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South African Review of Sociology

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Sociology and the ‘slow violence’ of

toxic pollution. An invitation to debate
a
Jacklyn Cock Professor Emeritus
a
Sociology Department University of the Witwatersrand Honorary
Research Associate at Society, Work and Development Institute
(SWOP)
Published online: 07 Oct 2014.

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toxic pollution. An invitation to debate, South African Review of Sociology, 45:3, 112-117, DOI:
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 SOCIOLOGY AND THE ‘SLOW VIOLENCE’ OF
TOXIC POLLUTION. AN INVITATION TO DEBATE
Sociology and the ‘slow violence’ of toxic pollution. An invitation to debate

Jacklyn Cock
Professor Emeritus, Sociology Department
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University of the Witwatersrand

Honorary Research Associate at Society, Work and Development Institute
(SWOP)
Jacklyn.Cock@wits.ac.za

Keywords: environmental sociology, social meanings, toxic pollution, slow violence, social invisibility

Until fairly recently Sociology neglected ecological factors. The reasons for this
disciplinary inertia go back to Durkheim’s insistence that ‘social facts’ must be
explained by other ‘social facts’ (Cock 1994). Another expression of disciplinary
inertia is that much of the recent writing under the rubric of Environmental Sociology
rejected Marxism on the grounds that Marx and Engels ignored natural limits, were
technological determinists, understood labour as the only source of value and promoted
an anti-ecological industrialism. This perspective has now been thoroughly debunked
(O’Connor 1998; Foster and Magdoff 2011; Foster 1999 and 2009; Burkett 2005).
By contrast a Sociological Marxism is emerging with a strong ecological focus. For
example, Burawoy maintains that ‘Marxism continues to offer the most comprehensive
critique of capitalism as well as a compelling guide to feasible alternatives’ (Burawoy
2003: 1). But it requires ‘regeneration’ and this ‘depends on the incorporation of
sociological ideas’; (ibid.: 4). His key sociological idea is the notion of ‘the novel
modes of commodification’ (Burawoy 2013: 36). He identifies three different periods
based on different modes of commodification and different forms of countermovement.
‘The third wave, known to many as neoliberalism, begins in 1973 with the oil crisis and
initiates a third wave of marketization featuring the recommodificiation of labour and
money, but also the commodificiation of nature’ (Burawoy, 2013:39). This is having
devastating impacts: ‘if nature is turned into a commodity it destroys our means of
existence – the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land upon which we grow food,
the bodies we inhabit’ (Burawoy 2013: 37). In his analysis, what is ‘unique about the
third period … is the way the expansion of capitalism has given rise to environmental
degradation, moving toward ecological catastrophe’ (Burawoy 2013: 39).

South African Review of Sociology VOL 45 • NO 3 • 2014

ISSN 2152-8586/Online 2072-1978
© South African Sociological Association pp 112–117
DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2014.960704
 Sociology and the ‘slow violence’ of toxic pollution. An invitation to debate

Research on such environmental degradation involves following Burawoy’s

injunction that Sociology should ‘make visible the invisible’ (Burawoy 2007: 5). The
impacts of climate change, deforestation and toxic pollution frequently take place
gradually and invisibly. Nixon captures this in his concept of ‘slow violence’. This
challenges conventional understandings of violence. ‘Violence is customarily conceived
as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space …’
(Nixon 2011: 2). By ‘slow violence’ he means ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out
of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space’(ibid.).
In Violence and the environmentalism of the poor (2012), Nixon shows that much
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environmental damage takes the form of this slow violence that extends over time, is
insidious, undramatic, accretive and relatively invisible.
This process is powerfully illustrated in Flammable. Environmental suffering in
an Argentine shantytown (2009). The sociologists, Javier Auyero and Debora Swistun,
provide a moving account of how the inhabitants of a particular community cope
with this process of slow, invisible environmental contamination. A product of long
term ‘collaborative ethnography’, the book describes the devastating effects of toxic
pollution in the community of Flammable, an Argentinian shanty town located adjacent
to a compound that houses Shell and other petrochemical companies and storage
facilities. This is a poor community of some 700 families ‘in many ways similar to
other territories of urban relegation in Argentina; it was deeply affected by the explosion
of unemployment and the ensuing misery of the 1990s. Residents mostly subsist on
part-time manual jobs in one of the companies of the compound, retirement pensions,
scavenging and state welfare programmes’ (2009: 45). But Flammable is different from
other destitute neighbourhoods throughout Buenos Aires in the extent of its air, water
and soil pollution. The effects are known to local government experts and the area is
acknowledged to be unsuitable for human residence. But there is a marked lack of
government action and a widespread confusion and uncertainty about the causes and
effects of the contamination among residents.
The authors main concern is with how the contamination is socially constructed and
perceived. This counters what sociologist Ulrich Beck called a ‘social invisibility’, an
absence of ‘social thinking’ about environmental issues (Beck 1992: 25). This includes
the failure to analyse the different social understandings of environmental problems.
They ‘are generally viewed as matters of nature and technology, or of economics and
medicine. What is astonishing about that is that the industrial pollution of the environment
and the destruction of nature, with their multifarious effects on the health and social life
of people’ is ignored (ibid.). Beck’s concern is that the debate about pollution is being
conducted in largely scientific terms and not only social impacts but different social
meanings are ignored while ‘the same pollutants can have quite different meanings for
different people, according to age, gender, eating habits, information, education and so
on’(Beck 1992: 26).
Addressing this tendency to ignore different social meanings, the main purpose of the
author’s ‘collaborative ethnography’ is ‘to examine what living in the midst of garbage

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and poison does to people and how they make sense of it’ (Auyero and Swistum 2009:
18). The authors are profoundly sensitive to the multiple and contradictory meanings
people give to their experiences of contamination, ‘the culture of toxic uncertainty is a
complex web of meanings and shared understandings’ (2009: 108). They acknowledge
that ‘Flammable residents are alternately angry, and confused or mystified about the
source, extent and potential effects of contamination’ (2009: 5); residents ‘do not think
about feel about toxicity in a single, monolithic way’ (2009: 6). ‘Flammable is a story
of people’s confusion, mistakes and/or blindness regarding the toxicity that surrounds
them. Flammable is also a story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost
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complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’ (2009: 4).

This ‘silent habituation’ and absence of mass protests suggest a strong contrast
with a different poisoned community – that of Love Canal in the USA – where the toxic
contamination was similarly invisible, slow and insidious. As Levine writes, ‘there were
no walls of water, no bolts of lightning, no reports of multiple deaths and brave rescues.
In short, the Love Canal situation was neither cataclysmic nor dramatic’ (Levine 1982:
179). But there was a slow process of community members moving from a condition
of ignorance about the chemicals that had been dumped in their neighbourhood, to
appreciating the dangers involved and organising themselves to challenge the power of
a multi-billion dollar corporation and an unresponsive government. This mobilisation
depended on unmasking the power relations at work, which involved the externalisation
of environmental costs by the Hooker Chemical Corporation.
Auyero and Swistun explain the lack of mass protest in Flammable in terms of
Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic violence’, how domination involves the misrecognition
of power structures on the part of the dominated. Their sense of responsibility as scholars
ends with the task of explaining ‘the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding,
division and ultimately, inaction in the midst of sustained toxic assault’ (2009: 8).
They are not concerned with correcting this situation. Their focus is on the subjective
perception of contamination, not its material base.
The attention to these diverse social meanings is the great strength of Flammable,
but the book also illustrates the limitations of a discourse analysis that fails to address
material factors. The authors pay scant attention to the fundamental material causes
of the environmental suffering they describe: the externalisation of environmental
costs by the oil companies operating in the area that involved petrochemical waste and
emissions. While pointing to Shell’s concern to present itself as safe and responsible,
they back off any explicit criticism, ‘we are ill-prepared to confirm or dispute Shell’s
assertions’ (2009: 73).
The denial of responsibility for pollution is characteristic of corporate practices in
many different societies. Corporate ‘deceit and denial’ have been documented in the
USA (see, for example, Markowitz and Rosen 2004). One of the most powerful exposés
of this pattern is Devra Davis’s When smoke ran like water. Tales of environmental
deception and the battle against pollution (2002). As in the case of Debora Swistun, a
resident of Flammable, for Davis, pollution became a personal issue when toxic pollution

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 Sociology and the ‘slow violence’ of toxic pollution. An invitation to debate

from a steel factory killed several family members and damaged half the population of
her home town of Donora in Pennsylvania. At the time pollution was marked by a
social invisibility. ‘Nobody knew about pollution. That was just the way it was’; ‘today
they call it pollution. Back then, it was just a living’; ‘People had to eat’ (cited by
Davis 2002: 9). The inhabitants lacked crucial information about how the steel mill was
externalising environmental costs. ‘For Donora … the important questions never got
asked’ (Davis 2002: 21). This experience spurred Davis to go on to research and expose
many other instances of corporate ‘deceit and denial’, as in how the oil companies and
car manufacturers in the USA fought for decades to keep lead in petrol, while knowing
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that it caused brain damage.

While Auyero and Swistun provide a deeply moving account of different
experiences and understandings of environmental suffering, the ‘silence’ and ‘absence’
in Flammable raise challenging questions for sociologists: is there any responsibility
to our informants beyond that of detached (even if highly sensitive and even brilliant)
scholarship? Is it sufficient to uncover and analyse the social construction of toxic
pollution? Does Burawoy’s injunction that sociology should ‘make visible the
invisible’ mean the responsibility to expose the ways in which the ‘deceit and denial’ of
powerful corporations block the understandings of the inhabitants of pollution-affected
communities? Such blockages obviously constrain social action. Should research also
investigate the externalisation of environmental costs by the petro-chemical companies,
which were the cause of the toxic pollution in this case? Does the book demonstrate
the need for a public or engaged sociology that is committed to empowering people for
transformative change? This could take the form of direct interventions such as popular
education or attempts to provoke government action. How far should interventions go,
such as contributing to the building of local and global alliances between labour and
environmental activists, which is happening in many countries to challenge polluting
corporations?
There are many communities in contemporary South Africa suffering from toxic
pollution caused by powerful corporations concerned to externalise environmental
costs (Butler and Hallowes 2002). The community of South Durban is struggling to
survive the highest rate of asthma in the world from exposure to toxic chemicals from
the Shell refinery. In Steel Valley, the area near Vanderbjlpark , the area bordering a steel
mill – once a thriving community – is now a denuded wasteland, emptied of human
habitation. Steel Valley demonstrates the ‘slow violence’ of ecological degradation.
The destruction was obscure and gradual. The penetration of the toxic pollution was
extensive, permeating the landscape, moving slowly through the air, the soil and the
underground water and – in many cases – was driven inwards and somatized in the form
of illness, genetic defects, cancers and kidney failures among animals and humans. In
Steel Valley, as at Flammable and at Love Canal, ‘there was no moment of impact when
physical surroundings changed suddenly’ (Levine 1982: 193). But over a long period,
the area of Steel Valley has been reduced to a wasteland. People and animals have been

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poisoned, crops have failed and lives have been devastated. The cause is extensive toxic
pollution from a steel mill – operated first by the parastatal, Iscor, and now by the largest
steel producer in the world, Arcelor Mittal.
What is the responsibility of Sociology in relation to these communities? Simply
to investigate and describe suffering, ignorance and confusion? Burawoy’s formulation
of an ‘organic public sociology’ involves not only making ‘visible the invisible’, but
working in close connection with a ‘visible, thick, active, local public’ (Burawoy
2007: 5). This involves emphasizing collective work and rejecting the call of C.
Wright Mills ‘to stand for the primary of the individual scholar’(Wright Mills 1959:
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246). Instead, in this highly individualised neoliberal moment, sociologists would

have to stand in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. In doing so, sociology
could strengthen social movements, mobilising collective action around issues such as
toxic contamination of poor communities – movements infused with a commitment to
social justice, movements that challenge corporate power and demand alternative social
arrangements, arrangements that promote human emancipation.

REFERENCES
Auyero, J. and Swistun, D. 2009. Flammable. Environmental suffering in an Argentine Shantytown.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Beck, U. 1992 Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage.
Burawoy, M. 2007. For public sociology. In Clawson, D. et al. (eds.), Public sociology, 23–66.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burawoy, M. 2003. ‘For a sociological Marxism: The complementary convergence of Antonio
Gramsci and Karl Polanyi. Politics and Society 31(2): 193–261.
Burawoy, M. 2013. Marxism after Polanyi. In Williams, M. and Satgar, V. (eds.), Marxisms in the 21st
century. Crisis, critique and struggle. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Butler M. and Hallowes, D. 2002. Power, poverty and marginalized environments. In McDonald, D.,
Environmental justice in South Africa, 15–48. Cape Town: Oxford.
Cock, J. 1994. Sociology as if survival mattered. South African Review of Sociology 6(2): 14–32.
Davis, D. 2002. When smoke ran like water. Tales of environmental deception and the battle against
pollution. New York: Basic Books.
Levine, A. 1982. Love canal: Science, politics and people. Lexington: Lexington Books.
Markowitz, G. and Rosner, D. 2002. Deceit and denial. The deadly politics of industrial pollution.
New York: University of California Press.
Nixon, R. 2011. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Wright Mills, C. 1959. The sociological imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Jacklyn Cock is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology, Wits University. She has
written extensively on militarisation, gender and environmentalism in South Africa. Her best known
work is Maids and madams. A study in the politics of exploitation (1980 Johannesburg: Ravan Press).
Her most recent book is The war against ourselves. Nature, justice and power in South Africa (2008
Johannesburg: Wits University Press).
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