The Brief Graveyard Shift at Nepal's Tribhuwan International Airport

A range of issues came to the fore when Nepal's Tribhuwan International Airport's workforce had to be mobilized for 24-hour shifts recently. The communication of vital information between shifts became an issue. The levels of depreciation of the workers needed to be judged carefully. Preparations for “random accidents” needed to take place. Continuous encouragement had to be given to prevent fatigue from becoming the precursor to a political movement of workers' unrest. To fulfill these tasks, the whole managerial artifice of the airport had to be awake once a small but important portion of the airport had to work for 24 hours. The 24-hour shift, a rarity in Nepal, brought the nation within the set of those countries that operate their national-capitalist system throughout the night, like a machine that can operate without tiring. The seeds were sown in Nepal for the depreciation of the workforce to not become a hindrance in the vitality/operation of the capitalist machine; the workforce could be replaced, a new idea in itself for Nepal, or the workers' depreciation monitored continuously and countered as much as possible. A new model of “insomniac capitalism” became a possibility for the businessmen of Nepal as the strength of the work ethic of Nepali airport workers became evident. The airport management could be scrutinized closely to see whether Nepali workers could be submitted to graveyard shifts. And also, for the workers themselves, more important than earning money from the graveyard shift was the need to uphold a favorable image of Nepal as a hardworking nation.

In general, when we take the workforce in its entirety, we often find that it is a machine. The ability of two human beings to operate one after the other to perform the same tasks is vital in the formation of this machine. Without a loss of productivity, the day shift laborer hands over the responsibilities of work to a night-shift laborer and so on the relay goes, throughout the day. A communicative relationship ensures that day-shift and night-shift laborers are able to continue with work as long as one of the workers is able to communicate to the other the nature of the work to be performed and any specific details regarding the work of a particular day. We cannot speak of Marxist alienation at work in the machine-like work system because there is an imperative to communicate between two workers so that work may be done day and night in a number of shifts. Alienation only applies to that period of history when work was completed for the day after workers left the factory. In a system that operates without taking a break, the workers are responsible for seeking out and communicating with other workers the details of the task and the responsibilities ahead, so the workers are not alienated from one another, but come into contact too much.

What enabled the construction of this machine? Perhaps the workers' unions are an important factor, because we can locate in their activities a concept of machine-like capitalism. The workers' unions keep the machine in place and running through an accurate judgment of workers' depreciation and the effective prevention of “random depreciation” such as workplace accidents, spontaneous worker unrest etc. The workers' union also has a hand in the observation and judgment of the worker's health and abilities, and creates the proper conditions for the worker to either change to a graveyard shift or to resign, all in order that the machine is run smoothly. The workers' unions, in this role, are the most capitalist of entities, for they are not concerned with the generation of profit only, they are beyond that, their concern is ensuring that capitalism as a system produces in a constant flow, that it has a rhythm, that it is humming like a healthy machine...a poetic-philosophical image of capitalism which is quite tempting and hard to erase. The problem is that, these days, such is the level of habituation of the worker to work that the workers do not know when to stop working.

It has to be said that money, in this regard, is not the culprit responsible for a kind of unhealthy 'workaholic.' Money is not the enslaving/oppressive symbol that submits people to work beyond their will, rather, money is the symbol of people's eagerness to work; money is the object which symbolizes people's drive to work. Money is a symbol made by the people, it is not a symbol acting on the people. Given the free reign and circulation that money has in society, it seems to be resistant to its political management, and seems rather to be a cultural object, an object which is much more free in its flows throughout the globe, which is seldom the object of political scrutiny and censorship. Even if we make an allowance to say that the flows of money are in part economically and politically determined, we still have to say that the most worthwhile earning and spending of money is determined by our cultural practices, norms and habits. Unlike political signs, which are imposed on the worker, money then is a symbol of hard work formed by the workers in the celebration of their collective and machine-like endeavor.

The Desire to Make Nepal's “War Jungles” into Historical Objects

There are many efforts underway, during and after a war, to try and make history. One way to make history is to make a certain portion of the territory relevant to the masses for a long time to come. This historical territory is usually the “No-Man's-Land,” such as the border regions between nations in traditional war, or the jungles in a guerrilla war. One of the issues that propels sides in a war to convert a piece of land into a historical land of dispute is that it is a way to subvert insertion of that land into the monetary economy: the no-man's-land or the jungle is exempt from economic valuation as it becomes an object of history, to be remembered because it was a special territory fought over rather than something to be utilized for building, agriculture or mining purposes eventually. In this way, a common desire from both sides of a conflict converts the contested territory into a historical object; both sides in a conflict demonstrate a fixation with history-making. That there is so much loss of life and other hardships during a war implies that the conversion of a territory into a historical object via the overcoming of its economic valuation is a tremendous feat indeed; it is as if a piece of land 'naturally' tends to be more friendly towards economic valuation rather than history-making. Ultimately, however, economic valuation and utility is short-lived; all objects are ultimately historical objects.

The exact history of the conflicts that criss-crossed a certain piece of land, such as a Nepali jungle, is however hard to preserve and disseminate. We therefore forget that a piece of land has history attached to it, and this forgetting is what enables us to put the land into the economic logic of buy/sell, boom/bust, profit/loss etc. Land, in particular, is hard to put within a historical framework of conflicts, harder than it is to submit houses and peoples to history and to remember them. Conflicts are therefore renewed, repeated again and again, in order that the land these conflicts occur on and for may be inserted once again into our memories, and hence, in this regard, conflicts would be entirely unnecessary if our historical memories were more longer and more pronounced. The necessity of war, then, is not economic nor is it political, but it is historical, it is the need to repeat history that brings two sides towards an enactment, a dramatization, of War. Thus, there is a need to re-evoke and preserve in history those conflicts that took place on the land from the oldest periods of known human history, as a way of subduing the desire to make war and re-submit territories into history again and again. It should be argued and asserted by witnesses that the re-enactment of a war in the present does more to trample on the past wars than it does to preserve them. 

But a factor of concern is whether the contemporary moment is characterized by an amnesia deeper than in previous times. This amnesia is a real possibility: the forces of globalization are inserting the local land upon which history-making processes take place into much wider global channels which ultimately means that history-making processes are being "colonized" by neo-imperial powers that utilize land far and away to re-enact the wars that they themselves do not want to repeat in the peaceful homeland. All the wars that are taking place today all over the world collectively re-enact the massive World War 2 that took place in Europe. Wars take place here, but have a greater significance over there, which causes amnesia of the local residents here. All this to say that if the memories and historical production at the local level concerning the war is weak, then it can perhaps be speculated that such a war has greater significance abroad, where it is depicted in detail by the media, than it does at the local level. 

Aerial Warfare and the Warlord's Ego

Given the aura of the capital cities of most countries, given the ways in which the capitals are made attractive and have high symbolic value, the warlord's ego is especially fixated on capturing/invading the capital cities, rather than the other cities, towns and villages of a enemy country. What has enabled the warlord to attack precisely the capitals of countries? The modern fighter airplane is an invention which makes the attacks on strategic points of a country possible, and hence, to satisfy the warlord's ego, aerial warfare is conducted to attack the capital, to enable the capture of the capital straight away. The traditional myth of the military-industrial complex posits that the technological gain dictates the warlord's capabilities in combat, but, the warlord's ego is very much still a force in determining what types of technology are made possible and what style of warfare can be conducted. The collective efforts of the industrial labor force that works on combat technology are not what causes war, neither is war perpetrated for "national interests," rather, war is still driven forward by the ego of the (often individual) warlord. The warlord pools together the vested interests, or may indeed fabricate the vested interests entirely, in order that his ego's war be possible. That the capital cities have been westernized at least in their outward appearance is a telling sign that what the warlord fights against is in a sense 'closer to home,' for his ego has been developed in rivalry with other western egos and he has no real knowledge of the realities of the non-western individuals on the ground where his war is conducted. His war is about directly attacking sentiments of peace and freedom at home via the attacks on an "other" abroad that happens to be the object of scrutiny of the western pacifists that he knows. 

Whereas the process of conducting war is left to the warlord's ego, the aftermath of the war demands a whole other kind of expertise entirely, an expertise which needs to somehow manage the gains of war and which needs to return the whole country back to a kind of stability. War has a strict fixed budget and a fixed plan. Often its most important moments are the capture of the capital and the other important cities, after that, war has to be considered over, partly over fears that the boosted ego of the warlord will not want to stop and will thus conduct war on other territories as well. After the successes, the country needs a different kind of external force to impact it, and it must be returned to peace, however short lived, to satisfy the vested interests that helped war go forward. The warlord has to be replaced as the authority over that territory by someone who can command and maintain peace at the same time.

There is a problem in the aftermath of an aerial warfare focused on capturing the capital of a country. The problem is that if the enemy country's government did not have a good handle on the tribal and/or rural regions of the country, then capturing just the capital will not translate to a real authority over the rest of the country.  Too often in modern conceptions of warfare, the capital is taken as the most strategically important point of a combat operation, but, the gains made in the capital may not indicate a command over the other regions of a country, given other leaders who may command these other regions. An airplane may fly one straight to the capital, but something about the logic of traditional war still endures: that the peripheral village/tribal regions must be attacked first, and only as strength and confidence is gathered, and the ego is boosted, should the warlord progress slowly, by making gains and conquering the rural, towards the capital, which is usually located at a central point of the territory. It is problematic that the warlord's ego is today boosted in training and education than it is in actual combat operations "on the ground." War has been conducted with sensation in mind: with spectacular gains made in the capital being more valuable than the slow invasion.