Analyze

“...Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty (Bullard et al., 2007) revealed that communities of colour and poor communities were still being used as dumping grounds for all kinds of toxic contaminants. The authors discovered evidence that the clustering of environmental hazards, in addition to single sources of pollution, presented significant threats to communities of colour. Furthermore, the research showed that polluting industries frequently singled out communities of colour in siting decisions, countering the “minority move-in hypothesis”: the claim that people of colour voluntarily move into contaminated communities rather than being targeted in situ by dirty industries.” (122)

“Bullard (1990) has highlighted the problem of “Black Love Canals” throughout the United States, where issues of environmental injustice are deeply connected with environ- mental racism. For example, Bullard highlights the case of toxic DDT water contamination in the African American community of Triana, Alabama. In 1978, in the midst of the national media attention focused on Love Canal, residents in Triana raised complaints over ill-health effects and contaminated fish and waterfowl. Lawsuits in Triana against the Olin Corporation continued throughout the 1980s. Although the case is noted within environ- mental justice histories (see Taylor, 2014), it is not widely recognized or commemorated.” (126)

“Underpinning the slow, structural violence (see Galtung, 1969; Davies, 2019) of unequal and unjust toxic exposures is the problem of “expendability” … Pellow (2018) proposes that indispensability is a key pillar of critical environmental justice studies (alongside intersectionality, scale, and state power). This idea builds on the work of critical race and ethnic studies scholar John Marquez (2014) on “racial expendability” to argue that, within a white-dominated society, people of colour are typically viewed as expendable.” (127)

“National and international media headlines followed the Flint water crisis story as it unfolded, but, after the initial shock, Flint faded from media attention. It shifted from being a spectacular disaster to a case of slow violence. This paral- lels the dynamics of public memory surrounding many toxic disasters, struggles, and legacies.” (128)

The author’s main argument is two-fold. Acute environmental disasters (e.g., Chernobyl, BP Horizon Spill, Hurricane Katrina) that garnered public attention leave behind legacies of increased support for environmental action and legislation, although the public attention span is often too short for lasting change. At the same time, these disasters have received a disproportionate amount of public attention compared to the many more slow-moving toxicity disasters that affect people in more systematic but often less visible ways. Examples of this disparity include the contrast between the 1984 Bhopal disaster coverage, and the persistent toxicity in the area in the time since then in the form of industrial waste and infrastructure that is not maintained. It is additionally important to note that the cases that don’t receive much attention often affect marginalized groups (by race, socioeconomics) disproportionately.

Individualizing and psychologizing the suicides, ignoring the publicness of the action and the structural causes, took away from its extreme emotional potency. Although it did spawn a good deal of activism and research, the profit margins of Apple continue to grow and Foxconn’s are shrinking. 

Automation is ignored - this topic was raised in the Dialectical Anthropology article that responded to something else that Ngai wrote and cited this piece.

Apple ”released its Supplier Responsibility Progress Report in February 2011 to show the remedial measures taken by Foxconn, its largest supplier, in the aftermath of the suicides. However, none of the ‘remedial measures’ addressed such core issues as speed-up, illegal levels of compulsory overtime work, dangerous conditions in the Foxconn factories, the humiliation of workers, and illegal practices associated with the use of student interns as workers.” -p1263

I think the corporations had extremely little regard for the Chinese factory workers, including the higher-ups at Foxconn and the people of Apple and the other companies that contract their manufacturing with Foxconn. It seemed like pure damage control.

Really just denying responsibility hard: Foxconn’s “public responses to workers’ suicides were uniform: the workers who attempted suicides suffered from individual psychological problems such as depression, distress over heavy debts, or family and other personal problems (Li, 2010). Foxconn hired Western and Chinese psychologists and psychiatrists to defend it in the wake of the plague of worker suicides at the company.” p1260

As more specified in news articles, like Heffernan 2013, Foxconn increased wages but increased the quotas by even more. They started making workers sign anti-suicide pledges that said they wouldn’t blame the company or sue or ask for compensation. They retracted that because of outcry but then just put up nets. “Steve Jobs gamely insisted that the factory, with swimming pools and cinemas, was far better than required. The Foxconn communications director Liu Kun, argued that with more than a million employees in China alone, the rate of "self-killing" wasn't far from China's relatively high average. Everyone pledged to do better and the story went away.”

In this economist article I can’t access, but that is cited in the Wikipedia article on this topic, they also mentioned that Buddhist monks were brought in for prayer sessions.

The activists “condemned the ineffectiveness of the Chinese government and trade unions to enforce labor law and protection of the migrant workers and hence urged Apple and other brands to support genuine reform of Foxconn’s unions.” p1261 - so they are turning to the brands for labor conditions to improve.

While I found the article illuminating (I did not read the book), I am frustrated by, what I found, to be the hegemonic visions of political theory and climate change. Is there no space for feminist epistemological stances when imagining future forms of governance? Even their presentation of Climate X--what seemed to me like a quest for a unifying theory of opposition that is neither realistic nor reflects the how resistence movements however stuttering they may be are also a source of possibility and hope.

I wonder about global corporations and how they might relate to the described US-UN-Western-Elite Climate Leviathan verus Behemoth on the Capitalist side. They already operate beyond nation-state territorial scope. Just from where I'm situated, I've heard a lot of people praising tech companies in the US for being the first to call for work-from-home. Facebook's Data for Good COVID mapping that Tim sent around also looks like a start of a global panopticon that already has the capacity to be monitoring a huge number of people's travel and symptoms, beyond state divisions, in fact explicitly in part because Facebook does not trust state data, and it does not need buy-in at a UN kind of event. People are already consenting in degrees to have Facebook "collect" and aggregate their data for the fun, validation, convenience, etc. of being on social media. As the Western Elite governments go to Behemoth, are the corporations of those elite places the ones to carry on the idea of Leviathan? 

This article also brought to mind a haunting story that I first heard from a fancy robotics professor of a "Noah's Ark" for Elon Musk. I haven't quite figured out how that fits yet with the chart of possibilites offered in the article.

I second Prerna's frustration about citation and writing like one is the first person to think of something. 

I admire Mann and Wainwright for taking on the impossible task of coming up with a political theory for climate justice. Their strength lies in how they inadvertently reveal the stubbornness of Leviathan, or liberal democracy. But I must question when abstractions turn into reifications. Like any political theory, it would of course rouse passions and frustrations, so here are mine.

(1)  The political theory of the state that Mann and Wainwright build on follows the tradition(s) of Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, and Walter Benjamin. If we are to limit ourselves in these traditions, there is a still a lot of space to talk about them that Mann and Wainwright keep open. I am intrigued by the phrases "a world without sovereignty is no world at all", and "democracy undoes the very possibility of rule", which reveal how stubborn our political imaginations are. In the construction of these phrases, a world without sovereignty and democracy is not recognizably a world. I think they are quite right here. I hope to explore in my own project the tensions they point out, that this moment reinforces in such a monstrous way: "Leviathan, whether in the Old Testament or in even oldermyths, was never a captive of its conjurer’s will, and remains at large today, prowling between nature and the supernatural, sovereign and subject." (1)

(2) The most obvious critique I have is their lack of imagination for where learning can come from. Their four climate scenarios assume a bipolar world of Asia and United States. Take for example, this quote: "In contrast to sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, for example, only in Asia—and only with some revolutionary leadership from China—do we find the combination of factors that make climate Mao realizable: massive and marginalized peasantries and proletariats, historical experience and ideology, existing state capacity, and skyrocketing carbon emissions." (10)

The phrase in contrast leaves Africa and Latin America as places without coordinational capacity. We have to remember that the Haitian Revolution  happened in the Caribbean in 1791, a successful proleteriat revolution against a colonial state which had degraded both ecology and humanity. Admittedly the challenges are different in scale and scope today, but we have to be careful about the biases we reveal when we abstract. 

(3) So, where can learning come from? As I write in my annotation on the T-STS COVID project: "The question of political organizing and mobilizing in times of crisis therefore needs to build on movements and organizing that have resulted out of long histories of exclusion. How does movement-building look like to those who have learned to organize in a state that was to them mostly oppressive and withdrawn? Corinna Mullin and Azadeh Shahshahani (2020) reflect on what a transnational perspective on movement-building and organizing looks like. Their excellent article points to early Black radical internationalism and organizations, indigenous internationalism, the international peasant and ecological movement of Via Campesina, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Black for Palestine and The Red Nation movements, for example. In short, we have much to learn from responses by ongoing anti-imperialist movements during COVID-19 which have called for cancellation of neocolonial debt, land repatriation, reconfiguration of gig and hustle economies, just to give a few examples." Where else can we find examples to build on?

(4) So, the world that I live in is not polar, nor is it confined to territorial nation-states. Does it still make sense to speak of the US as representative of liberal democracy? And does liberal democracy mean rule without terror? Mann and Wainwright contrast "Euro-American liberal hegemony" to the "necessity of a just terror" that climate Mao asserts (9). Further, they distinguish the mechanisms of "neoliberal contagion" from global climate change, as if the two operate on separate floating spheres (3). However, as Inderpal Grewal argues in Saving the Security State (2017) and Jasbir Puar argues in The Right to Maim (2017), the security state cannot be separated from the transnational parastatal humanitarian complex that has emerged to address global climate change, among other things. These parastatal organizations work within the contradictions of neoliberalism: benefiting from withdrawing of the state and the increased capacity of the state to surveil (as the COVID19 pandemic sadly shows too) and make citizens which see themselves as exceptional liberals if they participate in that complex. They maintain the US empire and benefit from it. Is there space to talk about present-day imperial projects in political theory about climate activism?

(5) I wished they would have cited and learned from other people who have been saying these things for a long time. Is my wish for them to "talk about everything"? No, my wish for them is to stop speaking as if they are the first ones to speak about this. A footnote would have sufficed. And that is my frustration.