Like any other successful capitalist society, Germany sports some of the highest inequality rates in the world (according to the Gini Inequality researchers Julia Friedrichs and Jochen Breyer have also made a documentary for the German ZDF channel – sadly it is not yet available on English translation, but I felt it was important to post about it here to complete the last series of dedicated posts. Currently, as of 2023, Germany has 237 billionaires (China has 969 and US has 691 resident billionaires). This is a really insightful look into the special tax counseling the rich get. A majority of the secretive richie rich refused to be interviewed but a few accepted – so Jochen Breyer goes on their private jets and yachts to get their opinion on several key issues. So even if the others seem especially camera shy, we still get to meet Hans-Peter Wild (majority holder in Wild Flavors – maker of Capri Sun and leading manufacturer of so-called natural flavors for the food industry) and one of the richest people in Switzerland (he left Germany long ago for the Swiss tax and banking heaven). Billionaires are also a highly volatile transnational bunch, so in order to satisfy their tax phobia, states or rather their governments are constantly lowering taxation and establishing special Economic Zones beyond the purview of democratic regulatory means of control. They also exert incredible influence on policy for a so-called social market state that prides itself on its social welfare programs and democratic values.
“When it comes to monitoring elite wealth, the sources are much scarcer. Forbes magazine counted 117 individual German billionaires in 2023. But since large wealth is organized in family holdings, it is more meaningful, as Germany’s Manager Magazine does, to count billion-euro “fortunes” (Vermoegen). The Magazine in 2023 counted 226 such fortunes. The list, however, is clearly incomplete. And the magazine has acknowledged that it has been subject to behind-the-scenes legal pressure to omit several notable families.
We know this startling fact thanks to a new surge of public interest in inequality in Germany. German activists are beginning to flex their muscles and unlock the power of expose and muck-raking. Websites like ungleichheit.info do a great job telling the dramatic story of inequality.”
The two richest German families own more wealth than the bottom half of the German population.
And if the data is to be believed, by the 2010s German wealth-holding was more concentrated than in any other European society (!!). In terms of the gini coefficient (Gini ratio= a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent income inequality, the wealth inequality, or the consumption inequality), Germany is closer to the US (wealth gini 0.81-0.86), than other European countries like France and Italy who have a gini closer to ex-socialist countries like Czech Republic or Poland.
In today’s world of broken tech/content cultural cycles where oligarchic, tech billionaire or strongmen rule, unchecked megalomania and institutionalized greed tends express itself nowadays as “concern” about freedom or fighting against PC and censorship but ends in layoffs and users migrating from one temporary heaven to another. It is as Ada Palmer put – getting meta, a place where one used to tweet about various meltdowns – Twitter – is itself tweeting about its own meltdown. Well TW was itself stuck in the verbal and textual (if minute and 200 character limit) turn. People move to Mastodon and this is not something that should surprise us.
There is even talk about returning to Tumblr and who knows, maybe a renewed interest in worn-out formats such as WordPress. With that in mind I will post a few short talks on various subjects related to green transitions from fossil fuel as East /West manifold, climate justice, the Capitalocene, resource depletion and greenwashing from the #AfterExtractivism series an appendage to the Berliner Gazette. I participated with an article and a video in one on these, but I urge you to check the others too – they are dense, interesting and quite urgent. They range I said from the history of empires, system of sacrificial (based on human sacrifice) economy – of vegetal greases in the Atlantic Slave trade and British Industrial and Colonial history or today’s infamous petro-states of the Gulf and their futuristic imagery. They are quite short, ~ 10 minutes to 18, and quite to the point, so they might be worth your while, even if it’s talking heads – a situation I also often find annoying.
Connecting post-1989 worker struggles in Romania’s coal mining region with Captain Power and a group of guerrilla fighters who oppose the machine forces that dominate Earth in the 22nd century following the so-called Metal Wars, artist, author, and curator Stefan Tiron inquires in his contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism” into the political potential of science fictional transitioning in the 1990s.
Max Haiven · Palm Oil
While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a global shortage of sunflower oil, propelling palm oil to rise again, a critical look at the global history of the palm oil industry reveals both the imperial violence of extractive capitalism as a system of human sacrifice and the challenges for a transition into a just world, social thinker Max Haiven argues in his contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism.”
Stoyo Tetevenski · European Green Deal
The case of Bulgaria reveals: what is sold as the ultimate way out – namely, the “green” transition – opens new spaces for accumulation. The cost of this is to be borne by society, especially by workers in old industries. Thus, the challenge is to advance post-capitalism, as environmental justice activist Stoyo Tetevenski argues in his contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism.”
Manuela Zechner · Earthcare
While ecological and economic systems are collapsing, a battle for white supremacy is raging; it is not least a class war for (controlling) access to the shrinking living space on the planet. It is high time to counter this development with a radical politics of earthcare, as feminist researcher, facilitator, and artist Manuela Zechner
Katarina Kusic · The Yugoslavia Lesson
The suffering caused by extractive capitalism has people looking back to Yugoslavia’s modernization project. While aiming to dominate nature, it also created cooperative platforms for social togetherness, enabling sustainable ways of living and organizing economy.
Julio Linares · Climate and Debt
Fighting for debt cancellation and environmental justice in the Global South, the question is how we can wager our future on the legacies and claims of those who – then as now – have been plunged into existential hardship by the ecological-economic complex. In his contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism,” economic anthropologist Julio Linares is looking for answers in Latin America.
Özgün Eylül İşcen · Gulf Futurism
After the Gulf boom propelled the growth both of the region and of oil-devouring economies in the West, new realms of capitalist expansion are being developed along the lines of green capitalism’s smartness mandate, ultimately reproducing the lasting systemic crisis of which Dubai is somewhat representative, media theoretician Özgün Eylül İşcen argues in her contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism.”
The Woman King is a 2022 American historical epic film about the Agojie, the all-female warrior unit that protected the West African kingdom of Dahomey during the 17th to 19th centuries. The film stars Viola Davis as a general who trains the next generation of warriors to fight their enemies. It is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and written by Dana Stevens, based on a story she wrote with Maria Bello. The film also stars Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim, and John Boyega.
(historical accuracy) John Boyega plays King Ghezo, a real-life figure who ruled Dahomey from 1818 to 1858 and engaged in the Atlantic slave trade through the end of his reign. Hero Fiennes Tiffin plays the white Portuguese-speaking slave trader Santo Ferreira who is fictional and portrayed as an enemy to Ghezo. History vs. Hollywood said the character was “possibly loosely inspired” by Francisco Félix de Sousa, a Brazilian slave trader who in actuality helped Ghezo gain power.
Historically, Dahomey was a kingdom that conquered other African states and enslaved their citizens to sell in the Atlantic slave trade, and most of the kingdom’s wealth was derived from slavery. The Agojie had a history of participating in slave raiding, and slavery in Dahomey persisted after the British Empire stopped Dahomey from continuing in the Atlantic slave trade.
In the film’s setting of the 1820s, Nanisca confronts Ghezo about the immorality of selling Dahomey slaves to the Portuguese and suggests trading in palm oil production instead. Nanisca being fictional, the confrontation did not take place. Smithsonian wrote, “Though Ghezo did at one point explore palm oil production as an alternative source of revenue, it proved far less lucrative, and the king soon resumed Dahomey’s participation in the slave trade.” wiki
timespace coordinates: Ivory Coast, Western Africa early 21st century
“Night of the Kings (French: La Nuit des rois) is a feature drama/fantasy film directed by Philippe Lacôte (a film director from Côte d’Ivoire). Announced in 2017 under the working title Zama King, the film premiered at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, with a follow-up screening at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival where it won the Amplify Voices Award. The film was one of two films featured in the Spotlight section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. It won the Black Film Critics Circle Award for Best International Film, the African American Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Film and the NAACP Image Awards 2021 for Outstanding International Motion Picture.”(wiki)
Night of the Kings shows how shallow is such talk is or how it is mainly framed or defined inside a very limited arena – ignoring both non-European/Euroamerican cinema or how it tends to ignore the arrival of the post-cinematic. It’s eminently easy to trash most of Western Hollywood blockbuster cinema – as repetitive drivel (which it is) or a heteronormative sequel-autophagia and shameless fanservicing. It’s perfectly OK to blame the sequel industry or the Netflix production money machine. Yet there’s is also something affirmative to new non-Euroamerican movies (or say fictions in general) – that goes beyond mere questions of taste or basic film critique – showing us the current blindspots and unspoken presuppositions and expectations of such a ‘constructed’ public.
Movies like The Night of the Kings point towards what lies outside of that limited horizon. We’re all restricted by our local comfort or supposedly global netizen status. We do this only by sticking with what is shoveled at us and ignoring all those movies out there. This is a direct example that we’re never done with ‘provincializing Europe’ (or the Global North) in Dipesh Chakrabarty‘s immortal phrase. The question is not about expecting the unexpected but attending to and allowing these other lives and other perspectives to breakthrough. The movie’s setting is inside the fictionalized MACA (infamous) prison a Royaume (realm) that is a world within a world, with to the central role of storytelling and narrative framing by the West African prisoner griot that embodies this rich oral storytelling tradition.
Global SF authors like Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Machine Mandate universe) and Tade Thompson (Wormwood cycle) writing in English – have been pointing out how annoying and puzzling it might feel to a diasporic non-Western writer to explain to a so-called ‘typical’ audience that their world-building is inspired by actual events or living cultures or that even SF editors might consider their worlds as inconceivable or improbable inventions. That is – these properly ‘SF’ aspects of their fictions, terminologies or traditions are not exactly fictions since they are closely inspired by a reality that appears completely ‘unreal’ (or automatically SF) to the average Western/Global North commercial public (also a construct of audience polls, micro-targeting & marketing ploys), or one that lies completely outside the experiential or multicultural knowledge bounds of a white Eurocentric/US audience. Explanations feel empty if the model public is centered only around a Western sensorium and reception that remains aloof and for the most part an isolated, posh, and prosperous cultural backwater juggling the same tired references and the same dusty canon on displays over and over again.
Even with Black or Asian actors starring in successful Hollywood movies – there is sadly rarely a radical change in the overall worldview of those Western-inflected perspectives represented.
I am not trying to essentialize non-Western differences – just trying to trace how difficult it is to make room for such movies as The Night of the Kings that have a 99% African crew or that actually play on the welcome absence of the usual metropoles of the cinematically overfamiliar Global North (Tokyo, Paris, New York, Berlin, London, Los Angeles etc.) that serve as a backdrop to imagining our contemporary 21st c world. They also refer to world events that nearly nobody remembers (such as the first Ivorian civil war 2002-2004 or the 2010 second Ivorian civil war) or that have this rapidly effacing “‘half-life’ of a disaster ” under disaster capitalism. We’re reminded that the contemporary world happens mostly elsewhere than the Eroatlantic! Also, there is (happily!) less need for the usual business center-skyline as a silver lining for superheroes jumping, saving or destroying the world. None of these typical Marvel Universe – highrise shots marking the Western pop imaginary.
There is a series of stories within stories – there is the larger frame of Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu) as the fallen Dangôro, the sick king and the god of La MACA prison that anoints a new young and hapless inmate (Bakary Koné) as the new Roman – playing both sacrificial lamb and storyteller in what seems like a violent transition of power. The various factions and form an inmate group that starts to sing (like an antique choire), dance and accompany the story of Roman -. of his former boss and urban legend Zama King that was recently killed. He has to hold up their attention in order to survive the Red Moon Night. Zama King – is a historical figure, one of “the handyman for the new leaders of the country,” in the words of Roman, one like many other young men that become a temporary hero of the northern rebel leaders. Zama King was only one of those young men with political backing that felt emboldened to turn chance to their advantage.
The story of the impromptu griot – also includes a coastal African kingdom and what appears to be an episode completely different historical era, one that nevertheless is intertwined with current events. It is a history of love, deceit and sorcery. The life of the local legendary trickster Zama King of the Microbe gang member of slum dwellers intertwines and follows the same route or ordeals as those of other times and remote events. His childhood, subsequent adoption – are all open to invention & revision. Visually we are presented with so much detail that it hard to focus or take in all at once. There are also different kinds of temporality and intentionality going on exemplified in different versions of the same story. Different retellings of the same history differ. Place mutates and alters the linear time flow of the MACA. Its power is more ominous – than what seems initially as a self-contained prison world. Besides the inmate audience, there are also the guardians hiding – and surveilling and having a stake in the unwinding story.
Structural racism under capitalism always incarcerates black bodies – the US has one of the biggest inmate populations in the words. In very different place (but related in terms of both racism, colonalism & slave trade), MACA feels distant from outside events, yet within the walls of its carnivalesque experience there is an ominous invisible presence of former colonial masters – the French troops that have kept a hold on Abidjan. These are the strengths of such a movie, one that does not follow the usual Enlightenment tropes carried along by the Western linear timeline of ultimate progress and totalizing framework. There is not so much a blurring of fiction and reality – but a heightening of the survival value of fiction. The ceremonial role of West African griot storytelling does not stay purely ceremonial or static but is involved in all the making and remaking of power, its vaccilations, reconstructions, modulations and interruptions. Fiction takes on this important role of continuous reworking histories, of improvising (out of need or under pain of death), of a general way in which speculative fiction (contemporary or traditional) is supposed to convey a sense of intensified realism in extreme situations. Nothing is neutral – and the storyteller is never sure of himself or of his own spinning. Roman is revising on the go and continuing interrupted stories he can only abandon with his life forefeited. Ending a story means death in a literal sense. The death of the story, its proper ending is not only the end of the movie (like in 1001 Night Islamic Arab cycle of famous stories) but the uncertain continuation under uncertain times. The audience is emprisoned by the story, not just because one is desperate to hear the end, but because it is already taken hostage, it cannot abstract, it cannot run away but is forced to find a way, to intervene, to shape the story with the means available.
Death is never far – and never just about sequels – it may be a play yet is is a play that keeps death at bay, that invents unexpected twists so that the knot of life can keep tight. In a sense we are prisoners of our time and space, of our culture and mores, of our biases and we can never completely escape them. Nothing can be totalized into a single univocal whole, and what exists or gets perceived is shaped by what lies to these situated and per-force limited perspectives (also explored by the paradoxo-metaphysic account of indexicalism in the recent book by Hilan Bensusan). Reality is not primarily substantive but first defined by a here and a there according to the speculative realism of Hilan Bensusan. There is much to say about how a non-traditional Western African griot time travels and even how the film director is a kind of contemporary griot.
There is much to say about many things – including the easy way VFX combine with the overall beauty (and brutality) of the movie. How the battles are happening on many levels. Imaginary creatures, local heroines or invisible forces play an important part in The Night of the Kings, including the fact that it is always a plural as in Kings not A King (not Lord of the Rings). It is overall a magnificent movie. Please take my word on it and watch it asap!
TimeSpace Warps 