It turned out to be a summer of profound angst, with some unexpected, welcome surprises — the unrelenting horror in Gaza, ICE detentions in the US, and in Britain, massive protests along with a new left-wing political party. The sailboat Madleen, filled with aid and activists heading for Gaza, was boarded by Israeli soldiers who detained protestors, preventing the smallest tokens of help from taking place; gondolas filled with tech billionaires in Venice celebrated the wedding of Jeff Bezos; and at a 50th anniversary screening of Jaws, Stephen Spielberg reminisced that his huge mechanical shark had been one ungodly headache from the get-go, constantly ‘acting up’ throughout the filming, and dominating daily work.
Yet arguably the biggest shock was the sudden appearance on social mediaof the Staten Island Ferry, a large and free transport service used as an example in the campaign video messaging of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who emerged victorious as the Democratic mayoral nominee for New York City. Articulate, savvy and a first-class organiser, the Queens state senator quietly won over mostly young, often working-class voters who responded strongly to the promise of a much more affordable city with free public transportation and government-run grocery stores.
Some days after the Staten Island Ferry affair, a call between Donald Trump and loser Andrew Cuomo reportedly concluded that the two could well work together to halt Mamdani from taking the mayoralty. This communication proved the threat social democratic victory posed to those who normally ran the city, and importantly, demonstrated the ongoing left insistence that the two major parties were nothing more than a duopoly, existing to run a financial behemoth that has, for decades, been a headquarters for neoliberalism and imperialism.
At the heart of the matter, Cuomo’s unbecoming drubbing totally horrified New York’s ‘finest’ — the real estate tycoons and Wall Street traders who had comfortably expected New York politicians to cement their interests. Leftist political analysts seized on this event as proof of neoliberalism’s last gasp: though Trump’s policies had reached a violent peak, it could be viewed, like the final horrors of all wars, as the beginning of the end, and some hoped the Mamdani victory was an indication of what could come in the not-too-distant future.
The World Offshore
In June, Harvard economist Ian Kumekawa published Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge. Kumekawa’s work follows an important — but mostly overlooked — aspect of neoliberalism: the offshore world. The book’s main character is the ‘Bibby Resolution’, an apparently unremarkable hulk that has been morphed and remoulded many times over since the late 1970s. In the past five decades, the vessel (referred to as such throughout the book due to its many owners and forms) has moved around the world, with its job being to serve as an inexpensive living place — sometimes for years — for British soldiers, New York City prisoners, German workers, and Indian sailors abandoned by bankrupt shipowners.
As the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in Offshore, an account of her time living on a small boat moored in London after becoming close to bankruptcy, the society of people she joined were ‘ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but they don’t manage to submit to them’. Her writing, she says, is ‘to give these people a voice’. In a larger sense, this is exactly what Kumekawa manages for the ever-changing inhabitants of the Bibby Resolution. By the 1970s, a sharp decline in international shipping activity precipitated a large uptick in offshore oil production, and the vessel found itself quickly entangled in the largest Norwegian bankruptcy of that period. Under new ownership, it would go on to the Falkland Islands, where, in 1982, it found itself caught up in Margaret Thatcher’s war with the Argentinean junta, housing scores of British service personnel.
After five years, the vessel was re-registered and re-flagged, first in Hong Kong and later in the Bahamas. Flags of convenience, Kumekawa explains, were fundamentally responsible for the worldwide decline of seafarers’ wages; he points out that one study found that pay dropped by around a quarter for all seafarers between 1992 and 1999. British workplace safety protections, wage regulations, and recourse to British justice were gone with the changing of the flag, with what the author describes as states ‘renting out their sovereignty to companies, ‘if not selling it outright’, the power of organised workers vanished.
By 1990, the vessel became home to a growing population of mostly black and brown prisoners, as New York City officials cut corporate taxes and radically uprooted existing social services. Uzi machine guns were at times used to control prisoners living in extremely crowded conditions on the vessel, while a Soho NIMBY group, alarmed at the prisoners’ close co-existence, had the ship removed from the area. It reappeared in the English coastal town of Portland, and again became the subject of local opposition.
In 2005, the British Prison Service announced that the vessel, then the last prison ship in Europe, would close. ‘Overall’, explains the author, ‘it did not check enough boxes in the Third Way’s knowledge economy.’ Although the vessel received glowing reviews from both staff and inmates, it was towed out of Portland Harbour in 2009 to be sent to Nigeria (having been heavily reconditioned since its New York days), where it provided housing for offshore oil workers.
Soon after the vessel arrived, however, global oil prices collapsed. Its new owner, Sea Trucks, faced disaster and would be liquidated in 2017 in the British Virgin Islands. Another company, West African Ventures, took ownership of the vessel in a negotiated settlement; at this stage, Kumekawa writes, the boat had become a ‘tool of multinational interests’ symbolising the collapse of all boundaries and concerns over questions such as national sovereignty. In what he calls a ‘new post-imperial global frontier’, all previously existing national considerations and regulations on everything from working laws to financial regulations are fundamentally rerouted and undermined.
The offshoring world Kumekawa describes so brilliantly has existed and expanded along with neoliberalism for more than forty years. Despite being an unseen entity, it has only grown more prosperous than ever and achieves regular success at further eroding any legal restraints to its operations. In a sense, Trump’s latest move of sending detained immigrants to an out-of-sight foreign prison with low costs and mostly absent legal restraints is this offshoring arriving on shore. These victims of a hyper-militarised ICE are political commodities, just like New York prisoners and Indian sailors who all experienced such ‘offshoring’ ventures before. This time, the only possible ‘upside’ of this anti-human adaptation is that it is being discussed and denounced across the world — hopefully, Empty Vessel can add some historical depth as to where so much of this misery emerged from.