On Asbestos and the Capitalist Dead
The Ongoing Story of an Industrial Disaster
In October 1964, a conference took place in New York on the “Biological Effects of Asbestos.” The international event, which had been organised by Irving J. Selikoff with support from the New York Academy of Sciences, was attended by more than three hundred participants. It soon came to be recognised as a defining moment in the medical-scientific conversation around asbestos and its harms. Selikoff gave the opening address and presented the results of his research with local asbestos insulation workers. He had found an excess mortality rate of 25 per cent, with deaths not only from asbestosis, but also from lung cancer, mesothelioma, and cancers of the stomach, colon, and rectum. Later in the conference, London doctor Molly Newhouse presented her work on the occurrence of mesothelioma among people who lived near the Cape Asbestos Company’s factory in Barking. An occupational problem that the industry maintained was manageable through new dust control measures was being decisively recast as an environmental and infrastructural danger.
The conference was also attended by representatives from the major companies. Their papers largely ignored the rising body count, focusing instead on narrow questions regarding geology and dust-counting technology. They seem to have quickly realised that their narrative around asbestos risks was being fatally undermined; they decried the “sensationalist” tone of the event. During his paper, Johns-Manville medical officer Kenneth Smith stressed the importance of examining “our problem as honest scientists with no ulterior motive, in a scientific manner.” It would later emerge that the industry had spent much of the previous two decades suppressing information about the health risks. It would spend the coming decades trying to intimidate, discredit, and undermine Selikoff, his colleagues, and anyone else who opposed them.
In 2021, the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) recorded that asbestos had killed around five thousand people in Britain. Many researchers and anti-asbestos campaigners believe that this official figure is a serious underestimate, and that the real total was closer to twenty thousand.
The implications of mesothelioma were significant: given that there was no lower threshold for exposure, the continuing existence of the industry should have been in question. But of course, what mattered to the companies was not knowledge in the abstract, but their material interests — their mines, factories, and distribution networks. When “capitalists purchase fixed capital, they are obliged to use it until its value (however calculated) is fully retrieved,” as Marxist geographer David Harvey once wrote. Managing the science around asbestos, suppressing critical voices, and keeping questions of risk and causality open — in short, insulating profit-making — became key to the industry’s survival. There were numerous critics, with Selikoff at the forefront. There were also plenty of obliging doctors and scientists who would go on to make good livings from industry-sponsored research. In the two decades from 1960, when the widespread dangers of asbestos-related cancer were becoming clear and safer alternatives were increasingly available, asbestos production increased significantly.
Between 1960 and the late 1980s, Cape Asbestos and Eternit played a key role in suppressing further studies of mesothelioma in South Africa. The apartheid government assisted their efforts to obstruct and intimidate researchers at every step. From the early Sixties, the industry had also alighted on another strategy, one that it still relies on today. The initial studies of mesothelioma had taken place around crocidolite mines, so the North American companies that produced and used only chrysotile questioned whether the different types of asbestos had different carcinogenic qualities. The companies pumped huge sums of money into the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association (QAMA) and the Institute of Occupational and Environmental Health (IOEH) at Montreal’s McGill University. There was evidence to suggest that crocidolite and amosite were especially harmful and dangerous when it came to mesothelioma. Through a series of flawed studies of Canadian asbestos miners and dubious assertions and syllogisms, the idea that “chrysotile is slightly less dangerous than crocidolite and amosite” was transformed into a simple message with which to reassure a concerned public: “chrysotile is safe.”
From the beginning, Selikoff and many others were disbelieving of “the chrysotile defence.” The insulation workers studied by Selikoff had been exposed to a mix of fibres, including chrysotile, and he saw no physical or epidemiological reason to believe that it was benign. As Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale note in Defending the Indefensible, even as they asserted the safety of “white” asbestos to workers and the public in the late 1960s, in private the companies were being advised that all kinds of asbestos caused mesothelioma. Further, with the focus directed mainly on the recently discovered disease, asbestosis and lung cancer were overlooked; that chrysotile caused those conditions could not be denied. Nevertheless, “chrysotile is safe” would prove to be a long-lived idea. In fact, by the 1990s, the “chrysophiles” were in the ascendancy over the “chrysophobes” of the anti-asbestos movement, even as the evidence that it causes mesothelioma became more and more overwhelming. This strategy, which entailed the sacrifice of South Africa’s amosite and crocidolite industries, was key to the endurance of the asbestos industry in Canada until the 2010s. In close collaboration with the federal and national government, which funded the region’s trade body and put its diplomats in developing nations to work promoting the material, the industry was able to forestall progress towards an international ban.
The asbestos industry remains adept at keeping the “question” or “controversy” of chrysotile’s harms open for further study and debate. The International Chrysotile Institute (formerly the Asbestos Institute) plays a central role in promoting its “safe and responsible use,” particularly in Africa and East Asia. As Lundy Braun and Hannah Kopinski show in an excellent 2018 essay, this “manufacturing of doubt” sets the agenda even for independent, publicly funded research. Under the broad pressures to secure grant funding and to publish research articles to further their careers, many academic researchers have contributed to a narrow biomedical discussion in which causality, responsibility, and workers’ experiences rarely feature. It is in this context that obvious social facts — the suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people every year, many of them poor and in the Global South — are still made to recede from view.
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For many people, asbestos summons thoughts of a previous era. The details might be hazy, but the word will invoke an ill-fated trajectory from enthusiastic use to belated realisation, regret, and finally, prohibition. In this version of the asbestos story, the material’s harms are acknowledged but are safely encapsulated and sealed off in the past.
Helen Bone was diagnosed with the asbestos-related cancer mesothelioma in 2021, at the age of thirty-eight. “You always think of asbestos as a disease from decades ago — affecting men who worked in heavy industry — so to be diagnosed in my 30s is shocking,” she told the Northern Echo, “Naturally I want to see my children grow up but now I have to come to terms with the thought that this might not happen.” Bone’s conflation of the object and her disease, “asbestos,” suggests the difficulty of seeing and conceptualising the material. Its origins are not widely known: “what actually is it?” and “where does it come from?” several friends have asked me. In use, it is generally meant to recede from view, behind walls and ceilings, into cement roofs and pipes, woven through textiles.
As part of their efforts to secure compensation for her illness, Bone’s solicitors were faced with the task of finding out whether she was exposed to the deadly carcinogen at her primary or secondary school, at the college where she studied to become a critical care practitioner, or at Middlesbrough General Hospital and the James Cook University Hospital, where she had worked since the age of seventeen. She may have been exposed at several or even all of them. Something terrible had been done to her and her family, of that there was no doubt, but the ubiquity of the material means that responsibility is not easily assigned. And in any case, compensation can only ever be a limited form of redress. Money and health are not commensurate.
In 2021, the year Helen Bone was diagnosed, the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) recorded that asbestos had killed around five thousand people in Britain. Many researchers and anti-asbestos campaigners believe that this official figure is a serious underestimate, and that the real total was closer to twenty thousand. Either way, it is still the single largest cause of work-related deaths, more than a quarter of a century after it was banned. As Bone’s experience shows and my book Bad Dust examines in detail, Britain had a particular appetite for the material once known as “the magic mineral.” Around seven million tonnes were imported and used between the 1870s and the late 1990s. We are still living through the consequences — Britain has the highest rate of mesothelioma per capita in the world — and given that much of it remains in place in the built environment, now far beyond its intended design life and either already disturbed or slowly degrading, we will be for some time yet.
How did this happen? Where did opposition to the asbestos industry come from? How have people like Helen Bone been treated by their employers, by the state, and by the insurers that are liable for compensation pay-outs? And what would a true reckoning with this vast, slowly unfolding disaster look like? Bad Dust is an attempt to answer these questions.
“In bringing asbestos out from behind the walls and ceilings where it lurks, and into the light, this highly original and disturbing book reveals an industrial disaster hiding in plain sight.”
— Novara Media
Continue reading in BAD DUST by Tom White.
Available now from Repeater Books