Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Identitarianism and the Theory of Groups

    Identitarianism is a political movement that, in its broadest understanding, is “premised on an acknowledgement that political questions begin with identity.” Identitarianism thus described may encompass any ethnic, racial, religious, national, or other grouping—but in common parlance it refers to a specific European and now American movement concerned with the interests of white Europeans and Americans of European descent. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a nice overview of the identitarian movement in the United States, although it is now clearly dated.

    In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson explained that large groups face an inherent problem of acting collectively because individual members have an incentive to free-ride on the actions and contributions of others. Combatting this free-rider problem requires either providing selective benefits to those who do contribute, morselizing the group into smaller units (say, clubs or college campuses) in which free-rider problem is easier to manage, or by relying on some sort of political entrepreneur who does not mind paying disproportionately the costs of organizing and mobilization.

    Identitarianism as a political movement faces something of a dilemma, then. In every society in which it flourishes, it is a movement that aims to represent the majority of citizens (“whites”). It should be the hardest to this majority to organize as a group to advances its interests qua a group.

    How useful is the collective action and theory of groups perspective for making sense of identitarianism in American and European politics? On one hand, the idea of operating at smaller scales, morselizing the problem of collective action, seems to describe how the identitarian movement works well. So too the idea of the political entrepreneur: the National Policy Institute in the U.S. (which “endeavors to do the impossible: give voice to the interests of white peoples”) is exactly this. But there are two departures from the classic theory of groups that might usefully be noticed.

    The first departure is that much of what the identitarian movement is about is not organizing whites as a group, but rather convincing whites that they are a group. This task is substantial. It requires “boundary work” or “boundary making” (qua Barth [PDF]): deciding who is in and who is out (Jews, Roma, Turks, sometimes southern and/or Eastern Europeans, and so on and so forth), and how to deal with ambiguity (as the Nuremberg Laws did). But it also requires propagation of this concept more broadly among the community to which it is applied. This differs from the classic collective action framework in which groups more or less objectively exist: wage laborers, or members of religious congregations. The collective action problem, when the group exists, is to convince individuals that their interests are best achieved through collective effort, not that the they in fact have mutual or collective interests. The identitarian movement works to create that group first, and at the same time, in doing so, to imbue that group with a particular set of interests. In 2016, Glenn Loury observed pointedly that

    I really don’t know how you ask white people not to be white in the world we’re creating

    Identitarianism can thrive within this political space, even if saying “the interests of white peoples” openly, as an invitation for individuals to conceive of themselves as a group that has collective interests, remains something of a provocation.

    The second departure has to do with the free-rider problem. The identitarian movement does not confront the standard collective action problem because success does not depend on broad contributions of all potential group members. It is true that the identitarian movement would be stronger politically if it had universal active support. But the movement can prove effective even under conditions of broad apathy. So unlike the congregation that will not build its new church unless all members contribute, or the labor union that cannot effectively press its demands unless all members participate in the strike, the identitarian movement does not need to convince everyone to join the movement in order to change policy. Only for people to accept that the boundaries and groups exist, or even less, not to oppose them. In this way, identitarianism can change national political conversations even without winning converts to its cause.

  • How Artisanal Small-Scale Gold Mining Works

    Many people are interested in small-scale artisanal gold mining (ASGM) because it is one of the most environmentally destructive economic activities out there. It is also an occupation pursued by tens of not hundreds of thousands of Indonesians who—rightly or wrongly—perceive it to be one viable way to earn a living. And ASGM also happens to be the world’s single largest source of environmental mercury emissions, making it extraordinarily toxic to the individual miners, to the communities and ecosystems in which they live, and more broadly to all of us.

    I recently had the opportunity to travel to Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, to observe ASGM as it is actually practiced. I was able to learn how this process works, and here is what I learned.

    Gold is found in trace amounts in the soil in this part of Indonesia. To extract it in economically significant quantities, one needs to find a way to collect it in amounts that are large enough to see. What this means is processing tons and tons of soil, separating out the sediment by size to identify the particulate in which it is found. Here is what that looks like.


    You can see here that the miners have dug a giant pit in the earth, and are processing all of the dirt and sand by passing it across a series of inclines that separate the sediment according to size. Most of what is produced is waste, which the miners deposit into large piles. The miners keep the desired particulate and save it for further processing.

    If this were the only step in the process, this would still be an extraordinarily destructive activity. It destroys the soil and removes all vegetation from it. Traveling to this site we passed miles and miles of what looked like sandy beach that was once a rich ecosystem covered in plant and animal life. It will take dozens and dozens of years to reestablish plant life on that land. Even longer for it to revert to its former natural state.

    The next step, though, makes this not just environmentally destructive on a local scale but also of concern to the regional, national, and global environment. Mercury can be added to a slurry of particulate and water to entice the gold particles to “clump together” so that the miners can find them.


    Here the miner is standing in a pool of water, sediment, and mercury. He is panning for the gold-and-mercury amalgam. What remains after this process is a slurry of particulate, water, and mercury that is either dumped into the river or just left there (where it eventually will make its way into the river).

    When the miners find the clumps of gold and mercury, they then go through a final process of heating the amalgam.


    This miner is using a blow torch to heat the amalgam. Because mercury is liquid at room temperature, the heating process makes the mercury evaporate, leaving nearly pure gold as the remainder. The miners can then sell this to gold traders in the nearest city.

    As a vapor or gas, the mercury that was used in the mining process travels through the air and beyond this particular site. There are many things that can happen to it. It can condense back to liquid form and “rain down” locally onto land and into the river. In this case, it enters the food web—through bacteria and archaea that produce methylmercury, later consumed by phytoplankton, then zooplankton, and so forth on up to fish, birds, and humans. Methylmercury concentrations increase exponentially (literally—by one order of magnitude) at each step in this process.

    It is also possible that mercury gas remains in that state for some time, and travels via winds and weather far beyond any particular site. It is thus a global environmental problem, as ASGM contributes to the global stock of environmental mercury. The tuna that you catch off the coast of New England has elevated mercury levels as a direct result of the mining done in Indonesia.

    There is lots more to say about ASGM and its socioeconomic context, and much has already been written about it. A good place to start would be this recent issue of Inside Indonesia on mining, and in particular, this essay by Semiarto Purwanto that describes more about the region that I visited. One might want to know the social context of gold mining, and who participates—the indigenous Dayaks, or migrants from other parts of Indonesia? About the consequences—not just for miners exposed to mercury vapor but to the ecosystems in which mercury inevitably passes. One might want to know where the mercury comes from—who produces it, and how is it distributed to the miners? One might also want to understand the international political economy of both gold and mercury—global treaties such as the Minamata Convention (of which Indonesia is a party) that aim to eliminate the release of mercury into the environment, and the global market for gold and how ASGM fits into it. Here is an area in which the social, environmental, and natural sciences might fruitfully collaborate.