It
is difficult to overstate the centrality of shipping to contemporary capitalism. Indeed, without shipping, it is difficult to imagine the birth of capitalism at all. Between 80 and 90% of world trade takes place via shipping, accounting for around 50% of the value of all trade in goods for the European Union and the United States, a figure which rises to 60% for China. Together, these economies account for half of the global GDP.
But shipping is integral to capitalism beyond its status as the primary mode by which the circulation of goods takes place. Shipping also serves, and has always served, as a testing ground for new methods of worker discipline and exploitation. In this sense, it has long been a harbinger of changes in the global economy—from inaugurating the age of fossil fuel to prefiguring the gig economy to fine-tuning methods of racial hierarchy within the division of labor. Despite this role, life aboard ships has changed remarkably little since the beginning of the European colonization of the world (which was itself only logistically possible due to shipping): racial hierarchies, brutal and hyper-exploitative working conditions, super profits flowing from the periphery to the core.
To examine the shipping industry, then, offers a vision of global economic exploitation in miniature, a condensed image of capitalist modernity, of the violence at its origin and the violence required to maintain it.
Gulf Studies Scholar Laleh Khalili, who has long been concerned with issues of movement—of people, ideologies, cargo—has recently released a book, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring, which examines the the lives of seafarers and the ways in which they are, sometimes quite literally, shaped by the ships on which they sail. But Khalili’s book—a small, deep-sea blue volume, which, despite its diminutive size, is densely packed with historical, anthropological, and political-economic research—has just as much to say about the global economy that has formed shipping as we know as it does about seafarers themselves. The book draws both from Khalili’s knowledge of the history of and contemporary reality of shipping in the Gulf of Arabia, but it is also, in a way, a work of reportage and field work. In order to write the book, Khalili sailed on the CMA CGM Corte Real and the CMA CGM Callisto, living and eating with their crews.
In August, I spoke with Khalili about The Corporeal Life of Seafaring, the centrality of shipping to the global economy, and the ways seafaring life has changed or, just as crucially, remained the same over time.
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Jake Romm: I wanted to talk a little bit about logistics studies writ large, because I think that when many people think of logistics studies, they think that it simply means studying the most efficient way to move something from point A to point B. But of course it’s much more than that. And in your writing elsewhere, you talk about the centrality of logistics studies to understanding capitalism as well as the global economy and the geopolitical structure of the world. I was wondering if you could explain what logistics studies actually is, how shipping figures into it, and its importance for our understanding of capitalism.
Laleh Khalili: On the question of logistics studies, it’s kind of funny because I’m not necessarily sure that I would consider myself too much of a logistics studies person. The kinds of things that I’m concerned with are not necessarily just the questions of logistics. What I’m interested in more broadly speaking, along with other comrades like Charmaine Chua, Rafeef Ziadah, Deb Cowan, or Martin Danyluk, and a number of other people that I have coauthored with and other colleagues that are working in this area, is the question of, as you say, the centrality of the movement of goods from point A to point B, but not simply this movement of goods, because what logistics entails is the process of acquiring or extracting primary materials.
It includes the movement to the production sites, it includes the kinds of politics of movement itself, which necessarily brings not only workplace politics into play, as for example, you see a lot in The Corporeal Life of Seafaring, but also the broader kind of macropolitics that are observed between states and transnationally, and across time as well. And in fact I would say that what perhaps began the field in its critical iteration was Deb Cowan’s extraordinary The Deadly Life of Logistics, which came out in 2014, and which was actually crucial in allowing us to see that the way the simple circulation of cargo throughout the world in order to keep the operation of capital going was also dependent on labor. It was also dependent on war. It was also dependent on a whole series of processes, including managerial softwares, and coercion, custom, and forms of contention that emerged in those settings.
And I think we’re all indebted to Deb for that critical queering of the field of logistics studies. But of course, we all went in different directions. So for me, one of the things that was really interesting from the get-go was the fact that a lot of the time when people talk about logistics, unless they’re talking about military logistics, what they often mean is cargo in containerized shipping. A lot of the histories of shipping or a lot of the histories of modern commercial logistics in fact begin with the invention of the standardized container in the 1950s, and then its consolidation and its kind of hegemony from the 1970s and ’80s onwards.
What was really interesting to me was that the process of containerization was completely and utterly predicated on a lot of the practices, management styles, and even actually the kinds of softwares that were used, as well as the kinds of processes and the kinds of relationships that were obtained between management and workers that had already been tested out in oil tankers, which had been around since the end of the 19th century, but really the beginning of the 20th century.
So still staying big picture—seafarers’ daily bodily life aboard the ship is the main concern of the book. But before getting to the seafarers themselves, I think it’s maybe important to give people a bit more context about the type of industry that shipping is, because it’s really wild. And I think the ownership structures of these ships are just in some sense almost comical in how byzantine they are—
Completely sinister actually.
Definitely. I think of the Ruby Mar, the ship that the Houthis sank in March. Both the Houthis and the British themselves, I think, believed it to be a UK ship, but only because the Lebanese man who owned the ship had a single residential address in the UK for insurance purposes, a country which the ship otherwise had nothing to do with.
I’m not sure that he was Lebanese, actually, I think wasn’t Ruby Mar the one that had an Israeli ship owner who had registered the ship in the Isle of White or the Isle of Man?
It was a Lebanese businessman and it was flying under the Belizean flag. But, either way, this is kind of illustrative of the point…
It is often quite unclear what the ownership structures are. So to talk a little bit about this: for people that have, for their sins, read Marx’s Capital, logistics really fits in volume two, which is concerned with questions of circulation and the extent to which questions of circulation actually feed into the processes of capital accumulation. So one of the things that makes ownership structures within shipping particularly of interest, not just to people who are ship nerds or maritime nerds, is the fact that in some ways they actually intensify, they embody, they distill the characteristics of capital as it is operating today in its purest form. What does that mean? That means that you have the processes of value extraction and exploitation that we are all familiar with, because of course that is what seafarers do, and of course, that’s what Marx writes about in regard to train workers or train operators in Capital volume two.
But there are other legal processes and political layers added to the processes of ownership and exploitation, which make shipping a clusterfuck, technical term. The ways in which it’s a clusterfuck is exactly the ways in which capitalism takes shape in each sector, absorbing the preexisting forms of ownership and preexisting forms of exploitation, incorporates them and builds upon them. Because the residues of previous systems all continue to exist in various forms, depending on the context, in capitalism everywhere. And we see that also in shipping. So one of the things that has characterized shipping for a very long time, is that shipping companies were often used for merchant trade. The people that were involved in the merchant trade had locations all over the world, but often actually kept the ownership structure very strictly within the family itself.
So family ownership continued to be, and actually, rather amazingly, still continues to be one of the most significant forms of ownership that exists in shipping throughout the world. And here I’m not just talking about some dude who owns two ships and sends them out. I’m talking about, for example, CMA-CGM, which is the third largest shipping company in the world. I’m talking about Maersk, which is often number one or two in the world. I’m talking about MSC, which is also often number one or two in the world. All of them are based in Europe, and their ownership is entirely held within certain families. So one of the things about this kind of family ownership structure is that it actually completely and totally evades scrutiny. It allows for the shipping company to maintain a large degree of secrecy. The processes of investment into the businesses are done privately or in ways that, again, evade scrutiny. And in some ways, of course, that makes these kind of an ideal form of capitalist corporation because of course that evasion of scrutiny is really central to them. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is that there are processes in which a ship owner, like any other business owner, has to interact with the state or with international legal bodies. That usually happens through the processes of corporate registration. And we know from the experiences of the United States, but also global experiences, that places that tend to be much laxer in terms of their, let’s say, labor regulations, et cetera, but at the same time have very strong enforcement of contracts, tend to be the places where corporations like to register themselves, e.g. Delaware or Panama or the Cayman Islands. Delaware is inshore-offshore, but essentially these places are offshore spaces where scrutiny is evaded, the regulatory processes for registration and other kinds of things are extremely thin, whereas the obligations of the contract are enforced very strongly. And of course that means that it acts to the benefit of the capitalist. Many companies are registered in these places, but some of them are not.
So CMA-CGM, for example, which I keep referring back to in part because I think it’s a really interesting instance of these kinds of shipping companies. It’s based in France, but it was set up in the 1970s by Lebanese Syrian exiles from the Civil War in Lebanon. They moved to Marseille, they set up a shipping company to sell cars, kind of dodgy because at the time a lot of cars were being stolen during the Civil War in Lebanon. Nobody knows how or why, never mind, we’re not going to say anything that could get me in trouble. But nevertheless, they started a “roro,” a “roll on roll off” car company. It expanded massively. They eventually bought the French Colonial shipping company that had existed for 150 years. In a way, that is exactly how capitalism operates in a lot of other sectors. It’s just that it is a lot more salacious, if you will, in the case of shipping.
Now, the additional layer that I was talking about a little bit earlier is that a shipping company can be registered either offshore or onshore. But one of the things that allows companies to still build another layer of complexity into the process of regulatory encounter, is the fact that ships themselves have to be registered to different countries. A ship flies the flag of the country whose laws it obeys. CMA-CGM may be registered in France; it charters, probably, ships from all over the world, including Japan, Greece, Norway, China, etc…Then the ship can be registered in what is formally called open registries, and which the International Transport Workers Federation calls “flags of convenience.”
Flags of convenience are open registries where labor and environmental regulations are extremely thin. So the three biggest flags of convenience to which ships are registered are Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Now, what makes these open registries also interesting, is that all three of these open registries were initially set up by companies in Virginia in the United States. And at the initial stages, the vast majority of the fees from the registration of ships were expatriated to Virginia. So in fact, it was the US benefiting from the open registries. Now the balance of the profits from the registries that are expatriated to Virginia versus the countries themselves has shifted a bit. It’s primarily now going to the countries themselves rather than to Virginia, but nevertheless, those Virginia registration companies are still very active in all three of those places as well as some other ones. And what happens if your ship is registered to a flag of convenience is that, as a matter of course, labor regulations are a lot thinner, insurance regulations are a lot less strictly enforced, environmental regulations are followed a lot less significantly.
And so because of all of those things, because of this kind of lighter inspection regime, what you end up seeing is that a lot of incidents where seafarers are abused, where they’re abandoned, or where ships run aground and environmental catastrophes happen; or, for example, the explosion in the Port of Beirut, whose fourth anniversary was just a few days ago—in all of these instances we see that the ships were flying flags of convenience and conditions on those ships that fly flags of convenience are horrendous. And so I think that is something that has to be recognized as central to the experience of the seafarers that sit aboard them, because that just adds another layer of complexity, of secrecy, and of unaccountability to the process of work aboard ships.
One of the things that really struck me in the book, as you said earlier, is that shipping really does distill so many features of contemporary capitalism down to their very bare essences, but there was also a kind of remnant of the pre-capitalist order onboard these ships, both in terms of how the labor is divided along the global color line, what the labor looks like, the very direct extra-economic modes of compulsion that take place aboard the ship, et cetera. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the continuities between the older colonial or pre-colonial shipping regimes and the shipping regimes we see today in terms of how seafarers are treated, but also in terms of where seafarers are coming from and why they’re largely coming from certain places.
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. But before I go there, I also want to make a little aside to make sure that it’s also clear that what we’re talking about are obviously the modern freighters, the huge mega ships that are operating. Because, in every part of the world, there’s also a whole set of other smaller, sometimes subnational, sometimes coastal, sometimes shorter distance forms of shipping that exist that don’t quite operate according to these rules often because they have to operate under national laws. And in those cases, although exploitative regimes still exist aboard the ships in an extensive sort of way, the legal world in which they operate is slightly different. So just to make sure that that sort of category is kept in mind because without that, these mega forms of shipping wouldn’t be able to operate, but they’re operating according to different kinds of set of rules. Now going back to the question of the forms, both pre-capitalistic but also very related to forms of capitalism, but also very capitalist forms of manners and customs and modes of exploitation that continue to persist in modern freighter shipping.
Some of these things are as follows. So in modern shipping, one of the things that is really, really quite striking, and which is slightly different than a lot of those forms of smaller coastal shipping, is that you have these incredible, almost militaristic, hierarchies onboard the ships. And I think that the extent to which these extreme forms of disciplined hierarchy have emerged has been concurrent with and has in some ways consolidated or hardened existing hierarchies within capitalism.
From the beginning, you’ve always heard that you’ve got a ship’s master or ship’s captain, even smaller distance forms of shipping have somebody who’s in charge. But the relationship becomes much more formal and much more disciplined as we go into capitalism. People who do histories of early capitalist shipping, people like Marcus Rediker for example, tell us that in order for the big shipping companies at the beginning of capitalism, which was of course concurrent with slavery and initial parts of colonialism, to be able to get people on board the ships to go and colonize and enslave, they would actually have to force people onto the ships. So very many times they would empty, for example, prisons into the ships. And of course, we know that the kind of people that were incarcerated within a lot of the early prisons were people who were criminalized, for example, for vagrancy or for having been thrown off their land. So proletarianized people were criminalized and through their criminalization were forced onto ships.
Pretty starkly, primitive accumulation.
Yes. This process was really central to European forms of shipping. We actually see only elements of it elsewhere in, for example, pearl diving in the Gulf, which is the other instance that I’m familiar with, this being forced onto ships, which in the gulf happens through indebtedness or indenture. Whereas in the European, and certainly the British context, it happened by people being whipped onto the ships. And so that in itself, first, is one of the initial ways in which you have incredibly exploitative labor relations established there, which are not necessarily based on mute compulsion (although it does become also based on mute compulsion) but actually the physical compulsion of the whip.
The second element of this, which is really quite important for European shipping, from very early on, again from the very early modern period ends up becoming very dependent on seafarers from the colonies. Part of the reason for this is because a lot of the sailing ships would go out to the colonies in Southeast Asia or South Asia, and of course the European seafarers who were already on ships that didn’t feed them well, didn’t provide them with nutrients, would arrive with scurvy and various other kinds of illnesses, et cetera, or would die from malaria. And so in order for the ships to return with the goods that they were essentially plundering through colonialism from these places or the people that they were taking as slaves, they would have to return with seafarers from those places. We then see the recruitment of what was called lascars, which was initially a word for South Asian seafarers, but which then extended to Southeast Asian and Chinese and Yemeni and East African seafarers as well.
Now, one of the other things that was interesting about this process was that in order for them to justify the bringing on of lascars onto the ships, a whole series of ideological narratives had to be built about geographic determinism or climatological determinism, racism essentially, which is that these people are from warmer climates and therefore they’re hardier and they can deal with warmer climates in a way that our seafarers can’t. But also these seafarers at the same time, in this contradictory ideological narrative, these seafarers are from warmer climates, which means they’re lazier and therefore they have to be forced through the whip.
And so the regime of labor exploitation that happens here is one that essentially we’re familiar with from all colonialism, and also in slavery, which is that at once you exploit these people to the hilt on the one hand, but on the other hand you also claim that they are lazy and therefore the regimes of control that you put into place are going to be based on naked coercion rather than any kind of consensual processes that you see beginning to emerge in forms of wage labor in Europe. And that color line has persisted. It has persisted in different shapes. Lascars are onboard European flagships and always have been. We are, as you probably know, undergoing these massive racist pogroms right now in the UK, and constantly there is referral back to the racist pogroms of 1919, which also happened throughout the country. And what is really interesting is that a lot of the people that refer back to 1919 have forgotten that in fact, those 1919 pogroms were by seafarers, white seafarers who were protesting the recruitment of brown and black seafarers, of lascars, onto British ships.
And so cities that ended up seeing those kinds of pogroms, were the cities in which there were large numbers of black and brown seafarers, including Liverpool and Cardiff, for example. And what is really fascinating is that we see a repetition of these same sorts of processes that happen across time, and that global color line has persisted. The second thing that is quite important in terms of the global color line, and this is where oil ends up becoming quite important, is that when, between the late 1960s and early 1970s, oil was nationalized in a lot of the world, including the Middle East, one of the things that happened is that the nationalization of oil forced market prices to be set for oil rather than the cartel prices that were being set by American and European companies. When market prices were set not through the cartelization of oil by oil majors, but by national producers, one of the things that happened is that you immediately had massive inflation throughout the world, and the massive inflation throughout the world resulted in major recession or depression in a lot of places.
You see this of course in the United States with the long petrol queues, et cetera, and of course talks of stagflation, which also had other causes because of course this is also the beginning of neoliberalism in the US, but what happens in the global south is that this process results in a lot of people being thrown out of work. And so in the 1970s, what you see is the reorientation of a lot of the countries that had experienced balance of trade issues and inflation arising out of the nationalization of oil, actually redirecting a lot of employment planning towards training seafarers because they were seeing the globalization of cargo transport, et cetera. And so they’re pushing into that direction. The Philippines is one of the most significant in that regard. India had long had a very large seafaring population, but this process also really accelerates that.
And you see this happening in a lot of countries elsewhere. Indonesia and the Philippines are archipelagic countries, so lots of people do seafaring. India has very long coasts, so therefore there are a lot of seafarers. But what you see is, again, the formalization of this process—the setting up, for example, of maritime colleges; of encouraging, for example, the sending back of remittances of dollars. And so when you have this mass influx of global majority people into seafaring, you also have the Global North’s imposition of flags of convenience, offshore, et cetera, all of which are concurrent. And so what you see is that as more and more brown and black seafarers come into shipping, you also see more and more the rights of seafarers being eroded through these mechanisms. So what we see essentially is the articulation of labor exploitation of class war through the color line, through the racial divide.
I think you used the phrase at one point in the book, but the notion of labor aristocracy kind of gets a bad rep in certain parts of the left, I think very incorrectly. But it would be fair to say that the shipping industry, especially the history you just walked us through, is such an easily visible form of labor aristocracy in action, no?
It is to a large extent, yes. So if you are, for example, a Dutch worker you happen to be very well protected from unions—because it is one of the few countries on the continent other than maybe France where the rights of unions have not been completely and totally eroded. So Dutch seafarers will have a lot more rights and are a lot more confident in asserting those rights than, for example, British seafarers, whose unions have really eroded in terms of power and ability, et cetera. And so what you end up seeing is that these kinds of very confident seafarers are still able to get extremely good kinds of wages aboard ships, they’re still able to collectively bargain for good working conditions. But of course, what we see is also that the number of jobs that are available to them is shrinking. And you see this also happening with dock workers and lots of other maritime workers.
But it is also interesting that this process has also meant that some of the countries that were very famous for having very large numbers of seafarers, perhaps disproportionate to their populations like the Netherlands or Britain or Germany, have seen a very consistent decline in the number of seafarers that they now put on ships. And what we’re seeing is a kind of shifting also of the color line in subtle and interesting ways, much the same way. And again, this is how shipping kind of echoes and resonates with other forms of labor exploitation. I’m sure you’ve heard about how we used to have offshore production, but now we have nearshore production. Factories being brought to, say, Portugal or Greece or Turkey, which are in the peripheries of Europe, in order to provide the kind of consumer goods, or perhaps even not consumer goods, that are used in the core countries.
I mean, it’s kind of crazy that Wallerstein’s core, periphery, semi periphery—which again was, as you say, criticized in a lot of the corners of the left—is being replayed, albeit in a different sort of way than what he was talking about, in the processes of production today. And so where we used to have a lot of Germans or a lot of Dutch or a lot of Brits onboard the ships, we now have a lot of Croatians or a lot of Russians. So we still have a color line, but these guys are earning less than the Germans would have. They have fewer rights than the Germans or the Dutch would have, but they still have better working conditions than the Filipino or the Indian seafarers that crew their ships. And I think that that is one of the interesting ways that this constant striation, this constant slicing and dicing of the working class into different kinds of layers, allows for further exploitation because you can set everybody off against one another.
And this manifests also in the division of labor onboard the ships. You talked earlier about the racist ideology of geographic or climatological determinism. And as you write, that actually meant that lascars were put in the engine rooms because they were thought to be able to better withstand these inhuman temperatures. That racialized division of labor obviously persists now, and even still in the engine rooms. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about the division of labor onboard the ships.
So the engine room is a really interesting one, because when the ships were steamships, they shoveled coal and the temperatures down there were 65C degrees or hotter, and people both burned and scalded themselves all the time. People actually died from heat exhaustion. And as you mentioned, I write in the book about how there is this kind of incredible racist designation that the people that are working in these places have to be black and brown. But I also mentioned one interesting caveat to this, that the process of racialization in this instance is actually not necessarily phenotypical, because the Irish are overrepresented in the engine rooms. And Ireland doesn’t have the climate, for example, of India. So they can’t use the same kind of climate racism that they use for these others, but rather, obviously, kind of a colonial racial designation is being used in these instances. So what we end up finding is that you have the hierarchy, but you have hierarchy within these hierarchies. So the chief engineer for example, is going to be, and in fact was on the two ships that I was on, from Croatia. But then the oilers — the people that sort of lubricate the machinery—in one instance were from Kerala and the other instance were Chinese. So you have, again, these hierarchies, and then you have the ratings. The ratings are the lower ranked seafarers on the deck. The ratings are almost always Filipino or Indian. India, the Philippines, China, Indonesia, and then Russia are the five largest producers of seafarers today. And so what we see is that the kind of job that you do, the kind of work that you do, the set of skills that you have, and the wages of course that you’re paid is very much determined by the global color line and by the kinds of exigencies of open registries.
And you write about the ways in which this division of labor literally forms and marks the bodies of these seafarers, not just in terms of engine room workers dealing with hot pipes and hot oil that will scald them, but also the types physical maintenance, the exercise that seafarers do, is very tailored.
I mean, I don’t want to take credit for noticing that because actually there’s a really fabulous book by a Filipino-American scholar, Kale Fajardo, who deals with this question and notices in a book called Tomboys…I can’t remember the full name, which has a really fascinating story about the way that forms of masculinity that exist aboard ships for Filipino seafarers is very different than the forms of masculinity that exist, for example, Russian seafarers. Now, the basic thing that I noticed was that the forms of masculinity that play out or the forms of embodiment that play out for seafarers—European seafarers tend to do upper body workouts, they have big arms, they’re muscley. Even the woman cadet in one of the ships that I was on was muscley—she wouldn’t take any shit from anybody, but she was muscley.
Whereas the Filipino seafarers or the Indian seafarers that were on the ships, the Chinese that were on the ships that I met, they were all really wiry and they did cardio. They swam a lot, they played ping pong a lot, and they weren’t as interested in this kind of a form of masculinity that manifested itself in being muscular. Bodily manifestations are, of course, we know different from place to place and have emerged from millennia because of whatever all those, of course, they emerged through the encounters we have with one another. But for me, it was interesting that that form of embodiment had persisted over the years on the ships themselves.
You write in the book that seafaring doesn’t just change people’s bodies, but also has various psychological effects as well. And some of them are quite interesting and maybe positive, the ability to see such incredibly long distances, which I guess is maybe physiological as well as psychological, but most of them seem to be pretty bad. Higher rates of depression, higher rates of suicide, things like that, from the isolation and also the abuse that can take place on board. And the Philippines for instance, supplies I think around 25% of the world’s seafarers, so there is a massive population or working population in the Philippines out at sea dealing with this. What happens when these people return home? Have you noticed any morbid effects on shore based on the experience of seafaring?
I think one of the things that has to be taken really seriously is that models of trauma and psychic damage don’t necessarily travel in the same way. And I think that while a lot of Filipino seafarers, particularly the ones that end up going to maritime colleges and end up becoming officers are doing so professionally, there’s a lot of seafarers also who work for a time, particularly in the crew ratings, that are doing this for a time in order to save money. Because seafaring ends up being a very good way to send remittances, but also a very good way to save money. And so I think that the forms of depression that you see on board don’t necessarily travel home to the same extent for these folks that do this kind of work seasonally or temporarily or in a transitory way as opposed to those who do it professionally.
The thing about it is also that if you’re doing this job professionally, there are other forms of coping mechanisms that emerge, which I think are dealt with quite strongly. When you come home, people find outlets, find ways to deal with them, et cetera. Where I think these forms of psychic damage and harm tend to be a lot more pronounced and problematic are when the seafarers are aboard the ships. Because I think that there you are in a very claustrophobic space, which allows for no room. You don’t have any doctors on board, you don’t have anybody who’s a psychologist. You might end up at a port where there is a Mission to Seafarers or some other kind of seafarer charity where the head of the mission may be able to do some counseling for you. But a lot of the time they don’t have any kind of an encounter with counselors.
And sea madness is a real thing. People that have been stuck at sea, have had to stare at the sea for a long time, actually do develop symptoms in response to the sea. And this, of course combined with the forms of exploitative labor that people are engaged in, which we’re seeing effects of in everybody on the land as well as on the sea, you get a lot more anxiety and depression and other kinds of things, but you do have forms of sea madness that have existed through time, and that is exacerbated by exploitative labor conditions. And that’s where I think the problem arises because we know that in a lot of instances, these forms of psychic damage could potentially result in self-harm or lack of care and therefore harm or injury because you are not paying attention or God forbid, in suicidal intentionality or action.
Seafarers have the second highest rate of suicide of any profession anywhere. To me, that’s a kind of shocking statistic. And I think part of it is because of the process of isolation. On the one hand, you’re isolated at sea, you’re out to sea if you’re crossing the Pacific for two to three weeks at a time, and on top of being isolated, you’re in a claustrophobic space where you’re sharing a room four to eight other people and you have no space to sort of think through things. And you’re on this kind of a shift process of work where you have no space, no time to really unwind. So all of the very basic mental hygiene things that we are talking about, giving yourself space, giving yourself room, finding a way to unwind, finding a way to recuperate your sense of self or your sense of being just don’t exist on board. And so I think that that’s what makes this particular job really, really difficult. And this has been exacerbated by the fact that turnaround times at Port have now, in order to sort of increase productivity, been reduced more and more and more and more. So seafarers can’t have R&R off the ship either. They can’t meet that counselor, for example. And I think that that’s really horrendous and depressing.
For all its ills you identify, you also note that seafaring did have this one emancipatory aspect to it—which is that you can go from one place to another and escape to a port city where cultures mix and which have a kind of libertine reputation, et cetera, et cetera. But that has started to die a bit. I’ve actually been to Marsaxlokk, the Maltese city where you departed from, as a tourist, and it’s this kitschy little tourist town, and the port is way outside—because it would spoil the image. But this type of separation wasn’t always the case. I think you write that it was narrowed at first because of very racist fears of sexually transmitted diseases. And turnaround times continue to get shorter, they’re forcing seafarers back on the ships, but seafarers are also, more and more often, just not allowed to leave the ports at all. Which is in large part due to security regimes, so I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the so-called Global War on Terror has maybe influenced the securitization of these ports.
The United States is in so many ways a malign force in the world, and one of the ways that it has affected the seafarers directly is the processes by which securitization has been sort of exported to a lot of the rest of the world. This securitization happens in a lot of different ways. I always mention this, and I have had a couple of American officers act completely unknowing in response to this. Why would the United States have Coast Guard officers in, for example, Hamburg, or why would there be a Coast Guard attaché in China or in the UAE? And the American officers are like, well, because we’re protecting the coast. But it’s funny that you’re protecting the coast on somebody else’s coast. And I think that that element of imperial control has translated not just to having a, whatever, Coast Guard attache that does coordination usually around questions of smuggling rather than much else, but it also translated into incredibly draconian regulations for seafarers getting off ports.
There was a time where if seafarers had a seafarers’ card, an internationally recognized document that essentially said that they were seafarers, they were able to get off the ship. They didn’t have to have passports, they didn’t have to have anything else. They could actually show that and they could leave the port, but of course, they now cannot. And the War on Terror has been particularly responsible for this. Much the same way that ticking bomb scenarios have been used in order to justify torture in prisons and other places, in shipping there’s also ticking bomb kind of scenarios: What if the cargo contains a bomb? And you have that in 24 and you have it in CSI, and you have it in NCIS, and you have it in all of these propaganda shows that the United States is so very good at producing, in all of which there’s often a container ship that, oh my God, it contains something really dangerous and terrible and they’re going to come and get us.
And of course, it’s always blamed on the lack of, or just bad security elsewhere. And so this is translated into, for example, there being a lot of difficulties placed on seafarers trying to get out of the port, but also sometimes in some places even into the port. At the United Arab Emirates port of Jebel Ali, for example—which is one of the most securitized ports in the region, in part because it’s one of their R&R ports for the US Navy—you have to have special permission, never mind to get off the port, but once you get off the ship, there are walls and electronic gates, and in order to just put foot on the land, you have to pass these electronic gates. And so the US essentially extends its border across to all the ports in the world, making it incredibly difficult for seafarers everywhere.
But I don’t want to entirely put this on the US because of course, other countries also have these incredibly racialized border regimes. We see that in fortress Europe. We see that in every single country in the world which uses fear of immigrants in order to distract from other forms of capitalist exploitation. And border control also plays out in these very, very racialized ways in countries where at least the seafarers can come onto the shore, but then in order to go into the city, they will have difficulties. So there are certain ports where seafarers know they can get off and they can enjoy their time there. And when they do, they are so excited to go there. Actually, Malta is rather interestingly, one of them. Barcelona is another one. Part of this is because these are ports where ships rotate their crews on. So seafarers have to be able to get off in order to be able to go to the airport and fly home. But part of it is also because these are sort of the last final outposts where these kinds of draconian rules are not being enforced in ways that makes the lives of seafarers hell.
You just mentioned migrants, which is this entire other category of seafarers in a certain way. And you highlight one incident in the book in which a Russian ship captain picks up this group of migrants whose ship is in distress, and then his ship is not allowed to dock in Malta for made up Covid reasons, and subsequently these stranded migrants are picked up by the Italian NGO Mediterranea. And so even though shipping has become much more tightly controlled, both onboard and at borders, and these racialized hierarchies and division of labor persist, there is still this intermixing of people from around the world and the seas are still a spot in which this Russian captain will out of his professional ethics pick up these migrants. So I’m wondering what kind of opportunities for solidarity among shipping workers and among specifically global south shipping workers exist? What movements are currently taking place?
So on the one hand, you have the basic rule of the sea— if you’re a seafarer, you never leave another person on the sea in distress. You just don’t leave them. On the other hand, after 2013 when there was a sort of a mass migration of people from both North Africa and from the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly Syrians, to Europe, and when a lot of ships were picking up people from sinking dinghies, actually a lot of the big shipping companies ordered their captains to not pick people up. I mean, if you think about that, essentially it’s thanatopolitics in the words of Foucault, it’s the power to let people die. It is a hideous and horrendous thing. And I think part of the reason that the story that I mentioned struck me was because it happened in the wake of such orders from the big shipping companies not to pick people up.
So the fact that this captain did is actually extraordinary, particularly on a European ship. It was a Maersk ship. And Maersk was one of the shipping companies that ordered their captains not to pick people up. I don’t want to necessarily say also that the seafarers are always good. Long before 2013, there were stories about how shipping captains found stowaways on board and threw them in the sea because they didn’t want to deal with them. And so there are also instances of malfeasance and cruelty and brutality that you find. But by and large, the vast majority of instances are that there’s just this simple kind of basic human rule. You don’t let people drown.
What are the opportunities for solidarity? We are seeing some, not necessarily between workers or in an organized way between the workers on the ships and the migrants, but between activists, the migrants, and the workers. So a kind of triadic process. One of the reasons that the captain ended up calling Mediterranea to come and help was because actually a lot of the people that work at Mediterranea, in addition to doctors who are providing support to the migrants, are ex-seafarers themselves. And so they have these relationships with the seafarers and the seafarers know that they can ask these NGOs for help. Mediterranea is not just the only one, there’s Sea Rescue and there’s a few other European activist organizations.
And I think we have to recognize that this activist work is crucial. It’s necessary, it keeps people alive, and it might be the basis of a future form of organizing. It is also really important to recognize, however, that seafaring is one of the most structurally surveilled and controlled and disciplined forms of labor today, anywhere. And I think that probably in some ways mitigates the effect of potential solidarity across these kinds of settings. But it is a possibility. And I think if that possibility happens, it will happen through migrants’ rights organizations, in which much of the personnel is comprised of ex-seafarers, some of whom were also actually migrants. And so I think that that is really, really important. That experience of having been a seafarer or a migrant, I think will feed into forms of solidarity into the future. It doesn’t exist in the full flourishing way we want, but there are a few really shining examples.