Mr Magpie has always been a bold friend. He sits at the table with us when we are outside. In the warmer months when we often leave the back door open he walks inside the house, sometimes looking for a snack, but often enough walks all the way through the house, apparently just to say hello.
Mrs Magpie and Magpie Jr are friendly, but less bold. They come and sit near us on the ground, not at the table. And they join Mr Magpie in eating nearby, but they don’t eat with us as he does – insists upon, even.
When there is food the three magpies sing a special song. It starts with one low warble, then the other two join in. The pitch of the warble gets higher and it ends with a long note, in three parts, pleasantly discordant. The song feels like gratitude or celebration to me, but who knows.
Being in relationship with Magpies is just great.
For the past few months we’d been noticing Magpie Jr is looking pretty adult. How long with they live with Magpie parents, we wondered? Turns, out, not much longer.
For a bit, Mrs Magpie and Magpie Jr hadn’t been around much. Then on a pleasantly warm day that turned out to be a False Spring (it was beautiful – but now we are kinda expecting snow tonight), Mr Magpie walked up to us while we were having lunch in the outdoor kitchen. Seeming kinda coy, but bolder than she had been for months, along came Mrs Magpie AND ALSO A NEW BABY.
Soft downy grey feathers along its little neck, I am totally anthropomorphising, but Mr and Mrs M seemed so proud. We felt so lucky that they wanted us to meet the new baby.
But what happened to the old baby? Obviously I googled. Apparently the young magpies go and join a young magpie gang. The youth gang roams around without a territory and then maybe one day our former Magpie Jr will settle with their own mate and take ownership of a new territory.
That process of roaming, mating and then claiming territory is fundamentally unstable. Each magpie carries with them the potential to maintain control over territory that they don’t yet have. It is messy, power hungry and a bit violent.
As spring looms the violence brews; magpies swoop magpies, in groups and alone. From now until summer is a pretty uncertain season as birds – magpies and their mortal enemies, the sulfur-crested white cockatoos – battle for territorial rights.
Is this a bit like what is happening to us, now?
Globalisation is over, Globalisation is Back on
I’m no expert on tariffs but their intention is surely towards deglobalisation. The Economist magazine, which as I understand it has supported free trade for 182 years, has been all doom and gloom about this whole tariff thing. I’m not saying they are wrong, but rather that 182 years of such a position also constitutes a politics.
Those economists (like at The Economist) who declare tariffs to be universally, ahistorically bad may be correct from certain angles, but we also gotta say that the latest phase of anti-tariff globalisation since the 1970s/8-s has not been that great, based as it is/was on enforcing governmental austerity (from some quarters, a deliberate attempt to override democracy’s tendency to redistribute the booty of capitalism to make things slightly fairer), so that goods, human labour and contracts flow like water to where profit can be extracted at the lowest cost.
Well, really the lowest price for the costs were and are enormous. The environmental cost alone might one day kill us all, while in the meantime we live with unspeakable levels of inequality that may well spill over to Magpies-in-spring level violence, but by humans who have nuclear weapons.
Carbon-spewing globalisation has been terrible for the actual (not just metaphorical) magpies, too, whose trees burned to an existential degree in the 2019 Black Summer bushfires. We were in green, damp England, but my wonderful local friend Naomi Parry Duncan says that many birds moved into town and began to build closer relationships with humans.
When I came home (due to Covid return-home directives) I shed tears as I walked in silent, burned forests with no birdsong – and not even the scuttling of tiny lizards beneath the leaves. The silence, it seemed to me, of mass extinction.
See the entangled nature of our living, and of historical capitalism. Even our present friendship with the Magpie family and their new baby may well be a result of globalisation.
The next story on the ABC news website contradicted the first. Mr “America First” was now choosing our Australian mining giants over red blooded American corporations to mine copper in Arizona.
Well, the end of globalisation didn’t even last as long as the End of History. Before I even scrolled down, globalisation was already back on.
I wonder if that is because deglobalisation is just not what is happening, but instead a kind of geoeconomic fragmentation, forging new complex, networked and multiple trading and relationship blocs.
I find this thought tantalising. But although Google Ngram shows ‘geoeconomic fragmentation’ growing since 2016 (wonder what happened then?), it still thinks ‘deglobalisation’ dominates – if frequency of mentions is a measure of anything (and it probably is).
Finding Capital Down the Back of the Sofa
In fact, under geoeconomic fragmentation, nations may instead be anxious not to lose critical goods, resources and human capital – and definitely, definitely not capital capital, which surely needs to be invested at home, especially to build more homes, flats and high-rise apartments, since somehow everyone seems to now have a housing crisis.
As a result, nations may have more difficulty accessing markets, components, materials, iron ore, and those dangerous-to-get but essential rare earths – and may need to look for them closer to home. So that one might also ask local capital to hang around, please. That really does sound like deglobalisation, doesn’t it, actually?
A related problem is that the workforce is getting older on average and the global workforce is shrinking, due to declining birthrates (except perhaps in Oz where we have high migration).
What it looks like, at least to my inexpert eyes, is that, no longer able to trust in the flow of global capital and a workforce ever-expanding by adding women, migrants and just more people being born, everyone instead is coerced into hunting for the scraps of capital in every dusty corner, under each piece of furniture and between the couch cushions.
Capitalists have long colonised ‘empty’ (not empty) worlds and accumulated their resources. They have exhausted forests (but are still bulldozing the last of them), have tapped the water sources (and are pouring their last dregs into AI) and are scraping the bottom of the very large coal and gas barrel provided by the carboniferous period (and are determined to exploit the last of it, even to the end of the world).
In recent decades the system has gathered women into the workforce (though boosting childcare might grab the scraps of the gendered commodity frontier).
What is left? Maybe the speed of investment, producing faster reinvestment?
Because now, a new deregulation (not-actually-deregulation, really) movement seeks to loosen selected regulations (in a flexible, targeted way) so that capital can be deployed more quickly (but without the perverse, deadly results of deregulation). Less friction, more profit from even small scraps of capital, right?
Similarly, encouraging labour mobility, at least within domestic borders, so that skills that are under-utilised in one area can be exploited by a sector that really needs them.
Augmenting labour with AI and other forms of automation waves the metal detector over the old mine.
And then, combining multiple, previously-marginal, sources of energy will ensure there is enough power to make the AI run.
Somewhere under those couch cushions is some loose capital which, added up, amounts to something that is not austerity and we might as well call abundance – though it does not look, at least to me, like abundant life.
Can the Magpie Unionise?
And in an anti-colonial, turning-power-systems-upside-down sense, we also, surely, want to attribute agency to the Magpies – and maybe even those dickhead suflur-crested cockatoos who snip the heads of hyacinths, lettuces and even the solar-powered outdoor lights in the outdoor kitchen. Rather than extract value from a perceived passive ‘nature’, we include it as agents that make our world, history and economy.
In our history of capitalism reading group last week we (re)read Timothy Mitchell’s classic book chapter ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?’.
A wondrous, meandering discussion about agency and relationships between non-human things (birds, coal, mosquitos, pens, AI) and humans in the history of capitalism a clever postdoc at the beleaguered UTS, Matt Ryan, pointed out that the question of agency in the history of capitalism may not be so much about whether the mosquito can speak as whether the mosquito can unionise.
When I went out to the outdoor kitchen to find snipped light bulbs, I gotta say that felt like anti-colonial, collective direct action on the part of the cockatoos – against me.*
So, maybe.
I’m not certain about much. But things are changing. Power relations. Geopolitics. The global economy. And the logics and intellectual frameworks in which we try to think, do and make policy. Even if we are Magpies.
*Since I drafted this the sulfur crested cockatoos also destroyed a bed of garlic, another of spring onions and DUG UP (not just snipped) the jonquils.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Cheez Whiz 09.09.25 at 11:18 pm
The Trump economic plan is a pastiche of 19th c. economics, empire tribute extraction, and what appears to be a very deliberate downshift of the us economy. The administration is completely sincere in its desire to deport 10M or more immigrants, defining “illegal” on the fly as needs be. The parallel Wellness agenda of RFK at HHS and the gutting of Medicaid, will result in up to millions of unnessary deaths. It looks like a concerted effort to decrease the size of the US population, to what end may be buried in Project 2025 or the 7 Mountains project. The various economic deals being struck are agreements to make a deal, with vague and unenforceable investment numbers thrown around. Most likely this all constitutes a plan by accident at best. How the rest of the world reacts and adapts will be the real plan, not anything the US does.
John Q 09.10.25 at 1:51 am
Unfortunately magpies routinely mistake humans, particularly cyclists, for cockatoos or maybe goannas (monitor lizards that like to eat birds eggs,name is a corruption of the unrelated iguana). First attacks are occurring right on time in September.
It’s striking that magpies, which are quite intelligent birds, haven’t worked out that humans can’t fly and almost never climb trees. Even in the absence of retaliation, time spent attacking humans is time when the nest is unguarded against real threats.
Ken_L 09.10.25 at 4:08 am
The magpies in my little village know all the local residents. We never get swooped. Not so the brain-dead plovers, who spend every day in a state of panic because people are approaching.
The cockies are definitely organising against us. They delight in biting unripe fruit off our fruit trees, tilting their heads in joy to watch it fall to the ground.
It’s probably nothing but the disillusionment of old age, but it does seem to me that lots of Americans are rapidly regressing into resentful violent adolescence, inspired by infantile billionaires, and an increasing number of people in the rest of what was once called “the free world” are thinking “That looks like fun!”, and doing the same.
Gareth Wilson 09.10.25 at 4:13 am
“we live with unspeakable levels of inequality that may well spill over to Magpies-in-spring level violence, but by humans who have nuclear weapons.”
I believe that among the particular people with control over nuclear weapons, inequality isn’t too bad.
Laban 09.10.25 at 9:33 am
Aussie magpies are such lovely singers, unlike the UK magpie. We stopped in a layby on the Great Ocean Road to admire the view (I think of Torquay) and one alighted on a post maybe six feet away and warbled beautifully. It didn’t mind a camera pointed at it either. Probably that bird’s on dozens of tourist videos, if not hundreds.
engels 09.10.25 at 9:59 am
In recent decades the system has gathered women into the workforce… What is left?
Florida debates lifting some child labor laws to fill jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/25/business/florida-child-labor-laws
engels 09.10.25 at 10:22 am
Also: forcing sick and disabled people to work (harder), raising the retirement age to infinity and gradually replacing everyone’s “leisure” with various joyless but economically productive compulsions.
Maybe not as sexy as asteroid mining but it’s a lot more lucrative.
Doug Muir 09.10.25 at 2:17 pm
“It’s striking that magpies, which are quite intelligent birds, haven’t worked out that humans can’t fly and almost never climb trees. Even in the absence of retaliation, time spent attacking humans is time when the nest is unguarded against real threats.”
— This may be happening because they’re intelligent birds. Magpies are bright enough to send and receive threats, and they probably have some concept of deterrence. So, demonstrating truculence — “look everyone, I’m SO aggressive that I’m even attacking this harmless thing!” — could easily be adaptive.
Competition for nesting sites and territory is, unfortunately, a zero-sum game. If a magpie wants to pass on its genes, it needs a sufficiently large territory. That territory has to be defended against all potential rivals — and there are always lots of potential rivals. So, ostentatious displays of aggression may be selected for.
It’s basically Mad Bomber Theory, bird style. You want to look too crazy to mess with! It may be expensive — but not as expensive as getting in a no-kidding fight that may end in injury, death, or defeat.
It’s depressingly possible that the chill, calm magpies that don’t attack cyclists are more likely to be perceived as weak, and thus are targeted by rivals or the hungry landless.
Doug M.
Kindred Winecoff 09.10.25 at 4:30 pm
This is very good, Hannah.
“I wonder if that is because deglobalisation is just not what is happening, but instead a kind of geoeconomic fragmentation, forging new complex, networked and multiple trading and relationship blocs.”
That is my bat-signal.
Yes this is happening, but not “fragmentation” into blocs… “fractionalization” into communities. The difference is technical but important. If we don’t get this right then the timelines that open up are very bleak indeed: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509423112
So what is important (IMO) is to rapidly pursue direct ties where there used to be indirect ones. For decades, many economies were indirectly connected to each other through the US, with the US taking a service fee for providing the connection.. I.e., Asia recycles export surpluses through Wall St which are then invested in the EU and Latin America.
Now the US is closing off that “brokerage” aspect of connectivity (Henry would refer to “chokepoints”).
So there are two choices: allow fractionalization to proceed on the US’s terms, or form new ties — very rapidly — in order to create more direct connectivity on alternate paths that do not run through the US.
Allowing fractionalization to proceed on the US’s terms is submission to imperialism. Forming direct connections around the US requires facing the reality of the global economy, taking responsibility for it rather than expecting someone else to do so. That is the magpies problem.
The good news is that creating pathways around the US’s chokepoints could be more democratic and egalitarian than the previous system. The bad news is getting to that point will require forms of coordination that the world is poor at, and in particular it will require actors and institutions that are uncomfortable expressing power to get comfortable with it.
NOW.
dk 09.10.25 at 11:59 pm
It never surprises me that magpies attack humans. We’re the greatest threat to the survival of most species barring rare exceptions, and we have extensive form in causing extinctions and destroying habitat. Lucky for humans that the natural world doesn’t engage in collective action, or every animal on the planet would be doing their level best to kill us in self-defense.