saladofpearls

A short piece on work and water via Conrad, Engels and Sekula written for the Viennese magazine Malmoe no.45 published March, 2009

What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river

I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England’s greatness before he sets foot upon English soil. It is only later that the traveler appreciates the human suffering that has made all this possible.1

Since Engel’s wrote these words, what history has washed from the water and banks of London’s river, the canals that fed off and into it, is labour and the labouring part of the population. When these words were written the river in London was already the site of a disappearance, from one phase of maritime transport to another – that is one phase (technical development) of accumulation to another, Engels remarks in a note to his study of the Condition of The Working Class in England, ‘In so far as such ships still ply to and from London they are now to be found only in the docks, while the river itself is covered with ugly, sooty steamers.’ Yet, though labour increasingly escapes representation, work is everywhere to be found. As capital has shaped the city in its interests, the river too which flows through it has been reshaped. This short text will travel along the waterways of London’s past and present fishing for keys to the shifting relationship between capital and labour.

In 1951 the Port of London was the second largest docks in the world. So, whilst it is claimed that the docks and the extensive canal traffic that served them were wound down due to the impossibility of getting larger ships up the Thames, containerisation also has a pivotal role in the transformation in the Port of London’s fortunes. It was also no accident that London’s docks had historically contained some of the most militant unions and labour organisations.

 With the use of larger ships and containerisation, the importance of the upstream port declined rapidly from the mid-1960s. The enclosed docks further up river declined and closed progressively between the end of the 1960s and the early 1980s.2

As early as 1951 the potential for the docks as a site of work was to be transformed into the scene of leisure, conspicuous consumption both picturesque and historic. The displacement of industry from the river and canalside was initially argued for in terms of the twin evils of blight and pollution to be cured by the virtues of parks, open space and picturesque views. In 1951, 85.1 percent of the riverside below Blackfriars Bridge was used for industrial and commercial uses. At the time of speaking at least the same percentage is occupied by luxury apartments. This development would not only affect the river, canals and former docklands, it was symptomatic of a broader shift across the UK to a services based economy and a built environment that would both reflect and to an arguable extent engineer that shift. Although this shift began properly in the 1980s as the move to a ’service-based economy’ beecame Conservative government policy, the origins of this movement can be seen in the Post-War II period.

[Regeneration] … seems to travel along water, canal systems, sewers, ditches anything as long as there’s a glimspe of water the developers will whack it into their prospectus and there’ll be photographs of Water and parks and regardless of what else is there they just take over all the industrial premises and come up with more and more New York loft-living style tackily built hutches. What was once very marginal and off the map seems to have become central to the arguments of the city at the moment.
– Iain Sinclair quoted in The Occupation, a film by the London Particular

Reshaping the material fabric of the city and its class relations, ‘regeneration’ seeks to smooth the passage of capital investment, pooling liquidity and creating ease of access to state funds and resources in a form of ‘capitalist commoning’.3 As part of the same movement, disinvestment or divestment occurs as publicly owned resources are sold off or broken up to suit the interests of this movement of privatisation. In some cases this takes the form of direct transfer of wealth to the private sphere; a sell off, a land grab, a theft or the mechanism of debt is used to bind the state into a relationship of dependency upon the private interests of the market. Legislation and para-legal apparatus punish recalcitrance from the market or non-compliance with the new regimes of consumption being put in place. Along the south side of the river visible from the part of the river closest to where I live, between warehouses long ago converted to luxury housing units with panoramic views, there is a public park affording rare access to the river. In this park stands a sign which invokes a local by-law prohibiting public drinking and the use of barbecues. Opposite this park cum enclosure Canary Wharf towers over representing a privatised island, a business park containing buildings modelled like glass credit cards.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of empires.4

Both Conrad’s and Engels’ narratives relate the river as the carrier of history as well as of goods and men. While Engels figures the river as a picturesque space increasingly crowded and obscured by the expansion of industry, Conrad evokes ‘the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames’ to render history as one long catastrophe of brutality and conquest. At the very beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow, moored in a ship on the Thames off Gravesend states suddenly ‘And this also, […] has been one of the dark places of the earth’. The river Thames reverses the image of enlightenment’s outflow from the centre of civilisation.

The photographer, Allan Sekula, has tracked in the transformation of maritime space through containerisation how the space, both of the sea and on land, is flattened, smoothed out, tuning it to the abstract flows of money that commands the flow of goods.

What one sees in the harbor is the concrete movement of goods. […] If the stock market is the site in which the abstract character of money rules, the harbor is the site in which material goods appear in bulk, in the very flux of exchange. […] But the more regularized, literally containerized, the movement of goods in harbors, that is, the more rationalised and automated, the more the harbor comes to resemble the stock market.5

If we increasingly relate to the sea and its history only through the commodities which travel the world in order for us to consume them then this isn’t because there is any less traffic.6In fact, since the implementation of containerisation, the logistics industry, and shipping as part of it has expanded manifold times. In the UK port traffic exports increased fivefold between 1965 and 1994. Until recently the Port of London Authority (which has jurisdiction over the entire Thames estuary) had the largest traffic in the UK (52.7 million tonnes in 2007).7 The growth of London as a centre of financial during the 1990s and the boostering of an attendant ‘creative sector’ actually masks the fact that the UK’s balance of trade is still sustained by manufactured exports. ‘[…] the service sector’s  share of exports has actually declined since 1960, and imports of cars, electronics and other visible items are balanced by exports not of services, but of less visible manufactured items, in particular intermediate products (for example, chemicals) and capital goods (power stations, airports, weapons).’8 Labour is pushed out by the ever increasing technical composition of capital, but it is also made remote, divided and furtive, by the race to the bottom for cheaper rents and lower wages driven by individual capitalists in competition over prices. This takes the form of a centralisation of profits (paper claims on wealth) in those glass towers that cover our cities and an almost subterranean distribution of labour – the life-spring of production – now perversely invisible and outcast.