Infrastructural stripping and ‘recycling’ of copper: producing the state in an industrial town in Serbia
2021; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1469-8676.13093
ISSN1469-8676
Autores Tópico(s)Mining and Resource Management
ResumoThis paper explores infrastructural disruptions of utility provisioning caused by stealing of copper infrastructural parts in a copper-processing town in Serbia. Such illicit practices of infrastructural stripping were part of copper circulation via theft, cynically referred to as ‘recycling’ of copper, and were incentivised by increased copper price and the specific local economy. Drawing from ethnography among the citizens who reacted to the disruption of the heating provision caused by infrastructural stripping and the disfranchised citizens who illegally recycled parts of infrastructures, I shift so far predominant scholarly focus on engagements with infrastructural material flows and/or their stasis to show how governance hinges on the very liquidation of infrastructural channels. Following the underlying mechanics of the ‘state’ and its uneven distributive politics, I argue that stripping of infrastructures and the consequential disruptions were vital in configuring the state as a desired framework necessary to regulate everyday (infrastructural) lives. I analyse how such process was arranged infrastructurally via socialist and post-socialist patterns, which enabled the maintenance of some configurations of power (from the socialist past) to govern the everyday (infrastructural) lives. The paper contributes to the intersection between anthropological literature on infrastructures and the state and the study of post-socialist infrastructures. Cet article explore les perturbations infrastructurelles de la fourniture de services publics causées par le vol de pièces d’infrastructure en cuivre dans une ville de traitement du cuivre en Serbie. Ces pratiques illicites de dépouillement des infrastructures faisaient partie de la circulation du cuivre par le vol, cyniquement appelée le « recyclage » du cuivre. Elles étaient encouragées par l’augmentation du prix et l’économie locale spécifique. En m’appuyant sur l’ethnographie des citoyens qui ont réagi à la perturbation des services de chauffage causée par le dépouillement des infrastructures et des citoyens privés de leurs droits qui recyclaient illégalement des pièces d’infrastructure, je m’écarte des discussions académiques prédominantes sur les engagements avec l’écoulement matériel d’infrastructure (et/ou leur stase) pour montrer comment la gouvernance s’articule sur la liquidation même des canaux d’infrastructure. En suivant les mécanismes sous-jacents de l’État et de sa politique de distribution inégale, je soutiens que ce dépouillement matériel (et les perturbations qui en découlent) étaient essentiels pour configurer l’État en tant que cadre souhaité nécessaire pour réguler les vies quotidiennes (infrastructurelles). J’analyse comment un tel processus a été organisé au niveau des infrastructures via des modèles socialistes et postsocialistes, permettant ainsi le maintien de certaines configurations de pouvoir (du passé socialiste) pour gouverner les vies quotidiennes (infrastructurelles). L’article contribue à l’intersection entre la literature anthropologique sur les infrastructures et l’État, ainsi que l’étude des infrastructures postsocialistes. In spring 2013, I was drinking coffee with Joca,11 I use pseudonyms for all the interlocutors in this paper. a 30-year-old teacher of an environmental protection course, in a teacher’s lounge of the technical high school in the industrial town of Bor in Eastern Serbia. While we were discussing his course, my attention was suddenly interrupted by the local radio, which was playing in the background, announcing that there was a cut in the electricity supply in part of the town. The reason, it was reported, was that someone had tried to steal some electricity wires. The newsreader said that, unfortunately, a person had died that day from an electric shock while stealing them. One part of the copper-processing company called RTB22 The ‘Mining and Smelter Basin Bor’ [Rudarsko topioničarski basen Bor – RTB Bor], hereafter referred to as ‘the company’ or ‘RTB’, was the name used until August 2018, when the company was sold to the Chinese company Zijin Mining Group. was also left ‘in the dark’. Such news was not ‘new’ in Bor, Joca explained to me, as stealing of copper infrastructural parts was very frequent. This further prompted him to explain the logic of such disruptions: he thought that ‘the state’ [država] should protect the infrastructure and that the corrupted state should restore the electricity supply. These thefts were ‘legalised’, according to him, considering that the state, the General Manager of the company and the police were involved too: ‘The copper gets returned to the company, and everybody is involved!’ he said, adding, ‘Hey, the politicians legally robbed and stole from the citizens, the same General Manager [of RTB] did … so why would anyone chase these people who steal only a little? They [the politicians] stole a vast number of factories in this country, the General Manager destroyed RTB during the 1990s, and they are not punished.’ Then he joked, ‘Did you know that the General Manager never steals?! You know what he is doing?’ He paused. ‘He is continuously investing in himself.’ We laughed. Joca’s affective reaction provoked by the interruptions of infrastructural provisioning caused by stealing of copper infrastructural parts, practices which I call infrastructural stripping, was a widely shared preoccupation among the citizens of Bor. Just like in Joca’s case, such preoccupations often brought together Bor’s local copper economy, urban infrastructures and ‘the state’, seen as an entity that was not doing its part to prevent this kind of theft and as one which might have been actively participating in it. In this paper, I explore such entanglements to understand how practices of infrastructural stripping came to be understood as a form of action that was nested within a post-socialist context of enduring expectations of infrastructural provision, omnipresent party politics, the precarious position of the copper-processing company, and the global boom and bust of commodity cycles. The breakdowns of infrastructural provisions due to infrastructural stripping were significantly different from other infrastructural breakdowns of heating or electricity that frequently occurred in Serbia. The latter were usually the consequence of a lack of maintenance of the outworn infrastructure built during socialism, a lack of resources to maintain it, and/or neglect or reduction of public services, increasingly felt after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. What made the breakdowns in Bor specific was the fact that the illicit practices were induced by the global market (the price of copper was high at that moment) and by the local economy, which was influenced by an indebted, state-managed, post-socialist company (RTB). The circulation of copper via theft, cynically referred to as ‘recycling’ of copper, made copper objects increasingly deficient in the urban landscape of Bor. In this paper, I focus on infrastructural effects of such ‘recycling’ of copper to look at the ways in which the breakdowns legitimated the underlying mechanics of the state and its uneven distributive politics. While providing new ethnographic insights into still under-researched infrastructures in the post-Yugoslav region (see Johnson 2018), the paper contributes to the intersection between anthropological literature on infrastructures and the state as well as to the study of infrastructural dynamics within the context of post-socialism. A large body of literature has shown how infrastructures are involved in configuring and materialising relations between the state and citizens (Harvey 2005; Larkin 2013; Dalakoglou 2016; Laszczkowski and Reeves 2017). To explore these dynamics and how they play a crucial role in shaping political subjectivities (Von Schnitzler 2008), the scholarship has, to a great extent, explored infrastructural engagements with water (Anand 2011, 2017; Schwenkel 2015; Barnes 2017), electricity (Gupta 2015), oil (Barry 2013), heat (Humphrey 2003; Şalaru 2018; Fennell 2011), waste (Kallianos 2018; Dalakoglou and Kallianos 2014), and so on. Such a focus on engagements with material flows and/or their stasis can be found in a number of ethnographies that focus even on illicit actions that target infrastructures and their flows: from unauthorised repairs, reconnections and extensions of an electrical network in Tanzania (Degani 2017; 2018), unlawful water connections in Mexico (Meehan 2013), and the bypassing of metering devices and illegal water connections in South Africa (Von Schnitzler 2008, 2016) to ‘bunkering’ of oil in Nigeria (Gelber 2015). Altogether, this work has demonstrated how such practices play a vital role in political and social (re)ordering. Drawing from these insights, this paper shifts the focus from studying ‘things’ that flow infrastructurally to showing how governance hinges on the very liquidation of infrastructural channels. Stripping of infrastructures is a suitable lens through which to explore this and to show in detail what kinds of practices and configurations of power within a landscape of global capitalism today govern the everyday (infrastructural) lives in a place like Bor, a post-socialist, late-industrial town embedded at the semi-periphery of Europe (Blagojević 2009). While ethnographically unpacking the production of power in this town, the paper particularly shows how stripping of infrastructures and the consequential infrastructural disorders became vital in configuring the state as a desired framework necessary to regulate everyday (infrastructural) lives. I illustrate how it was possible for such a process to be arranged infrastructurally via past socialist and post-socialist social, political and economic patterns, which enabled the maintenance of some configurations of power (from the socialist past) to govern the everyday (infrastructural) life. Furthermore, I also show how exclusions from infrastructural citizenship occurred according to class and ethnicity. In this paper, I acknowledge the generative and relational capacity of the constitutive materials (Harvey 2019). I ethnographically depict their capacity and the capacity of infrastructures to undercut and sustain the perception of the state (which is certainly not reducible to them). I see the material things as neither ‘prior to politics’ (Anand 2017: 13) nor merely effects of social organisation and ‘the effect of the politics’ (Anand 2017: 13). Rather, I see them as involved in affecting relations and that the relations affect the materials. Hence, I draw from Laszczkowski (2015: 139), who argues that materials have a capacity to exercise agency in a Latourian sense of things as mediators, as active elements capable of altering the course and effects of the agency of others, and may, to an extent, stimulate humans to undertake particular actions. In the first part of this paper, I embed the infrastructural disorders in the local context of recycling of copper. This is followed by ethnographic illustrations of the affective responses of the citizens who had their heating delivery destabilised by infrastructural stripping and of disfranchised citizens who illegally recycled pieces of copper, parts of urban infrastructure. My intention is not, by any means, to insinuate that the people I talked with committed the particular theft that I refer to in this paper. Rather, these descriptions portray the uncertain responsibilities vis-à-vis the state and the unequal access to citizenship via infrastructures. The paper is based on ethnographic material collected during the fieldwork I conducted in this town for 14 months from August 2012 to September 2013 and during my visit in April 2018. The town of Bor, located 250 km southeast of the capital of Serbia, is a medium-sized town characterised by a mono-structural economy. RTB Bor, which consists of both extractive and processing components, is the only producer of copper and precious metals in Serbia. The town and the company experienced a prosperous period during self-managed socialism in the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia, when urbanised infrastructure emerged due to rapid industrial expansion and urbanisation. The company has been historically intertwined with the town’s social and political life, prosperity and development. While the town was a symbol of socialist industrial success and modernism and the company was considered to be an industrial ‘giant’, after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and further in the 2000s, both the town and the company became emblematic of post-socialist crisis, with an impaired environment and precarious economy. My fieldwork in 2012 and 2013 overlapped with a moment of alleged ‘revival’ of the then still state-managed company, which occurred due to a rise in the copper price on the global market and political and economic support at the local and national levels. The company was in the process of restructuration, a status granted by the state, which temporarily protected it from external creditors and debtors. Alongside this, the Serbian government subsidised the company and acted as a guarantor for colossal loans, thus ensuring that the struggling ‘strategic’ company was kept economically alive. This was both a populist measure of ‘buying social peace’ and looking for a strategic partner to finally sell the ailing company. The revival as a campaign enabled party-political votes to be secured and to create pathways for privatisation in 2018, when the company was sold to a Chinese state company. Until 2018, the managers of this company were the leading party-political figures in the municipal assembly. Their colleagues from the same political party, over whom the industrial managers had influence, governed the public utility companies that were owned by the government. RTB itself was intertwined with the work of utility companies. For instance, the General Manager of RTB, through his influence as a leader of the ruling political party (which held power at local and national level), had the capacity to make infrastructures work through his political power and patron–client relationships. For instance, he would bring a certain amount of coal to the heating plant in order to help it start working on time or would pressure the workers at the public utilities to work overtime in order to finish the repairs more quickly. At that time, heating and electricity utility providers in particular were economically, technically and environmentally unsustainable and highly indebted. Moreover, it was still difficult to disconnect from the state providers, as they were the only providers. It was also impossible to disconnect from district heating systems, due to the physical inability to disconnect from the joint pipes (see Collier 2011).33 I discuss elsewhere the ways in which the obduracy of materials was involved in reconfiguring the social contract among the heating users and I point to distinctive processes that make these infrastructures visible (see Jovanović 2019). As they increasingly polluted and became less affordable, all these issues made the electricity and heating provisions major topics of political contentions and collective concerns in Serbia. Even though the infrastructural provision of electricity and heating occasionally kept failing, the urban infrastructures still succeeded in producing a generalised sense of social good to which the residents subscribed (see Harvey and Knox 2012). Built and installed during socialist urbanisation, the Yugoslav state had assured (in the past) that it would deliver prosperous socialist futures, modern and comfortable lives, and welfare and care through setting up modern urban infrastructures (Jovanović 2019). As a ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ and as a ‘bundle’, it was simultaneously integrated into the socialist idea of the provision of the ‘minimum living standard’. The infrastructural modern lives reflected the aspirations of the Yugoslav state to ensure socio-economic development, such as equal access to jobs and housing (Djurašovic 2016: 107–8). Even though socially owned flats and jobs were not equally distributed in practice, the infrastructural entitlements such as heating and electricity were widely distributed. Through collective, social and political efforts, infrastructures had a role in being themselves socially transformative (Humphrey 2005) – socialist citizens should have fulfilled their part of the social contract through labour (as producers and workers) and, in return, they expected the socialist state to deliver hardware and software for daily modern living. My interlocutors often told me that stealing of copper objects had worsened over the past few years since 2012 because the copper price had increased and because the particular money-go-round economy was to a great extent influenced by RTB. In general, copper’s physical properties allow its wide use in infrastructures due to its availability, excellent formability, good strength when alloyed, high thermal and electric conductivity, non-corrosiveness, resistance, malleability and flexibility (Campbell 2008: 469). These material properties also made it prone to being stolen. Electricity and telephone cables, pipes, heating substations, and phone signal transmitters went missing too. The town had almost no manhole covers over the underground utility vaults, leaving telephone, electricity and heating vaults exposed. The stone blocks in the middle of the pavements, a permanent municipal solution to the stolen metal manholes, were a reminder of the striking process of ‘demodernisation’ (Graham and Marvin 2001). The infrastructure was sometimes left permanently exposed, ‘as the tendrils that connected … to modernity are literally carted off and melted down for a quick buck’ (Graham and Marvin 2001: 3). According to some of my interlocutors, the reason why Bor experienced this rapid increase in illegal activities was especially because copper was produced in the town: the stolen copper objects were sold to and smelted by (illegal) private companies, sometimes even officially registered as legal ones. According to these apprehensions, which were even confirmed by the company’s official statements, this copper concentrate was then sold to the indebted company, which had a low concentration of copper in ore and was in need of more copper. The company would then sell the concentrate on the London Metal Exchange. Ironically, copper produced by this company was even sold to other Serbian companies that made electric cables used on a vast scale in industrial areas and urban infrastructure. The insufficient capacity for extractive production and the dependence of the company on imported copper concentrate impacted on the dynamics of copper ‘recycling’. Interestingly, the insufficiency of this crucial metal was a characteristic that was found in many socialist settings. For instance, in socialist Hungary, as Gille (2007) argued, the shortage economy in the metal industry was handled through collective collection of scrap metal officially organised by the authorities. Today, the post-socialist survival of the company in Bor highlighted the scarcity of the metal and significance of copper scrap metal, but differently organised: the company prompted the need for the production of (illegal) waste and propelled the informal scrap-metal economies. The money-go-round economy and the circulation of copper in Bor were characterised not only by the scarcity of the material but also by significant indebtedness (the company was indebted to the state for electricity, to external debtors, and so on; the municipality was indebted to the state and the citizens to the utilities). Due to this specific local economy, the infrastructural objects were a different kind of waste. Namely, the objects made into waste were characterised more by being deficient matter. Hence, they were not a leftover, spillover, product of abundancy or an indeterminate excess (Alexander and Reno 2012) within overproducing capitalism, all characteristics of waste often pointed out by anthropological accounts (Alexander and Reno 2012; Reno 2015). Copper parts were indispensable, operable objects with potential, a ‘matter in place’ (to paraphrase Mary Douglas 1966) (in heater exchangers, in wires), made temporarily a ‘matter out of place’ to be reused, remade and recast. While generating value out of waste (Millar 2008; Reno 2015), it became ‘a matter in another right place’ (in the smelter) and was eventually potentially returned to make the infrastructural provision operational. It is such economic and social dynamics, which also echo socialist and post-socialist economies (Verdery 1995; Humphrey 2003) where materials and inputs are constantly recirculated, that today shape the infrastructural disorders caused by stripping of infrastructures and the political terrain in this town. The circular economy of copper was the reason why my interlocutor Stanko (age 47), a private entrepreneur whose company collaborated with RTB and whose family I spent time with, ironically contended, like many other citizens of Bor, that the most effective recycling activity was the illegal ‘recycling’ of copper objects. The environmental endeavours such as recycling of paper or glass appeared ironic since the most urgent environmental issue was the by-product of copper smelting, which made this town the most polluted in Serbia. ‘Recycling’ of copper was always compared to some other almost non-existent environmental recycling activities promoted only by a few, not quite active environmental organisations. This irony can be illustrated by an ecological project that won a competition in 2013 by making and installing a bronze three-headed bird-like robot that was supposed to collect tin cans for recycling. As no one maintained this machine and the recycling endeavours remained underdeveloped, the unused robot became broken and was left to stand in the town square for years. Its unusual, avant-garde aesthetics saved this doomed project from being completely removed. In 2017, the municipality provided it with a new role in the town square as a sculpture. Ironically, this ecological-robot-turned-sculpture turned out to be a convenient target for scrap metal theft. As a final solution to its volatile existence, the sculpture was set in a cage and displayed behind metal bars, reminding the citizens that there was only one kind of efficient recycling. In the following ethnographic accounts, I illustrate the effects of this economy, embodied in the bird statue, with regard to the infrastructural provision and the ubiquitous presence of the state. Immediately after the theft of a heat exchanger at the beginning of November 2012, twelve candelabras and lampposts disappeared from the front of the sports centre, leaving electrical wires sticking out of the ground and part of the town in darkness. I lived close to this area and my neighbours complained that they did not feel safe at night without electricity. On the same day, the whole heating substation was stolen as well, leaving a couple of buildings without heating for several days. The heating company reacted immediately in the media: ‘If this tendency continues, there will be some serious problems with heating delivery for certain parts of the town’ (Blic 2012: np). It invited the citizens to protect the company’s property and to report any ‘suspicious persons’ walking around the substations (usually kept on the lower floor or in the basements of buildings). The citizens were not indifferent to this news. And now they [the heating power plant] are complaining to people?! It is their job and the job of police to protect the equipment … Do they think that the citizens will protect the heating system with weapons? The government says: ‘We have been robbed by the thieves, and therefore there is no heating … and you [citizens] are paying every month, even during summer’. What impudence! It is their responsibility to provide us with heating, and it is ours to pay for it … And let them place a guard if they need to and not complain to us about how they have been robbed … We don’t care if they are robbed! I want a warm flat. I paid for it! As far as I know, the whole heating system is the property of the heating company and I know that I am not allowed to change anything on my radiator (to fix it, etc.) because it is their responsibility. The state should protect its infrastructure. My interlocutors who worked at the municipal office where I volunteered argued that those who committed the crime were well known in the town and that the corrupted state was also involved in this robbery, which made RTB responsible too because, allegedly, copper eventually returned there. Radivoje (age 47) expressed his suspicion: ‘And why do you think everybody keeps silent about the fact that most of the manholes and grids are missing on the streets of Bor?!’ My neighbour, whose children lived in that area, told me one day: ‘Sosa [the General Manager of RTB] should have dealt with this a long time ago, but it might be that he is in this deal too. The state allows this’. From these illustrations, we can see that the citizens, who were captive and dependent customers of the public company, believed that the state, the municipal bodies (many times equated with ‘the state’), and even the company and the General Manager (as ‘the state’) should take care of keeping their flats warm. On the other hand, the utility company invited the citizens to take responsibility for themselves and for the community. As illustrated, some individuals protested against such a suggestion by emphasising that the heating infrastructure was not the citizens’ responsibility. They argued that the heating plant should protect it and rejected the idea of seeing parts of the urban infrastructure as their own property. There was a clear calculation: customers were paying the municipality for services, and such payment should guarantee the certain, stable, satisfying and constant delivery of heating. This calculation also included demands for protection of the heating infrastructure from potential thieves who could jeopardise everything that was expected from the services paid for. Now, let us stop here for a moment and see the issues around stealing of infrastructural parts from a perspective of those who claimed that their ‘job’ was to steal scrap metal. The scrap metal was the primary source of livelihood for some members of the Roma community, who lived in precarious and poor financial conditions on the margins of society on the outskirts of town. The illegal activities were mostly associated with this community, although many others were involved. This population mostly lived in certain urban areas, which pointed to racialised, ethicised and spatial urban marginality (ERRC 2016). This community has been present in Bor since the town’s foundation at the beginning of the 20th century and was also brought in as a labour force to work in the mine, which was turned into a Nazi work camp during the Second World War. A great number also arrived and still today continue to live as displaced as a result of wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) and Kosovo (1999). In general, this population faces impoverishment, discrimination, intimidation, constant threats of forced evictions and struggles with housing rights, and has difficulty accessing infrastructural provisions, public services and education (ERRC 2016). In October 2012, I visited the outskirts of Bor together with a librarian from the National Library of Bor with whom I frequently collaborated. He invited me to join one of his guests, a photographer from Switzerland, who was taking portraits for a project initiated by Bor’s library. The three of us took a cab, which left us in the middle of the road, after which we continued on foot. The settlement was located up on a hill with long, two-storey housing blocks of crumbling concrete. The old cemetery was on the other side of the settlement and ended next to the cliff of the old mining pit and red copper-tinted hills and tailings. The librarian greeted people who passed in their cars. As we climbed the steps, we saw children running around and playing and some people looking at us. The librarian told us that people did not pass through this area frequently. We stood in the middle of a road made of stone and gravel. A couple of younger men approached us, appearing curious to find out what we were doing there. They did not seem disturbed by the photographer’s camera either. Some of them stood in front of him, asking him to take a picture of them and their kids. Many gathered around us after five minutes. When the librarian started a conversation with a couple of men, some of them started complaining about living conditions. ‘Do you know how pretty this place was before? Engineers and doctors lived here once; it was not broken like this … Our roofs are leaking. The sewage systems were good’, one younger man said to me, adding that they had broken down and nobody maintained them. The electricity stopped working occasionally. ‘That’s why some of us gave up paying the state for the services’, he said, continuing: ‘The politicians come here only when they need us to vote for them, and they make empty promises to us … but nobody ever remembers us after that. We are completely forgotten. My mother is very sick.’ One of the men was talking to the photographer in German, as he had lived in Germany for a while and had worked there in McDonald’s. He had come to Serbia through the EU re-admission programme.44 Since 2007, the Serbian government has carried out the so-called readmission and reintegration programme of persons who were residing in the EU but had no legal basis. Another man asked what I was doing in Bor, and I said I was wri
Referência(s)