

If this is truly an unprecedented, peculiar war, we must hasten to chart the battlefields. Specifically on the issues of land and real estate, this charting should be literal, ideally:

- Which territories are interesting in terms of energy around the planet? Which lend themselves to producing food?

- Who owns these areas today? What are the trends in terms of their ownership?

- What are the ownership regimes for urban land and property around the planet? How concentrated is ownership in the areas of special interest?

- How are the profits from construction distributed? How do they relate to developments in the stock exchange and the markets in general?

Evidently, these questions are only indicative. Ideally, these special issues should be linked to broader matters in the fledging new system of production and social structure—for instance: What are the traits of the global middle class today (quantitative and qualitative characteri­stics, productive base, geographic distribution)? Is it capable of reproduction and survival or can it be easily annihilated through “sudden death”? What are the means which enable the power system to gain the upper hand? Can we invert those means so that they function in favour of society as a whole in the context of an alternative production system?

In any case the area of land and property lends itself as a first-class tool for understanding the way in which the new system of power works, not only because it is central to people’s lives but because it touches upon a tangible reality in a world otherwise that increasingly invokes a virtual realm.

Necessary though the above theoretical groundwork is, it is still not sufficient. Describing an approaching disaster or demonstrating the harm that the monster can cause is not necessarily helpful to the prospective victims. Indeed, according to Hitchcock, this is a technique which can intensify the feeling of terror. So knowledge of the truth is not revolutionary in itself unless it is combined with the determination to prevent any adverse developments and a plan for the effective handling of the situation and its prospects, inspired by a new vision as to what we want to come.

For Europe in particular, aside from a series of suitable actions within each country we need to work systematically and build powerful pan-European alliances with the majority of the continent’s affected population. This will not be on the basis of a general programme which may never come, but by ensuring that the individual’s fundamental rights to food, shelter, education and health remain inalienable. The game is not lost. The forces with an interest in resisting are many and sizeable. What appears today as a rudderless and highly vulnerable set of solitary (ex-)consumers can ultimately develop an unimaginable dynamic in favour of our collective interest.

REFERENCES

Transnational Institute (TNI) for European Coordination Via Campesina and Hands off the Land Network, “Land Concentration, land grabbing and people’s struggles in Europe” April 2013.

-David Harvey, Rebel Cities, Verso, London, 2012.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Penguin, Allen Lane, 2007.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006.

Massimo de Angelis, "Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures", Historical Materialism 12 (2004).

Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted lives. Modernity and its outcasts, Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003.

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts – El Nino Famines and the making of the third world, Verso, London, 2002.

Giorgio Agaben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, 1998.

George Caffentzis, "Why Machines Cannot Create Value or, Marx’s Theory of Machines", in the collective volume Cutting Edge – Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution, ed. Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael Stack, Verso, 1997.