In the 1960s, newly independent African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources, in a reversal of their prior colonial exploitation by European mining corporations. In this excerpt from his new book , Ben Radley shows how transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force assuming ownership and management of industrial mining projects. Radley argues this latest reversal has taken place through a three-stage process grounded in a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards. Recent mining code revisions in several countries have been heralded by some as marking a new era of resource nationalism. Yet the new codes remain a far cry from the earlier period of resource sovereignty. The first three chapters of the book can be downloaded for free .

Stage one: Blame the African state

The first wave of political independence in Africa, beginning in the mid-1950s, ushered in a period of resource sovereignty, including the pursuit of African socialism in several countries. This was based on the recognition that during the colonial period, Africa鈥檚 natural resources had been exploited by European mining corporations to the benefit of the colonizing countries. For these resources to serve the interest of African countries, economies, and peoples, it was held that external control and ownership had to be reduced. Buoyed by the long commodity boom of the 1950s, and the spirit of events such as the 1955 Bandung Conference and the 1958 All African 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Conference, there was a general commitment by newly independent African governments to wrest the control and management of their natural resource wealth back from the hands of their former colonizers.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the first step was taken under the presidency of Joseph-D茅sir茅 Mobutu with the Bakajika Law of June 1966. This law was an explicit attack on the contentious 1960 Belgian law giving colonial Congolese corporations Belgian nationality just a few weeks before Independence. It required all foreign-based companies whose main activities were in the DRC to establish their headquarters in the DRC by the end of the year.

The government failed to reach an agreement on the nationality of the largest, Belgian-owned colonial mining subsidiary, Union mini猫re de Haut Katanga. So, on 31 December 1966, the Mobutu administration announced its decision to expropriate the firm and transfer its assets to a new company, Soci茅t茅 g茅n茅rale Congolaise des minerais (G茅camines), which was to eventually become 100 per cent state-owned. The policy of increasing state participation in the productive economy continued in other sectors. By 1970, the Congolese public sector controlled 40 per cent of national value added.

Efforts elsewhere were similarly ambitious, such as Kenneth Kaunda鈥檚 Zambian-led initiative of the Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC) and Julius Nyerere鈥檚 nationalist ban on extractives, 鈥樷��. Early results were impressive. In the DRC and Zambia, copper production increased steadily between 1960 and 1974鈥攁cross the inaugural years of CIPEC鈥攆rom around 300,000 to 500,000 tonnes and 500,000 to 700,000 tonnes, respectively.

In the DRC, greater sovereign control of value added contributed to a tripling of state revenue from $190 million in 1967 to $630 million in 1970, based in part on a 50 percent profit tax in the mining sector. A national health system numbering 500,000 employees was established, seen as a model for primary health care in the global South. The education system was nationalized, achieving 92 per cent primary school enrolment and increased access to the secondary and tertiary sectors.

The period culminated in May 1974 with the United Nations adoption of a Declaration and Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order. This declaration and programme 鈥樷��. Rather than usher in a new international economic order, however, the period during which this declaration was signed was to prove a stark reminder of the solidity of the old order.

The declaration was inaugurated at a time when the oil price was beginning to rise and demand for African exports beginning to diminish due to recession in the global North, leading to a decrease in commodity prices. In the DRC and Zambia, the copper price crashed from $1.40 per pound in April 1974 to $0.53 per pound in early 1975 and stagnated thereafter. Around the same time, from 1973 to 1977, the cost of oil imports quadrupled. Coupled with rising inflation globally during this period, the effect of these price shifts on government revenue would have been even greater in real terms. In addition, as African government loan repayments became due, interest rates on the loans began to rise as the United States sought to control inflation through monetary policy.

Previously rising mining production levels stagnated or dropped, growth slowed, and debt grew across the continent, reducing the foreign exchange available to purchase the imports needed to further industrialization. Between 1980 and 1988, 25 African countries rescheduled their debts 105 times. In the DRC, copper and cobalt exports decreased sharply, eventually collapsing by the early 1990s.

Of course, external shocks were not the sole cause of the reversal. Internal dynamics had a critical role to play. In the DRC, external shocks unmasked the failures and limitations of Mobutu鈥檚 nation state-building project. Nationalization measures undertaken in 1973 and 1974 to provide an emerging politico-commercial class of senior state bureaucrats with access to productive capital鈥攌nown as Zairianization鈥攚ere poorly planned and implemented and went badly awry. Agriculture had been neglected, receiving less than 1 per cent of state expenditure from 1968 to 1972, and the Congolese manufacturing sector was in decline.

Yet, a consideration of the impact of external shocks, alongside recognition of the progress made by newly independent African governments in the short time frame up until this juncture, was largely missing from influential analyses of the 1980s seeking to understand the causes of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards.

Instead, misguided African state intervention and government corruption were put forward as primary causal explanations, to the exclusion of other factors. Championed largely by Africanists based in North American universities (such as Robert Bates and Eliot Berg, the latter the author of the World Bank鈥檚 1981 report ), this line of thinking was immediately embraced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

In the DRC, World Bank reports from the 1980s show how ingrained this view was at the time. In one, the Bank argued that the country鈥檚 economic decline was due to 鈥榓 long series of inadequate economic and financial decisions. Nothing in the past decade has had a more lasting and devastating effect on the economy than the Zairianization and Nationalization measures of 1973 and 1974.鈥�

There is no doubting that the ill-conceived nationalization policies of the 1970s held a share of the responsibility for the DRC鈥檚 economic difficulties during this period. Yet, such factors ought to be weighed in consideration with the impact of external shocks鈥� which began for the DRC with the copper price crash in 1974鈥攁nd the achievements made by the Mobutu administration up until this point. Such a weighting exercise is absent from both reports.

Offering a regional perspective, on the causes of the mid-1970s decline in African economic performance is worth citing at length:

Our intention here is not to rationalize, let alone ignore the infamous mismanagement of economies by African governments. Rather, the point is to emphasize that successful adjustment will be elusive unless Africa始s vulnerability to external factors is recognised. Such a recognition will serve in rethinking the form and content of Africa始s structural transformation. Failure to account for such factors, even as one corrects for internal policy errors, can frustrate attempts at change and condemn them to involuntary reversal.

By downplaying the external and foregrounding the internal, the result is an analysis and diagnosis that lays the blame firmly on the state management and ownership structures underpinning national developmentalist ambitions in the 1960s and early 1970s, to the exclusion of external shocks and trends in the global economy.

With governments across the global South in debt distress, and with little or no access to international capital markets during this period, the IMF and the Bank grew significantly in influence, formulating a neoliberal set of now infamous policies that came to be known as the Washington Consensus. The policy doctrine of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation was implemented across Africa by World Bank and IMF-financed structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). Crucially, most SAPs had a focus on increasing primary commodity exports, but this time around鈥攖o correct for the perceived failures of the recent past鈥攗nder new management.

Stage two: Liberalize and privatize

It was in this neoliberal political and ideological context that, as Hormeku-Ajei and Goetz have summarized, 鈥樷��. Between 1980 and 2021, the Bank provided $1.1 billion in mining sector grants and loans to fifteen of the continent鈥檚 seventeen mineral-rich, low-income countries (LICs) (Table 1).

Table 1 African LIC metal and mineral wealth

Sources: Author classification based on the World Bank鈥檚 fiscal year 2020 country classifications by income level, US Geological Survey country reports, and The Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Knowledge Sharing Archive.

Prior to the rise of China as an alternative source of resource-linked finance, and with many African countries still unable to access international capital markets, the Bank was able to exert significant influence through these grants and loans to implement its strategic vision for how mining should be organized and managed, as laid out in its 1992 report:

The private sector should take the lead. Private investors should own and operate mines鈥�. Existing state mining companies should be privatized at the earliest opportunity to improve productivity of the operations and to give a clear signal to investors with respect to the government始s intention to follow a private-sector-based strategy.

In the DRC, staff from the Bank worked in close collaboration with a Congolese committee on the drafting of the mining law. Blaming mining-sector decline on poor governance under the Mobutu administration, the eventual 2002 Mining Code moved to privatize state-owned mining enterprises and attract fresh foreign direct investment (FDI) by offering a generously liberal fiscal regime, including tax holidays and exemptions and low royalty rates. This included the eventual privatization of the country鈥檚 two largest SOEs, the copper producer G茅camines and the diamond producer Soci茅t茅 mini猫re de Bakwanga.

Three decades on, the underlying logic of the Bank鈥檚 African mining strategy continues to hold. In 2021, the Bank had ongoing mining reform programmes in the seven mineral-rich, African LICs of Niger ($100 million), Guinea ($65 million), Mozambique ($50 million), Mali ($40 million), Sierra Leone ($20 million), Togo ($15 million), and the Central African Republic ($10 million). Each programme was focused, in whole or in part, on institutional and regulatory change within a general framework giving overall priority to capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining.

With the regulatory framework overhauled, foreign investment was unleashed to seek out fresh opportunities. Mining exploration in Africa increased from 4 per cent of total mineral exploration expenditure worldwide in 1991 to 17.5 per cent in 1998, and overall mining investment in Africa doubled between 1990 and 1997. The start of a commodity supercycle in 1999 gave fresh impetus to this activity. In 2004, the $15 billion invested in mining in Africa represented 15 per cent of the total of mining investment worldwide, up from 5 per cent in the mid-1980s and putting the region third globally, behind Latin America and Oceania. From 2002 to 2012, a period spanning most of the supercycle, mineral exploration spending in Africa rose by more than 700 per cent, reaching $3.1 billion in 2012.

In 2007, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) :

the sweeping changes in African mining policy in the 1980s and 1990s were aimed at attracting FDI and increasing exports, in which they have been successful. Total FDI inflows into African least-developed countries rose fourfold from an annual average of $1.7 billion in the 1990s to $6.8 billion in 2000 to 2005鈥he bulk of which was directed to mineral extractive industries.

In the DRC, FDI inflows focused almost exclusively on mining, increasing by a factor of seventeen between 2002 and 2012, from $188 million to $3.3 billion. Across the same period, FDI stocks rose from $907 million to $22.5 billion or from 10 per cent to 59 per cent of gross domestic product.

Looking at the aggregate level of inward FDI flows to the group of 17 mineral-rich, African LICs from 1970 to 2019 confirms this picture. Total FDI inflows to the group were low and stable during the 1970s and 1980s, at an annual average of just $0.2 billion, increasing only slightly to $0.6 billion in the 1990s. Hereafter, they grew to an annual average of $3.9 billion in the 2000s and $13.9 billion in the 2010s.

At the country level, FDI inflows have grown significantly across all 17 countries from this group, with the sole exception of Eritrea. While countries such as Madagascar, Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Togo, and Burkina Faso received the lowest levels of foreign investment across the group, they have nonetheless experienced pronounced increases in these flows since the turn of the century, much of which has been mineral-seeking. And as highlighted earlier, it is in several of these lower-placed countries that, in 2021, the World Bank had active mining sector liberalization and privatization programmes.

The dramatic increase in FDI growth since the 1990s has altered the composition of these economies, which have become increasingly dependent upon FDI as a source of development financing, and this level of dependence is greater today relative to other country groups and regions.

Stage three: Criminalize African miners

One final stage was required before transnational mining corporations could move front and centre. This involved dealing with the on-the-ground reality that, for many incoming transnationals, their prized deposits were already occupied by African miners involved in a wide range of labour-intensive forms of mining. Most commonly associated with gold and diamonds, labour-intensive African mining is also involved in the production of silver, copper, cobalt, tin, tantalum, iron ore, aluminium, tungsten, wolframite, phosphates, precious and semi-precious stones, and rare earth minerals, among others. Globally, labour-intensive mining has been estimated to contribute up to 30 per cent of total cobalt production, 25 per cent for tin, tantalum, and diamonds, 20 per cent for gold, and 80 per cent for sapphires.

Labour-intensive African mining has grown significantly since the 1980s to directly employ millions of workers across the continent, driven by three factors. First, the crisis of African agriculture has led to an increasingly important role for off-farm employment. Second, the decline of state-led national developmentalism and the collapse of welfare provisioning under the weight of structural adjustment during the 1980s exerted significant strain on the productive and reproductive capacity of rural African households. Third, rising commodity prices, especially during the supercycle of 1999鈥�2012, pulled people towards the sector, where there were often higher wages and profits to be made than locally available alternatives.

Despite the sector鈥檚 importance to rural employment, African miners have typically been cast by the World Bank, African governments, and parts of the scholarly literature as 鈥榩rimitive鈥�, 鈥榖asic鈥�, 鈥榠nefficient鈥�, 鈥榬udimentary鈥�, and 鈥榰nproductive鈥� (in contrast to the 鈥榚fficient鈥�, 鈥榤odern鈥�, 鈥榗omplex鈥�,

and 鈥榩roductive鈥� mining corporation). As a result, labour-intensive African mining has been peripheral to mining development strategies on the continent. Criminalized by policy frameworks unless they submit to a set of procedurally complex, bureaucratically burdensome, and financially costly demands to formalize their activities, and cast as illegally encroaching on a concession once it has been assigned to a corporation, African miners have time and time again been forcibly displaced from their sites to make way for the construction of corporate-led industrial mines. Often financed by the incoming corporations themselves, and echoing violent colonial practices of the past, displacement has frequently taken place as government military-led 鈥榮weeps鈥�.

In 2017, 70,000 miners were displaced by Ugandan military and police in Mubende to make way for a Canadian-listed mining corporation. Speaking to local media shortly after the displacement, Edwards Katto, a Director at the Ugandan Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, :

Those people [Ugandan miners] still joking should style up. Now, I鈥檓 not only a director [in the Ministry] but also a commander of the Minerals Protection Unit of the Uganda Police Force. So, those illegal miners still behaving like those in Mubende [who were evicted], they should pack and vacate the mines, otherwise, my police force will them help to pack.

This statement speaks well to the general regard held for African miners within the process of capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining (re)industrialization. These dynamics recall Marx鈥檚 description of primitive accumulation, or Harvey鈥檚 (2004: 74) reconceptualization of this as a continuous process of accumulation by dispossession, involving 鈥樷��. Forcibly displaced and removed from the best deposits, African miners are restricted to working in less productive areas.

With the African state framed as corrupt and mismanaged, and African miners as inefficient and unproductive criminals, the path was cleared for the en masse arrival of transnational mining corporations, across a far wider group of countries than was the case during the colonial period (when most mineral deposits remained unknown to foreign capital, particularly in West Africa). From Glencore and Pengxin in the DRC and Emirates Global Aluminium in Guineau, to Cluff Minerals and Etruscan Resources in Burkina Faso and Shandong Iron in Sierra Leone, to AngloGold Ashanti and Acacia Mining in Tanzania and Rio Tinto in Madagascar 鈥� the list goes on 鈥� foreign corporations dominate today鈥檚 landscape.

Recent mining code and policy revisions led by African governments such as Tanzania, the DRC, Sierra Leone, and Malawi have begun to push back against this dominance, taking inspiration from the Africa Mining Vision, a framework developed by the African Union in 2009 to deepen the linkages between foreign-owned mining and national economies and strengthen government capacity to negotiate with and leverage developmental benefits from foreign mining corporations.

The mining industry and some scholarship has been quick to herald these revisions as marking a new era of resource nationalism. As proclaimed in 2019, 鈥楾he fight between miners and African governments is just getting started鈥�. Changes to date are yet, however, to provide a fundamental challenge to the dominant model of capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining industrialization on the continent. They remain a far cry from the earlier period of 1960s and 1970s resource sovereignty to which the discourse on resource nationalism alludes.

Ben Radley () is a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath. His research interests relate to the political economy of economic transformation in Africa, with a focus on resource-based industrialisation, green transitions, and labour dynamics. He鈥檚 a member of the Editorial Working Group for ROAPE, and an affiliated member of the Centre of Mining Research at the Catholic University of Bukavu, DR Congo.

This excerpt was originally posted on .

Migration Governance: Moving Away from 鈥淯ncle Always Knows鈥�

Almost everyone on social media has that one Instagram friend who posts bronzed pictures in Santorini, or screenshots of champagne flutes atop the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai skyline looming in the background.  To those internationals for whom travelling on holiday was an annual rite of passage, the pandemic鈥檚 travel restrictions resulted in adventures that were inopportunely thwarted. Conversely, to economic migrants everywhere, the implications of banned travel, whether by air, train, or foot, equated directly with the fundamental ability to survive. The scrambles of governments worldwide to gauge appropriate responses to COVID-19 was understandable, inasmuch the magnitude of the event was entirely unprecedented, and the need to contain its spread dire. Yet, one of the largest follies of the pandemic remains undebated: instinctive government responses moved to ban travel without duly considering the global interconnectedness of labour markets in the modern age. Belonging to one state but working in another meant that with travel bans, economic migrants were either shackled to their workplaces, away from their families; or held back from gainful employment whilst trapped at home. In most contexts, migrants are to countries like an unknown opening band at a music concert: the audience does not fundamentally care, and everybody is simply waiting for the headline act. In their origin states, migrant workers often escape the focus of governments who are more concerned with those who remain behind. In the meanwhile, the countries to which they migrate often look at them as charity, despite these workers鈥� crucial role in economic development. Since they belong to places differently, being of and from multiple geographies at once, migrant workers have shifted typical state-worker relationships to a new realm. What, therefore, does good governance look like for an individual- a migrant– who is from several places at once?

Multiple answers to this question can be gleaned from . As the title suggests, the volume focuses on the South Asia-Gulf migration nexus. There are various considerations that render this book highly topical. First, the movement of people around the world, particularly for employment, has outmoded traditional conceptions of citizenship and a worker鈥檚 relationship with a state. This necessitates the re-engineering of these traditional conceptions of citizenship in ways that account for a dynamic and modern global workforce which is constantly on the move. Second, a fitting place to start thinking about the redefinition of worker-state relations is from the lens of workers emigrating from South Asia into the Arab Gulf. These geographies are of particular significance given the staggering volume of South Asian emigrants in the Arab Gulf, with over 80 percent of the region鈥檚 labour force being comprised of migrants, as Blarel and Ennis describe in their introduction. Governing this sizeable migrant workforce is what is collectively termed Kafala, a complex set of legal and policy frameworks centred around an employer-oriented visa sponsorship system. For years now, the Kafala system has come under severe criticism from human rights groups for rendering low-wage migrant workers in various conditions of modern day slavery, most recently with the . Further compounding the importance of the South Asia-Gulf nexus is the phenomenon of South-South migration, where the Gulf鈥檚 ambitious development projects tend to drive largescale demands for a workforce that can be tailored to expand and contract as per their whimsy (Ennis and Blarel; Hamadah; Walton-Roberts et al). Above all, this volume is timely given the now universal tussle between the need for good governance and sustainable worker livelihoods on the one hand, versus competing pressures for labour market flexibility on the other (Devkota; Babar; Hamadah).

At the heart of this book is the argument that the labour governance frameworks which exert influence over the lives of migrant workers are far more expansive than just the singular hold of the two main states between which the migrant moves. Typically, South Asia-Gulf migration has been looked at as occurring within a 鈥渃orridor鈥�- but the various authors across this volume venture forth realities which showcase a wholly different truth. Traditional policymaking approaches habitually consider labour governance within this space to be somewhat flat, not unlike a crepe. In reality, as the authors in this volume demonstrate, labour governance frameworks are more akin to a many-tiered cake. They possess many layers, multiple actors both formal and informal, and a variety of cross-cutting ingredients. While the sending and receiving states do play a substantial role in a migrant鈥檚 experience of emigration, this experience is additionally mediated by a host of other actors such as private sector players, recruitment agents, civil society actors, INGOs and NGOs. The conventional view of governing migration may be top-down, but a lot of it is also bottom-up, with added layers of complexity in the process (Blarel and Ennis).

By and large, this book holds appeal especially for those policymakers that have been stumped by the umpteen complexities of migrant stories, and are now seeking answers on how to begin addressing them. Refreshingly, the book does not shy away from critiquing various actors, and rightly theorises that Gulf state governments often palm off their responsibilities towards migrant workers by 鈥渙utsourcing鈥� governance to citizen-employers (Hamadah). At its core, the book is looking to do right by those workers who are the most vulnerable, whether irregular migrants or domestic workers- and it does this by arguing that workers鈥� voices must be mainstreamed in policymaking. Instead of such approaches which centre worker voices, the authors observe that rather than engaging with migrants as people, formal actors such as migrant origin states have historically tended towards paternalistic policies. Apt examples include Nepal鈥檚 bid to regulate the mobility of women citizens since 1964, or Sri Lanka鈥檚 Family Background Report, a policy which looks to regulate the movement of women via the sole lens of her offspring (Wadhawan).

The structure of the volume is itself vital to note. Its heterodox mix of scholars from different disciplines, and insights from practitioners cutting across government, industry and civil society exemplify nuanced policymaking discourse. The three parts of the volume tell a different story. The first segment is an assessment of the more formal actors in a migration space: the governments of migrant origin countries, at the national and federal levels. Undergirding the breadth of subjects covered is a cloaked warning for the attentive reader: governance processes which overly favour a state-centric approach tend to simultaneously favour paternalistic policies towards workers. This can be hugely deleterious especially for vulnerable groups such as irregular migrants, pushing them even further to the margins. The story of government intervention and oversight is assessed in multiple ways, from the emigration of Indian nurses to the Gulf (Walton-Roberts, Rajan and Joseph); irregular migrants in Nepal (Devkota); and finally, from state-level perspectives in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh (Akhil and Ganga).

The second segment of the book highlights the role played by the more informal, often non-state actors in the migration process. Examples of such actors include recruitment agents; friends and family on whom migrants may rely to emigrate; NGOs; civil society and trade unions. The section comprises a study of Pathan migrants from Pakistan (Babar), and an intriguing case of Bangladeshi migrants who have been emigrating out of the small island of Hatiya in the Bay of Bengal, to become fishermen in Oman, ever since the eighties (Percot). Through perspectives heavily informed by grassroots voices, the two cases speak to the ground-level complications of workers trying desperately to eke out a living overseas. At the same time, these cases are a microcosm of the seemingly damned lot of the developing nation. In both the Pakistan and the Bangladesh cases, workers are actively seeking avenues to escape indigent circumstances. A host of political quandaries pepper the landscape. These range from political instability, to migrant-sending governments using emigration as a 鈥渟afety valve鈥� against unemployment (Blarel and Ennis); the rampant corruption within migration governance institutions; and the role of actors such as recruitment agents, which is convoluted and tough to regulate.

The third segment of the book examines the conundrum of the contested ideas of governance and sovereignty in a migration context. Perhaps the best example of this is the description of the Kerala-Dubai migration complex by Ennis and Blarel. Describing India鈥檚 attempt to provide a digital solution to migration governance by way of its e-Migrate system, Ennis and Blarel also underscore the vast pushback in response to the move from multiple actors, including the UAE government, migrant activists and the Kerala state government. At the time, the main contention of the UAE government was that India was seeking to acquire information on Emirati companies via the e-Migrate portal. Astutely, the authors observe that such diplomatic kerfuffles are likely to result from attempts to regulate spaces which are shared.

This volume is also not simply home to critiques: its pages offer several answers as well. For starters, many authors push for democratic decentralisation and for formal actors such as governments to work more closely with other actors such as civil society and NGOs. Although different to each other, it is important to additionally take note of initiatives at the state level, or of subnational governance such as those in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, although as evidenced by Akhil and Ganga, these can always be influenced by political vacillations. Still others take heart in developments such as the Global Compact for Migration (GCM), the first ever UN agreement negotiated between governments to cover international migration.

But the overarching takeaway is clear. States fail when they choose to inhibit the mobility of women emigrants instead of focusing on empowerment; wilfully omit groups such as domestic workers and irregular migrants from data or ignore issues due to watery political will. States similarly fail when they choose to ignore migration as an issue from the ground up, forgetting to work with governments at the local level, instead taking a heavily centralised, top-down approach to labour governance.

Whether Bangladeshi workers escaping land erosion in Hatiya, or Tamang Nepali domestic workers rebuilding their homes after earthquakes, worker voices need to be mainstreamed in policymaking, rather than taking an uncle always knows approach. In their introduction, Blarel and Ennis argue that the South Asia-Gulf complex should be accorded far more attention than the small bucket to which it is relegated within either South Asian or Gulf Migration studies. On reading the book, it is easy to go one further than the editors themselves. Studying migration governance in all its complexity is not just imperative for workers in the South Asia-Gulf complex, or for the field of migration, but has far-reaching implications for the world in this moment of political, social and economic turbulence. It is a prime example of the need for deeper thought and collaboration across the multiple actors that dot a highly entangled policymaking landscape. In an era of pandemics, travel bans, and multiple other crises, perhaps it is even more critical to step away from ossified ways of thinking.

鈥淯ncle鈥� may know a lot, but so do the workers who choose to migrate every day.

Namrata Raju is a labour and public policy researcher focused on South and West Asia, and works at the international labour rights organisation, Equidem. She has an MPA from Harvard University and an MSc in Economics from the University of Warwick.

By Daivi Rodima-Taylor and

The mortgaging of land, a risky practice usually treated as just an economic and legal contract, hasneeded a broader set of perspectives for a fuller, more humanist understanding. Most of the existing scholarly literature on land and mortgages has been written by economists and legal specialists, reflecting the perspectives of their disciplinary traditions. Lacking are assessments from a wider range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, drawing upon historical experiences, cultural meanings, and locally informed perspectives.

Our recent edited volume, drawing on historical and observational research in different parts of the world, is meant to help fill that gap. It examines mortgaging as a social and cultural phenomenon to show its origins, variation, and effects on human lives and communities. Here anthropologists, historians, and economists explore archival, printed, and ethnographic evidence about mortgage. The book shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. Tracing origins of land titling, pledging, and the mortgage in over millennia and incorporating findings from authors鈥� original field research, the book explores effects of government, bank, and aid agency attempts and impositions meant to encourage mortgage lending and borrowing.  It shows how these mix in practice, in different languages, currencies, and contexts, with locally rooted understandings, and how all parties have sought, and too often failed, to make adjustments. The outcomes of mortgage in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America challenge economic development orthodoxies, calling for a human-centered exploration of this age-old institution.  It must take account, we insist, of emotions, vulnerabilities, and histories of unexpected outcomes, as shown in different societies, cultures, and environmental and political conditions.

An introductory chapter by Daivi Rodima-Taylor lays out basic concepts and discusses the history of the mortgage institution and land financialization. It shows how social and cultural concerns must be added to the legal and economic, foreshadows some recent turns to electronic and crypto-finance, and explores the promises and pitfalls of lending guided by algorithms. The book then turns back in time. Other authors offer deep historical perspectives from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, medieval England, and colonial United States to illuminate some foundations and variations of the mortgage institution.  They show how it has changed over time in assumptions about possession and ownership, the duration of loans and debts, the fairness of flows, and the rightness of sacred and secular attempts at governance. The chapter by Michael Hudson describes land tenure in the ancient Near East, while highlighting its fundamentally political dimensions. Elaborating on the history of mortgage as a legal device in Anglo-American law, David Seipp discusses the development of mortgage in medieval and early modern England and argues that the nature of it has profoundly changed in contemporary society where it has become a formalized financial tool with a primary goal of acquiring property. Winifred Rothenberg鈥檚 chapter examines, with carefully compiled numerical data, the first recorded mortgages in colonial Massachusetts, highlighting town-country relations, the contributions of mortgage credit to reducing landlessness and poverty, and for many moneylenders, the extended use of mortgages as a form of annuity. Both borrowers and lenders invested in the mortgage and the colony in paper money, with enough confidence to change the nature and scale of the colonial economy.

Turning to modern times and including authors鈥� own field observations, the book examines the human economy of mortgage as constructed and remade by people in their daily practices. Mortgaging is shown to relate directly to inheritance, insurance, and taxation, as well as local politics. A few chapters of the anthology examine the still little-explored topic of embeddedness of land pledging and mortgaging in African countries in both vernacular and formal bureaucracies. Sara Berry鈥檚 chapter elaborates on the ways social groupings, such as families and polities, mediate debt and property. Kristine Juul鈥檚 chapter studies the relationship between land mortgaging and taxation in rural communities of Senegal and its impact on property rights and identity. The chapters of the volume also caution against the assumption that lending against land is a panacea for economic insecurity in regions undergoing transition and resettlement. The study by Mette Kusk and Lotte Meinert explores contested land sales in northern Uganda after long-lasting armed conflict and displacement.

Focusing on a different transitional context, the chapter by Stefan Dorondel, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, and Marioara Rusu explores the reinvention of land mortgage in Romania after a fifty-year interruption by the socialist regime. The analysis situates the post-socialist rural financialization within the histories of diverse tenure reforms in the Romanian countryside, and among a multiplicity of formal and informal actors that shape local economic practices. The micro-politics of resistance is central in the chapter by Nate Coben and Melissa Wrapp that compares the cases in South Africa and Ireland where rural landholders devise strategies to evade mortgage offers from formal financial institutions while relying heavily on informal social modes of trust. These chapters call attention to new ways of resistance and novel political imaginings around mortgages and their failures to solve social problems.

The book opens difficult issues of attempted international aid. Tariq Rahman鈥檚 contribution discusses the recent state-led, World Bank-inspired effort to digitize the land revenue system in Lahore. Rahman鈥檚 ethnographic analysis demonstrates that governing land property in the old city remains both a social and material practice鈥攁nd despite the emerging elements of e-governance, deeply embedded in vernacular knowledge and hierarchies. The contributions by Parker Shipton explore mortgage as a form of entrustment and counter-entrustment that relies heavily on language, metaphor, and difficult translation. Combining glimpses of the mortgage in Eurasian, North American and African history, Shipton outlines the often traumatic effects of land loss upon family farmers and dependents, warning of risks to farming people and communities as the mortgage spreads to rural tropical settings.  He also shows why the causes and effects of mortgaging, such a uniquely human institution, spread well beyond humankind to other animals.

Tracing origins of land titling, pledging, and the mortgage over millennia into contemporary forms, our book thus explores effects of colonial policies, state impositions, and locally rooted understandings as they have combined and recombined in diverse regions across the world. We hope that this collection will prompt other scholars to devote more attention to the peculiar and culture-bound institution of mortgage and compel them to rethink the premises of landholding, finance, and trust in new and productive ways.

is a social anthropologist and researcher at the African Studies Center of Boston University (rodima@bu.edu). She tweets at . is a social anthropologist and professor at the Department of Anthropology of Boston University (shipton@bu.edu).

More blog articles by the book collaborators on the

Photo: Farmland at the Great Rift Valley escarpment, Tanzania. Photo: Daivi Rodima-Taylor

Max Ajl鈥檚聽A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal聽intervenes in current debates regarding green planning, green future, green stimuli, and eco-socialism. It surveys a wide range of existing literature on the ecological and social crisis, ranging from ruling-class 鈥済reat transitions,鈥� to eco-modernist聽elixirs聽of聽the聽right and聽the聽left which bank on technological solutions to today鈥檚 social and ecological problems. It then considers and聽critiques an array of liberal, left-liberal, and social democratic proposals, some of them going under the eco-socialist moniker, and shows how they rest on continued exploitation and primitive accumulation of the periphery.听

A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal contributions lie in, first, using frameworks of dependency theory, accumulation on a world scale, and ecologically uneven exchange to illuminate the costs and consequences of distinct approaches to the climate crisis, left and right. Second, the book鈥檚 emphasis on agriculture, land use, and agro-ecology makes it unique amongst books on the Green New Deal and parallel debates. Its emphasis on decolonization, national sovereignty, anti-imperialism, and climate debt repayments from the North to the South is a third contribution. A fourth is how it deals with technology. 

This review forum assesses the contribution of聽A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal.听Sakshi 蝉颈迟耻补迟别蝉听APGND聽in terms of a counter-epistemology to Eurocentric and empire-blind resolutions, if not really solutions, to the social and ecological crises to which mainstream Green New Deals are addressed.听Sheetal Chhabria 补蝉蝉别蝉蝉别蝉听APGND鈥檚 contribution to thinking on a planetary scale about appropriate planning for a just transition, while criticizing the book鈥檚 uncritical embrace of certain Indian nationalist tropes. G眉ney I艧谋kara raises questions regarding political agency and organization, the role of national-level planning in any form of national-level green transition, and how to approach anti-imperialism on a world scale.听聽

Read the contributions:

• A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal 鈥� An Exercise in Just Knowledge Production, by Sakshi
• Beyond Green Restoration: An Eco-Socialist GND, by G眉ney I艧谋kara
• Debunking the 鈥淓co-Fortress Nationalism鈥� of the AOC/Markey Green New Deal, by Sheetal Chhabria

Photo: Farming in Karnataka, India.

Max Ajl鈥檚 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal is a brutal reminder for the American left that even the most celebrated and progressive developments in American politics are still simply American politics, in other words they are a politics for America, and America first. Ajl situates both the longer history of environmental destruction and the response to it within a planetary frame without losing sight of geographical unevenness. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is where Ajl systematically debunks the American-centrism of the Cortez/Markey Green New Deal (GND). The second part is an imagination-widening exposition of an alternative 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal that centers the livelihood of the majority of the world鈥檚 people by putting forth an anti-imperial and anti-capitalist framework for a just transition. 

In the first part, Ajl exposes the 鈥淓co-Fortress Nationalism鈥� at the heart of the Cortez/Markey GND. It is is remarkable that even while paying lip service to the 鈥渟ystemic injustices鈥� of racial, gendered, regional, and economic injustices of environmental destruction, Cortez/Markey鈥檚 made the case for  by claiming that, 鈥渃limate change constitutes a direct threat to the national security of the United States.鈥� Therefore, this GND is a blueprint for how, through some combination of green capitalism and new technologies, America will save itself and become a 鈥渓eader鈥� in the world. The current GND has its origins in other blueprints for 鈥済reen transitions鈥� articulated in the early 2000s that exhibited a:  

Tendency towards apolitical social management 鈥� the governance approach 鈥� which tries to dissolve contradictions around class and colonialism, and capitalism鈥檚 inability as a historical system to respect the earth-system and the tenuous, delicate, and easily shattered niche it has for many billions of humans. Long-term planning and the equally vague call for 鈥渄ecent minimum living standards鈥� all gesture towards using the GND as a lever to shift the social system to 鈥渟ustainability,鈥� another voguish word adulterated to meaninglessness through technocratic, bureaucratic, and academic misuse and overuse. 

The main problem with the GND is it seeks to ameliorate rather than confront or negate structural inequalities between North and South or rich and poor.  

In what is probably the most counter-intuitive and yet compelling argument against the claim that the GND is useful because it is practical or viable, Ajl exposes the political damage the GND has done. Rather than inaugurate or even open up the possibility for a green transition, the Cortez/Markey GND uses the slogan of a green transition to center US security interests in ways that displace and 鈥渄isorganize鈥� other movements for a just transition. Ajl reminds us that prior to the Cortez/Markey GND, climate activists called for rich countries to pay the climate debt owed to countries of the global south which serving as a dumping ground for northern industrial waste and repeatedly had their atmospheric sovereignty violated. So the GND doesn鈥檛 represent the victory of an organized eco-left in the United States, rather, the GND 鈥渕ay well end up disorganizing resistance to the broader ruling-class agenda by embracing a false opposition to it.鈥� (italics mine, Introduction) Discussions of the GND thus end up being depoliticizing or reformist precisely because many concessions have already been made to arrive at it. What is 鈥減ragmatic鈥� or 鈥渧iable鈥� about the Cortez/Markey GND, which is in fact the one the Sanders faction also endorses, is the very thing that makes it not a just transition at all and instead a US-security centered vision. 

Instead we need climate reparations that consist of actual transfers of sums so that 1.) countries of the global south can undertake intentional and carefully planned projects of industrialization, 2.) Northern countries can take responsibility for the people who will undergo forced climate migrations, and 3.) an honoring of these as a part of the 鈥�.鈥� What we do not need are intellectual property rights for green technology hoarded through patents on which the North retains power and control. The Red Nation鈥檚  provides a much better starting point for how to think boldly, citing as it does as a first principle that, 鈥淲hat creates crisis cannot solve it.鈥� So the US military, the largest polluter on earth, has absolutely no role to play besides disappearing itself as fast as possible. This is a fact not recognized at all when even 鈥減rogressives鈥� like Elizabeth Warren state, 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have to choose between a green military and an effective one.鈥�¹ In addition, green capitalism cannot save us from the environmental destruction of capitalism itself, nor can the US build an 鈥渋solated utopia while the rest of the world burns.鈥� Yet, it is the very strategic ambiguity of the Cortez/Markey GND that leaves wide open the possibility of co-optation by the US 鈥渟ecurity鈥� beneficiaries, as witnessed in the Pentagon鈥檚 where the climate threat becomes a threat to our security. The Pentagon鈥檚 solution seems to be to ramp up military spending more strategically to deal with the fallout. 

The second half of Ajl鈥檚 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal is an astonishing read. It aims to 鈥渆xpand the scope of what is understood to be feasible.鈥� The amount of detailed research on very specific  historical and current metrics of resource use, allocation, and impact on livelihood and equity are remarkable. In marshaling such learning, Ajl reminds us that the climate crisis is not an 鈥渋mpending鈥� crisis that we must urgently forestall, rather it is already here. In the countries of the Global South, vast majorities of people have already been and currently are living with the systematic destruction of the planet occasioned by capitalist exploitation of nature and labor.  

If we are to solve the problem, we must conceive of a just transition that includes climate reparations and a whole host of other methods for planning carefully how to use which resource, where, and when. It is in the second half of the book that we learn so clearly that environmental destruction is not simply climate change; it includes desertification, soil depletion, land degradation, rising waters, droughts, fires, depletion of fisheries and wildlife, etc. All these things and more have disrupted livelihoods in many places for much longer than most think. And to take just one example of the folly of fashionable 鈥渘orthern鈥� eco-trends, vegetarianism might sound like the earth-friendly ethical solution. But de-industrializing meat production instead would allow pastoralists and small-holders to have a livelihood and allow us to confront the problem of scale that is driving most environmental destruction. Not to mention, the fake meat industry is not innocent. Instead of simply lifestyle changes, Ajl advocates for planning a structural transformation that is purposeful, intentional, and knowledge-based to attain the stuff we need and forego what is harmful.[Text Wrapping Break] What is most remarkable about A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal, and is almost never discussed even in heated debates about the GND is agriculture. Taking agriculture as a central part of human existence in the second half of the book, Ajl provides such a detailed account of how we can plan to save ourselves and the earth that entire curricula should be built around it. Only de-growth can work but not in the way most North-Atlantic centered thinkers imagine it. Some places have to have the right to industrialize in strategic ways. So this is neither romanticism of de-industrialization nor a common blueprint for all places. 

Reading the book, one can鈥檛 but help wonder what it is we teach in all our educational institutions if not how to concretely plan, and therefore build a livable and collective future. One can imagine courses in economics, sociology, anthropology, history, biology, geology, and even math, all dedicated to the task of debating and thereby planning a just transition that centers ecology and labor across the global south. Each subject would have to be thoroughly re-thought, of course. For instance, we learn about economics that the price mechanism is not a neutral arbiter of value or the market, but rather represents social power. We also learn that, 鈥淲ords like economies and livelihoods are kaleidoscopic. They hint at human needs for food, shelter, and the good life and conflate them with the well-being of the economy. In this discourse, it is simply assumed that the health of 鈥渢he economy鈥� leads to the health of concrete individual human beings.鈥� Such insights should thoroughly transform what is taught in economics, where relations of power are made invisible and 鈥渢he economy鈥� is treated as a natural artifact. 

If a curriculum were built around A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal, the only climate transition plans that would be debated would be ones which enshrine a universal right to health, education, electricity, housing, food, and work that isn鈥檛 demeaning or alienating. At the center of such a just transition would be a serious consideration of agriculture, not in its technocratic vein in which the agricultural sciences are harnessed to do the work of creating economic growth but agriculture as the work the majority must do to sustain ourselves and the earth. 

It is rare that a book comes along that is so explicitly connected to current American politics and yet is global in scope without riding roughshod over the details of other places. It is also rare that such a work could center the needs and aspirations of peasants, landless landworkers, and laborers from the once third world or now global south. If a landless agricultural laborer in India, or the majority of the world, could shout at or argue against even the most 鈥減rogressive鈥� of American politicians, this is the book that one might compose from the wisdom of that confrontation.  

But as is usual, probably every regional specialist will have their quibbles with the book. As a historian of India, I winced when I read the occasional endorsement of 鈥淕andhian economics.鈥� For one, Gandhi allied with industrialists to advocate for a total deregulation of agriculture in India鈥檚 first year of independence.² Nehru obliged for a few months and the results were devastating. In other words, planning was never a Gandhian virtue and Gandhi may have been a libertarian in today鈥檚 parlance. Second, Gandhi actively  replacing collective labor power with calls for 鈥渟piritual cleansing.鈥� 鈥淕andhian economics鈥� deserves much criticism as does what we now call the Indian economists whose nationalist conception of a drain of wealth sidelined critiques of capitalism within India. But for every such wincing there is also the fact that regional historiographies can be invigorated by the new questions this book poses, implicit or explicit. For instance, Ajl鈥檚 reading of the Green Revolution in India leads him to claim that there is insufficient evidence to prove India was food insecure in the 1960s, rather it was the Green Revolution that caused landlessness and food insecurity. These are the debates that would be enlivened by building a curriculum around Ajl鈥檚 book. For historians for instance, what kinds of new questions about the past would we ask if we saw de-growth and a 辫别辞辫濒别鈥檚&苍产蝉辫;green new deal as the only viable future? Upon reading the book it is clear, we need an entire new generation of thinkers who ask what a truly 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 green new deal would have to look like if it centered laborers, de-fetishized technology, sought neither industrial-modernization nor romanticized versions of village life 鈥� a green new deal that planned for a collective future rather than containing or managing our uneven demise.  

Sheetal Chhabria is Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College. She tweets at .

This book review is a part of a symposium on Max Ajl’s book the People’s Green New Deal. .

[1] Cited in A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal. .

[2] Benjamin Seigel, The Hungry Nation.

Following the resolution introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, the term Green New Deal (GND) has become the gravitational center of climate action debates. On the one hand, conservatives, as well as some leftist circles, designate the AOC-Markey resolution as 鈥渟ocialist鈥�. On the other hand, the term GND was first made public by Thomas Friedman in his NY Times column as a capitalistic and patriotic project which serves as 鈥渢he basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century鈥� (p.4). It comes as no surprise that so much political confusion accrues around the concept of a GND.

Max Ajl鈥檚 A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal is the best leftist response I have read to the discussions whirling around this notion. It is clear-minded and well written. Politically, it constructs a consistent, uncompromising, anti-imperialist vision, well aware of the fact that tamed horizons are easily coopted and rearticulated by the ruling classes thanks to the elasticity of capital accumulation. Theoretically, its foundations are found in the 鈥渋nherently polarizing鈥� frameworks of dependency theory, world-system analysis, and (environmentally) unequal exchange (p.14).

Ajl evaluates GND proposals not only on the basis of targeted changes in physical production, but also in terms of their systemic implications. Some GNDs aim to preserve or strengthen capitalism, while others are designed to attack or abolish it (p.3). Correspondingly, the book is divided into two parts. The first one is concerned with what Ajl calls Capitalist Green Transitions (p.16) or 鈥渞uling class agendas鈥� (p.20), while the second part sketches his vision of a 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal.

The Existing GNDs

Chapter 1 provides a bird鈥檚 eye view to various 鈥榞reen social control鈥� programs, which aim to mitigate the worst consequences of climate change, and mobilize an 鈥榚mergency鈥� discourse to do so. Ajl鈥檚 critique is not confined to easy philanthropic targets such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It extends to more appealing social democratic proposals brought up by writers and politicians like Jeremy Rifkin, Ed Miliband, and Mariana Mazzucato, who share a great deal of enthusiasm for new technologies and green jobs unlocked by public-private partnerships, that is, for fixing and saving rather than attacking and abolishing capitalism.

The next chapter discusses the green transition of modernization theory from both the left and right. The author traces the roots of contemporary eco-modernism to Rostow鈥檚 original modernization theory which emerged as a reaction to the 鈥榯hreat of communism鈥�. For Ajl, ecological modernization theory, perpetuated by centers like the Breakthrough Institute, has the intention of deflecting attention from systemic drivers of the ecological crisis rooted in social and economic relations, and frame the crisis as a purely technological challenge. Its counterpart on the left is the accelerationist current, which shares the same techno-fantasies, forgetting that 鈥榯echnology as such鈥� does not exist, as any technology emerges and functions in particular social settings.

Chapters 3 and 4 engage in a critical analysis of the existing GND proposals. Ajl starts by distinguishing between three main brands of progressive politics: i) the left-liberal attempt that aims to render current energy use fully renewable, while promoting increased energy use in the Global South and maintaining capitalist property structures; ii) the green social democratic (or being-nice-to-the-South) vision which prescribes lower energy use in core countries along with a redistribution of income, and grants to southern countries; iii) the degrowth or eco-communist solution with considerably lower energy use in the core, decommodified infrastructure, and massive technology grants to the South (p.58).  

Ajl is very critical of the first two camps mentioned above. Progressives like Robert Pollin who narrow down the debate to the question of replacement of fossil fuels by green and renewable energy sources not only turn a blind eye to other crucial aspects of the multidimensional ecological destruction, but also obscure the exploitation, suffering, and deprivation likely to increase as a result of imperial political engineering to extract the required raw materials from the periphery. The book is rife with examples of such 鈥榠nterventions鈥�, coups, and sponsoring of suppressive regimes to secure the flow of cheap raw materials.    

The author is right on point in saying that hiding behind the cloak of pragmatism used to justify such restricted interventions to capitalist markets is nothing more than an ideological commitment to the notion that there is no alternative to capitalism. In a world of class divisions and imperial hierarchies within and between countries, getting capital on board with a program corresponds to making the working classes and the oppressed pay the price for it.

Social Democracy, Yesterday and Today

In his reflection on various social democratic proposals, Ajl introduces an analytical distinction between 鈥榮ocial democracy as a bundle of policies鈥� and 鈥榮ocial democracy as a historical form of capitalism鈥�. The former comprises rights like free health care and education, a decent infrastructure, low levels of inequality, and so forth. The latter one represents a barely tamed capitalism that existed for a brief period following WWII. It was marked by class compromise, relentless value extraction from the periphery, and most importantly, the conceived threat of communism in flesh and blood 鈥� the USSR, Maoist China, and numerous Marxist national liberation movements (p.76-7). I am not totally convinced that this distinction between the two meanings of social democracy is warranted, as the two are much more interconnected than they might appear in the light of this distinction. Those 鈥榖undle of policies鈥� at least partially presuppose the conditions pertaining to the second meaning.

When it comes to the AOC-Markey resolution, Ajl notes that the 鈥渄anger lies in identifying an anti-racist Green Keynesian tract as a 鈥榯ransitional program,鈥� anti-capitalist, or related to eco-socialism.鈥� (p.81) He gives due credit to the proposal for relating the climate crisis to social crisis, but is quite critical of the use of 鈥榥ational security鈥� as a framework to placate the established order. When the resolution discusses the global dimensions of green transition with an emphasis on the U.S. as the international leader, it employs the usual language with signs of imperial conceit. This is supported by its silence on the U.S. military, which would be the 47^th largest polluter if it were a country (p.155). All these points aside, it is striking that even so many on the left designate a resolution which makes no reference whatsoever to capital accumulation and class conflict as eco-socialist.

The first part of the book closes with a succinct summary statement of Ajl鈥檚 position on green social democracy: i) it is not achievable through current electoral strategies; ii) even if it were, it would intensify and deepen the existing practices of extraction, exploitation and deprivation especially in the Global South; iii) it is misleadingly being marketed as eco-socialist; and iv) its compromised horizon limits our political imagination, and prevents us from reaching a further horizon (p.94-5).

My caveats pertaining to the first part of the book are rather minor and secondary. I do not fully understand, for instance, why the concept of carbon budget as such is problematic. Ajl notes that it ignores the interests of some relevant parties, and are of probabilistic nature (p.62). It is true that the mainstream arithmetic of carbon budgets does not adequately reflect social and political conflicts which are essential for an eco-socialist perspective. Yet these objections pertain to the frameworks in which carbon budgets are employed, and not, in my opinion, to the concept itself. In fact, Ajl himself uses the concept in his discussion of the precautionary principle, rightly underlining that the debate is primarily political rather than technical (p.63).

A People鈥�s GND

The first chapter of the second part provides the core elements of Ajl鈥檚 vision for a 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 GND, with which I sympathize to a great extent. Thus, I will rather focus on the points where I have reservations or questions to deepen the discussion from a comradely perspective.

The first point on the eco-socialist agenda in the North is, according to Ajl, to build local action which 鈥渘eeds to be autonomous from national politics and the two-party system鈥� (p.100). Taking root in local struggles, working with people to empower people is a must. Once the meaning of this empowerment is extended to supporting and sustaining local small producers in a programmatic way, however, we might easily end up pursuing a petty bourgeois vision rather than an eco-socialist one.

The emphasis on building 鈥渁utonomy and decentralized power into the transition鈥� (p.101) is not misplaced, but somewhat one-sided. Without a functioning national-level counterpart rooted in working-class interests and an ultimate vision of eco-socialism, neither local self-sufficiency nor local ecological action is likely to survive or prevail. Migration flows and policies, wage differentials, tax and subsidy policies, as well as the state鈥檚 hard power come to mind at this juncture. Large scale power and pressure must be confronted with large-scale organization and struggle. Nonetheless, this is not to favor 鈥榥ational鈥� over 鈥榣ocal鈥�, but rather a reminder that it is not an either-or question.

I believe Ajl is in fact aware of this dialectical relationship. The second pillar of his vision is thus a new labor regime with the aim of 鈥渄emocratic and worker-controlled production wherein workers also control the surplus and decide collectively where it goes.鈥� (p.102) Steps in this direction can be direct, through co-ops and the socialization of the surplus, or indirect, through wage increases alongside significantly reduced working weeks. In addition, he mentions the need to ensure that labor pertaining to social reproduction is compensated through direct welfare payments, and to gradually socialize such work (p.104).

I fully sympathize with all these points. However, the socialization of the surplus and establishing of workers鈥� control in production require a discussion that cannot be avoided, namely that of a revolution. The indirect method of boosting wages and cutting working hours, on the other hand, is a very far possibility in the absence of massive productivity leaps or other changes that help cut production costs drastically.

The pillar of his vision pertaining to industry and manufacturing emphasizes the re-localization of production, the fostering of decentralized manufacturing hubs that share knowledge, pushing for planned longevity and repairing, and a transition of energy use in production. Although I share the push for a more even geographic organization of production, I still find the emphasis on decentralization and re-localization of production somewhat one-sided. One of the questions that comes to my mind is that of economies of scale. The latter, along with other sources of productivity increases, is the material basis of the shortening of the necessary working day for Marx and Engels. There is a tendential conflict between shorter worker hours and risking economies of scale. 

Ajl, and also degrowthers for whom a shorter working day is foundational, might hence want to reconsider this point. An obvious merit of Ajl鈥檚 text compared to the degrowth literature at large is that he recognizes that such a 鈥湵时鸫潜璞舯疴�檚 Green New Deal is about building eco-socialism鈥�. This directly relates to the question of abolishing capitalism and constructing a new mode of production, rather than contemplating some vague vision of post-growth or post-capitalist society. I must also note that Ajl鈥檚 differs from the degrowth literature at large insofar as it does not engage in 鈥淸鈥 rejecting goods transport on a large scale and a socially complex, modern, and interwoven world.鈥� (p.111)

What could add to the strength of his case is a discussion of the relations, tools, and mechanisms that would gradually curtail away and replace the market mechanism as the organizing foundation of generalized commodity production. He speaks of eco-socialist planning several times in the book. To what extent does this entail large-scale coordination and some degree of centralization? I think it is important to avoid conflating the spectrum of central-decentral with that of democratic-undemocratic, which is a widespread but undue shortcut that blurs debates around planning.

Another issue that is left open-ended in the book is the political function of a 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal. Does the author see the latter as a leverage to advance the revolutionary struggle and lead Northern societies to an eco-socialist future? Is it a transition program with one foot in the existing relations and structures, and the other foot in 鈥渢he world we wish to see鈥� (p.99)? As the author himself recognizes, 鈥淸m]any of these demands [which build the core of his 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 GND] are actually basic core social democratic demands [鈥. They clearly go far beyond the current elected progressive policy platforms.鈥� What are then the possible means of pushing for a 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 GND?  What is the role of revolutionary organizations in the context of a 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal?

Putting Agriculture and Anti-Imperialism to the Center

For Ajl, the top priority of an internationalist GND is the shift to agroecology. He invites the reader to envision a less urban, more rural utopia, which implies locating more agriculture in cities and making rural areas more urban and agriculture more pleasant (p.118-9). Chapter 6 provides many examples and figures on how the modern food system and agriculture is wrecking havoc on people鈥檚 health, impoverishing small farmers, and imposing an imperialist division of labor. Moreover, in contrast to Malthusian cries over food scarcity, Ajl convincingly demonstrates that the current food system is one of overproduction. Far more food than what people need is produced and wasted (p.123-5).

He suggests a simple roadmap for moving to agroecology, which bears an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist character: large agricultural corporations must be dismantled or nationalized; huge farms must be turned into cooperatives or broken down into smaller units where agroecological methods are employed; prices must be regulated to avoid overproduction and ensure high living standards in the countryside; massive investment to support farmers in green transition; and public investment to provide high-quality infrastructure in the countryside (p.143-5).

The chapter discusses many topics from the significance of land use in bringing down cumulated emissions in the atmosphere to the question of meat production and veganism, to productivity comparisons between agroecology and monocultures, to possible short-run interventions in urban planning. It constitutes one of the main strengths of the book, and I learned a lot from it. The question that haunts my mind however, is the same as I mentioned in the previous section: how could this type of a radical transition be launched while capitalist social relations still prevail? The way I understand it, Ajl鈥檚 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 GND is meant to disrupt the logic of capital, push for changes that are absolutely incompatible with the capitalist mode of production, and use the emerging political discontent and energy as a leverage to abolish the latter.

One of the biggest merits of the book is, by the way, that the argument is not confined to a critique. Ajl asks the right questions, and points out embryonic solutions already in motion: Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, the Landless Workers鈥� Movement in Brazil, the international farmers organization La Via Campesina, the Red Deal proposed by The Red Nation, and the 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Agreement of Cochabamba.

The closing chapter of the book reiterates the centrality of anti-imperialism for any internationalist and eco-socialist GND. I fully acknowledge the importance of the anti-imperialist emphasis Ajl makes. The right to national self-determination is not negotiable. Equally important is, however, an emphasis on the struggles of workers and the oppressed in the South. Otherwise, one can easily end up locked in a mechanistic dualism of 鈥榯he bad North鈥� versus 鈥榯he good South鈥�, something I have seen too often in the past decade, resulting in an odd outcome where leftists declare open support for oppressive regimes and brutal dictatorships, which ironically work in full harmony with the North. Reality is always more complicated, comprising multiple subjectivities in both the North and South, bringing about tactical and strategic alliances that deviate from the grayness of theory.

It is striking, as Ajl demonstrates, that the vast majority of progressive GND proposals either sidestep or suppress this question by erasing the language of ecological debt, silencing the demand for reparations, and content themselves with merely recognizing historically unequal responsibilities.

Ajl is bold at one point: 鈥渢he national question is not a historical relic, antiquated and anachronistic.鈥� (p.148) The national political sphere is still the primary terrain of determining the rate and direction of investment, building political alliances and internationalisms. A just transition has hence to be built upon the recognition of the right of self-determination as a principle. According to the author, there are three pillars to this: i) climate and ecological debt; ii) demilitarization; and iii) establishing and strengthening sovereignty, which translates into 鈥渘ational-popular environmentalism of the poor and eco-socialism鈥� in the South, and 鈥渁cknowledging and struggling against state violation of southern self-determination鈥� in the North (p.158-9).

All in all, Ajl鈥檚 book is a must-read for anyone not content with pure descriptions of ecological breakdown or sterile roadmaps that try to avoid social conflicts. Calling the object by its name is the first step for confronting and dealing with the multidimensional ecological destruction: it is, in fact, a destruction where capital accumulation is our main antagonist. What is utopian today is not envisioning an eco-socialist future and fighting for it, but believing that one can change everything by changing nothing.

G眉ney I艧谋kara is a a Clinical Assistant Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University.

This book review is a part of a symposium on Max Ajl’s book the People’s Green New Deal. .

In his speech before the聽聽makes the following astute observation regarding the African petite bourgeoisie and its public intellectuals:聽聽

“Our professors, engineers and economists are content simply to add a little colouring, because they have brought from the European universities of which they are the products only their diplomas and the surface smoothness of adjectives and superlatives. It is urgently necessary that our qualified personnel and those who work with ideas learn that there is no innocent writing. In these tempestuous times, we cannot leave it to our enemies of the past and of the present to think and to imagine and to create. We also must do so.”

In the same speech, Sankara continues to caution against planning for the uplifting of a nation if such plans are ignorant of, or are wilfully erasing, the disinherited masses and the wretchedness inherited by them. Sankara’s postulation, emerging from the socio-political contexts of the African continent, provides a sound theoretical foundation for knowledge production in the contemporary worlds we inhabit. The popular narratives around climate change have strived to communicate the gravity of planetary collapse and measures required to avert ecological and environmental crises worldwide. Nevertheless, the urgency of envisioning a new world shows little self-reflection as to its epistemic positions and privileges. Climate change discourses in the Global North, academic or otherwise, have largely been constrained by the desire to brave the planetary crises with limited disruption to existing race and class privileges. In terms of how the problems of climate change are identified and defined and the range of solutions to address them, the western epistemologies remain rudimentary.

Consequently, the range of green new deals or the visions for just-transition and sustainable utopias remain agnostic to the everyday realities and struggles of the Global South against imperialism and colonialism. It is unclear if Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour are better placed to partake in these futures than they are now. Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal provides a refreshing and rich scholarly alternative to how an ideal green new deal should be imagined.

A People’s Green New Deal strikes a fine harmony between theory, critique, and discerning avenues towards eco-socialist futures. The book illustrates how the reciprocity between theory and critique could be harnessed to create meaningful conversations around environmental justice and anti-colonialism. The text branches off into two parts. The first part scrutinises the existing green transitions plans and agendas that do not aim for an eco-socialist objective or an endpoint. The second part is more visionary, providing a textured segue into eco-socialism that embodies many possibilities of just futures. The concise core of the book鈥檚 argument is 鈥� that a people’s green new deal must be based on, amongst others, “universal access to renewable energy, climate debt payments, de-commodified public spaces鈥nd food sovereignty in the (global) South and North鈥�” (p.2). What a People’s Green New Deal hopes to do is not to build another “ecological empire” but to oversee “empire’s end” (p.3). There are no illusions that this will be an easy achievement, especially when it demands the dismantling of imperialist and colonial privileges and institutions.

Max Ajl’s cogent analysis in ‘Capitalist Green Transitions‘ takes no prisoners. The disagreements here emerge from the fact that the power centres, which advance ideas of green transition, have reckoned with neither the nature of climate injustice nor their complicity in perpetuating the planetary collapse that stares us in the face. Further, we must understand what conceptual work terms such as ‘green’ or ‘new deal’ do for us if they fail to interrogate the new frontiers of accumulation conceived within green transition plans or the historical oppression and dispossession of the Global South in myriad forms. The author considers the flimsy escapism of eco-modernist Left (p.42-54), the creation of ‘alternate’ energy futures that are as exploitative as the present (p.57-74), and the docile nature of the Green New Deal pitched by Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey (p.75-93). Here, the book effectively calls out both the epistemic and teleological problems with the green new deals bandied about in the Global North. Further, the critique extends to the palliative remedies of geoengineering and the tone-deaf enthusiasm of eco-modernism. 

The solutions to ongoing environmental catastrophe and injustice cannot be accurate if they have failed to understand the genesis of these problems in colonial plunder, settler colonial erasure, and capital led devastation of more-than-human worlds and Indigenous cosmologies. In his critique, the author repeatedly foregrounds the land and the agrarian question as central to understanding and remedying the problem. Climate change as an issue eludes strict categorisation. Likewise, environmental injustices do not always have a perceptible form. Planetary collapse is an amalgam of dispossession and erasure of Indigenous peoples and their knowledge forms, super-exploitation of the labour, aggravated forms of wealth and income inequality across race, class, and gender, and the relentless extraction of resources from the Global South and the Indigenous lands. We are only staring at multiple reincarnations of ongoing settler colonial projects if the proposed solutions treat climate change as a security threat (p.81), , or . The lab-grown climate mitigation, adaptation, or remedial plans of the Green New Deal or eco-modernism are insular from the imperial and colonial realities. The urgency is not so much in recognition of climate catastrophe as much as it is in the forging of a truly revolutionary future when the moment is ripe. Although provocative, the book is a perfect example of why we must understand that decoloniality is not merely an academic exercise but is a vital component of epistemic repositioning in policy, legislative, and juridical spaces, especially in relation to contemporary environmental politics.      

In the second part of the book, Max Ajl delivers an exquisite sketch of ideal avenues towards eco-socialism. The text does more than its modest claim 鈥� the book may not be a “theoretical treatise on planning for eco-socialist transition” (p.15). However, it invites the readers to expand their political imagination beyond what is known and available. These may include Land-back as a central tenet of climate justice, returning to Indigenous food sovereignty and diverse agroecological practices in the Global South, handing back the stewardship to Traditional Owners for maintaining land, water, and natural resources. ‘A Planet of Fields’, the most vibrant chapter of the book, draws from extensive sources and contemporary examples from Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam, Sumatra etc., to illustrate how endemic knowledge systems and agroecology has been antidotes for industrial agriculture. Ensuring Indigenous food sovereignty would be a primary tool for dismantling corporate agrarian practice and enabling “communities rather than farms鈥e in control of water, seed, and eventually land” (p.126). While industrial agriculture or livestock production in the Global North has been devastating to the planet and the multispecies world, this is not the only means to carry farming practices elsewhere in the world. The book’s repeated emphasis on looking at evidence from Indigenous practices and traditional agricultural practices in the Global South sets it apart from its predecessors.  

The economic and ecological destruction caused by  of economies in Paraguay and Brazil is neither a simple problem of farming choice or economic policy. It is a complex network of extractive capitalism driving the over-exploitation of labour and land, guided by the consumption choices made elsewhere in the world. On a small scale, Indigenous Paraguayan communities and small farmers have been shifting to sustainable alternatives, such as , that address inequalities of land ownership, restore agricultural land eroded by soy and cattle farming, and enable just participation of women in labour. While this may be a small instance of what the book calls “land healing labour” (p.142), our collective vision for the future must have the necessary apparatus to equip and broaden these initiatives. The climate debt, “the formerly colonised world’s rights to reparation, restitution, and development” (p.5), serves the latter function. The string of symptomatic treatments in the form of  (ineffectual so far) and  are already failing miserably as fossil fuel infrastructures continue to flourish. Instead, the resources and the land must be channelled to more meaningful uses, especially towards facilitating resource sovereignty in the Global South.      

A People’s Green New Deal is not a mere polemic as a text and as an idea. It is a persuasive endeavour towards what Sankara calls the need to ‘think, imagine, and create’ iterations of justice. The western diagnosis of the climate catastrophe and the tentative remedies have failed at the onto-epistemic front as it excludes the Indigenous voice. Marisol de La Cadena and Mario Blaser call Indigenous cosmologies and knowledge forms’ a. Planetary collapse is experienced in non-linear, incommensurable ways as it goes about destroying multispecies worlds and amplifies the existing injustices across race, class, and geographies. An environmental revolution from Indigenous perspectives would guarantee a more holistic transformation of both the North and the South in organising and restructuring labour, production, and consumption. In many ways, Max Ajl’s work must be read with the Red Nation’s Red Deal and Bordertown Violence Working Group’s Red Nation Rising as radical futures also entail co-production of knowledge in climate policies. Understanding climate change demands understanding racial and colonial violence.

Moreover, it calls for rethinking about how climate change is not just a problem of global warming or environmental catastrophes but an intricate network of social and economic injustices. In effect, it demands re-learning on our part. The Red Deal and Red Nation tell us about Indigenous peoples’ resistance, resilience, anger, and the centrality of onto-epistemic relations with the land that western knowledge forms have never comprehended. Relearning can be tough, painful, and challenging. However, that is the flesh and blood of solidarity. As Max Ajl suggests for the First World left, “anti-systemic struggles of the periphery” must be “the fundamental departure point for solidarity” (p.93).  

The normative idea of green new deals has raised complex questions regarding the politics of expertise in framing alternatives and their implications for the oppressed and marginalised peoples. While the magnitude of climate catastrophes may seem unprecedented to the richer nations, the loss has always been palpable for Indigenous peoples and nations at the periphery in the Global South. If we insist on terming something as unprecedented, it will be attended by a moral question of what we intend to do with that information now. and others argue that living meaningfully include “鈥itting with a system in decline, learning from its history, offering palliative case, seeing oneself in that which is dying, attending to the integrity of the process, dealing with tantrums, incontinence, anger and hopelessness, cleaning up and clearing the space for something new.” The same can be extended to knowledge production and Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal fulfils this mandate flawlessly.

Sakshi is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, working on Indigenous Environmental Justice in Australia, Brazil, and Canada. Previously, she graduated from the University of Oxford, where she studied for the Bachelor of Civil Law (2014-15), specialising in criminal law and evidence. Her research areas include legal and Indigenous geographies, comparative environmental law, multispecies justice, and political ecology. She tweets at .

This book review is a part of a symposium on Max Ajl鈥檚 book the聽笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal. Read the other contributions here.

by Alex M. Thomas, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

This recently published introductory Macroeconomics textbook written by Alex M. Thomas provides a refreshingly novel approach to teaching Macroeconomics to undergraduate students. As the author points out in the Preface, this textbook offers a 鈥�problem-setting approach rather than a problem-solving one, as is the case with most economics textbooks鈥� (Page xvi, emphasis mine). The textbook has nine chapters, and the chapters have enough material to whet the appetite of a broad audience 鈥� Chapters 1,2,6 and 9 deal with the history and philosophy of Macroeconomics, Chapters 3-5 deal with the core economic theory of money and interest rates, output and employment levels and economic growth and Chapters 7 and 8 talk about the macroeconomic policy of achieving full employment and tackling inflation. In this review, I would focus on four issues 鈥� the commitment of the book towards enhancing pluralism in Macroeconomics, the importance given to studying macroeconomic theory, the idea of relating macroeconomic concepts to the context which is being studied and an explicit concern to make Macroeconomics accessible to an undergraduate audience residing in underdeveloped parts of the world.

The chapters dealing with the broader philosophy of Macroeconomics in this book make the case for budding macroeconomists to be widely read and be able to utilize all sources of information at hand 鈥� textbooks, classic papers, newspapers, government reports, historical accounts and even works of fiction to make sense of the context. The picture that best conveys the imagery of a such a well-grounded economist is on Page 3 of Chapter 1 just preceding John Maynard Keynes鈥� famous description of 鈥渢he kind of skills an economist ought to possess鈥�(Page 3). The picture depicts a young economics student who has four hands 鈥� one hand holding a history textbook, one hand engaging with graphs discussing macroeconomic equilibrium, the third hand holds the picture of the Indian Parliament and the fourth hand is held by the student on her chin 鈥� as if wondering in awe about the varied inputs that are required to make sense of the mammoth creature under consideration. This depiction of Macroeconomics made me recall former US President Harry Truman鈥檚 who was widely credited with saying 鈥淕ive me a one-handed economist!鈥�. Clearly, as the author鈥檚 depiction shows, we need to train many-handed economists who would be able to bring in various perspectives while deliberating on issues of policy importance. This might frustrate the policy makers looking for quick actions but would ensure that the policy advise that is being given is well-thought out and has engaged with contradictory pulls and pushes and diverse realities facing our contemporary societies. The readers would be able to better appreciate the book鈥檚 commitment to pluralism by looking at the references section and also suggestions for further reading after each chapter.

This book has a firm commitment to ensuring that undergraduate students in their first course on Macroeconomics learn to appreciate the insights and rigor of economic theory. Economic theory readily gets associated with abstraction for its own sake and tends to earn a bad name especially in today鈥檚 times when the economics profession is taking a turn towards data-driven approaches (interested readers can look at Chapter 6: Why Economic Theory Matters for a detailed discussion). The book uses 鈥渁n economy with free mobility of capital and labor鈥� as the object of analysis at the first level (Page 13). This is not to say that aspects of the 鈥渁ctual鈥� world like immobility of labor in a developing country context like India that happens due to caste, gender and community do not exist. Using the competitive economy as the 鈥渟tandard of reference鈥� is only a first level of analysis abstracting from the myriad considerations of the real world to enable 鈥減recise鈥� statements to be made about the 鈥渆conomic phenomena under study鈥� (Page 14). Even if the theoretical framework employed does not speak to the actual world as a one-to-one mapping, the thought experiment at the first level of analysis greatly enhances the rigor and sharpens the thinking of a budding economist. Talking of economic theory, the author is careful to point out that he 鈥減refers using 鈥榓ctual鈥� to 鈥榬eal鈥� as the theoretical world is also real鈥� (Page 14). The theoretical framework, in turn, creates demand for observables – accounting and data that are needed for analysis. Though economists like Richard Stone working in the middle of the 20^th century on developing national income accounting systems were well aware of the need for theory in empirical measurement (pointed out by the author in Chapter 6), the lesson seems to have been lost on the current fad among economists to only look at big data and rely on data-driven solutions to offer policy advice. The author has a nice quote from Albert Einstein in chapter 6 highlighting the need for theory 鈥� Einstein after attending Werner Heisenberg鈥檚 talk on quantum mechanics in 1926 had this to say, 鈥淲hether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed鈥� (Page 133).

The plea to give due space to theory in economic analysis does not mean that one should ignore the immediate context in which economies are functioning. Chapter 1 of the book distinguishes between different levels of analysis 鈥� macro, meso and micro. The macro approach is what the textbook mostly deals with but is also complemented by meso (a study of different sectors within an economy) and also at times with micro approaches (the way an individual makes economic decisions). While staying true to the core conceptual core of Macroeconomics, the book tends to move away from the narrow compartmentalization of the subject as is found in many conventional macroeconomics textbooks. Even while the student is immersed in learning a Macroeconomic concept, it is not wise to lose sight of the end goal of the study of this subject. As the author points out, 鈥渋t is important to remember that most of us are studying economics not only to understand our economic surroundings but also to better them for all鈥� (Page 16). The task of bettering lives for all cannot be complete unless trained macroeconomists are sensitive to the context in question. This sensitivity to the immediate macroeconomic context is visible in this book in the discussion of the policy application of macroeconomic theories to the Indian context (Chapters 7 and 8). Chapters 4 and 7 raises the issue of the applicability of the Keynesian demand multiplier to the post-independence Indian economy. VKRV Rao, an Indian economist (also a student of John Maynard Keynes at the University of Cambridge) and founder of many great institutions of learning in post-independence India, wrote an article in 1952 in the Indian Economic Review talking about the limited applicability of Keynesian ideas to the Indian context because of the extensive informal sector in Indian economy where wage determination did not take place as in the developed countries and extensive supply-side constraints that the newly independent country faced. Clearly, this indicates a tension between the concept and its application depending on the context and as the author rightly argues, 鈥済ood policymaking needs to take cognizance of both concept and context鈥� (Page 158).

Another major contribution of this book is its accessibility and relatability to the undergraduate audience in developing countries (in the case of this book, the undergraduates in India). The study of Economics, in my view, has faced two major problems. First, most Eurocentric theories have been privileged over the voices from the Global South. Second, even if you accept the argument that students across the world need to be well-versed with Economics as taught in the West, there are barriers of language and privilege that have allowed only a select few 鈥� a representative sample of elite students from the developing countries, as it were, to be able to partake of this Western discourse. Every chapter in this book offers some citations from works of fiction immersed in the milieu of the Indian sub-continent. The author makes this objective clear in the Preface where he mentions that he has tried to infuse the Indian context into 鈥渙ur non-Indian economic contexts鈥� by engaging with fiction pertaining to the themes of 鈥渃aste, ecology, gender or land鈥� (Page xvi). The very first chapter of this book where the history of economics is discussed points out towards the development of economic thought in non-European contexts. This is important so that undergraduates do not leave the classroom thinking that whatever happened in Economics happened in a faraway Western land and their job is just to diligently replicate those theories irrespective of the context they operate in. Closely tied in with this objective of infusing the Indian context into a Macroeconomic context is the concern for making the readings and textbooks available to Indian students who do not have access to 鈥渨ell-stocked鈥� libraries (page xv). In an earlier paragraph I had supported the author鈥檚 view that economics students should be well-read and be able to utilize different sources of information. The author realizes that this normative claim has to be tempered with the harsh material realities of differential access to education in developing countries. Often in the past have I received requests from friends in India looking for books and journal articles which their libraries do not have access to. The author has clearly taken cognizance of this fact and in every chapter where he offers suggestions for further reading, he suggests multiple sources of the same reading material so that accessing it does not become impossible for the less privileged undergraduate student willing to learn Macroeconomics.

When I was taught Macroeconomics as an undergraduate, my course instruction primarily relied on conventional Macroeconomic textbooks written by North American authors with the US context in mind. I knew more about how the Federal Reserve functions after my Principles of Economics course than I knew about the Reserve Bank of India. I certainly learnt the macroeconomic concepts very well but was seldom left thinking how this related to what the local newspaper was reporting about the policies of my own central bank. It is only when I took a course on Money and Financial Markets in my final year that the context of Indian monetary institutions was brought in. This book is clearly different for good and I really hope that it would bring in winds of change in the pedagogy of Macroeconomics and that more such books would be written in the future offering students a holistic approach to the subject.

Mohit Arora is a PhD student in the Economics department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

叠测听Sunanda Sen and

How is imperialism relevant today? How has it mutated over the past century? What are different theoretical and empirical angles through which we can study imperialism? These are the questions we deal with in our edited volume on (2018).

We understand imperialism as a continuing arrangement since the early years of empire-colonies to the prevailing pattern of expropriations, on part of those who wield power vis-脿-vis those who are weak. The pattern of 鈥榦ld imperialism鈥�, in the writings of Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin, were framed in the context of the imperial relations between the ruling nations and their colonies with political subjugation of the latter, captured by force or by commerce, providing the groundwork for their economic domination in the interest of the ruling nations. Forms of such arrogation varied, across regions and over time; including  the early European invasions of South America, use of slaves or indentured labour across oceans, and the draining off of surpluses from colonies by using trade and financial channels. Imperialism, however, has considerably changed its pattern since then, especially with institutional changes in the  prevailing power structure.

The essays in the volume offer a renewed interpretation, which include the alternate interpretations of imperialism and its changing pattern over space and time, incorporating the changing pattern of oppression which reflects the dynamics underlying the specific  patterns of oppression. The pattern can be characterised as 鈥榥ew imperialism鈥� under contemporary capitalism as distinct from its 鈥榦ld鈥� form under colonialism. The varied interpretations of imperialism  as in the literature do not lessen the significance of the common ground underlying the alternate positions, including the diverse pattern of expropriations under imperialism.

The volume offers fourteen chapters by renowned authors. In this blog, we organise them in the following manner: the first five of those deal with the conceptual basis of imperialism from different angles, the next three chapters deal with contemporary imperialism, and then the rest six chapters of book deal with India, colonialism and contemporary issues with imperialism.

The conceptual basis of imperialism: different angles

Satyaki Roy鈥檚 Imperialism: the old and the new, departures and continuities sets the tone of the volume by making the point that we do not have a single theory of imperialism applicable to all times, but several which correspond to multiple historical manifestations of imperialism in the contemporary phase of capitalism. Roy sees in earlier theories of imperialism a focus on the conflicts between nations representing interests of national capitals, while nation-states  currently are no longer the organizing unit in the context of globalisation and universal capitalism. Thus, the characterisation of imperialism today cannot be limited to a rivalry between advanced capitalist countries nor as an expression of conflict between developed and underdeveloped nations. Rather, it has to encompass the power structure and internal articulation of global capitalism.

Above is followed by a paper on Marx鈥檚 capital and the global crisis by John Smith dwelling on the current status of the working class worldwide (workers as 鈥榞lobal labour鈥�). The paper looks at the cost-cutting exercises by Multi-National Corporations, which displaces the domestic workers by cheaper foreign labour, achieved either through emigration of production (鈥渙utsourcing鈥�) to overseas or through immigration of workers. This so-called neoliberal globalisation is the new imperialist stage of capitalist development, where imperialism is characterised by the exploitation of 鈥渟outhern鈥� labour by northern 鈥渃apital鈥�.

The next chapter is on Reflections on Contemporary Capitalism by Prabhat Patnaik. It takes us from the original formulation of imperialism by Lenin, who associated imperialism with centralisation of capital in industry and among banks, along the different phases of imperialism since then, to its present form marked by the hegemony of international finance capital, globalisation and neoliberal policies. Interestingly, Patnaik takes issue with interpretations of imperialism as a political project undertaken by the ruling state of US, through enlisting the support of other advanced capitalist States. For him, taking the leading country as the driving force behind imperialism means attributing to its state an autonomy, which none of the present capitalists countries have. Instead, as he argues, today鈥檚 imperialism is marked by the retreat and subservience of the state to international finance and, consequently, as the only political option, a selective delinking of the national economy from the global economy.

The particularity of imperialism today is also the topic addressed in Anjan Chakrabarti in the following chapter. Neoliberal globalisation has re-shaped the international division of labour and intra-national division of labour by mechanisms of offshoring, outsourcing and subcontracting, so that globalisation has been able to fragment activities across time zones, spaces and enterprises within the nation states. The methodology of the analysis draws on Bukharin (1915) and his notion of policy of conquest. Thus, for Chakrabarti, today鈥檚 imperialism is a policy of conquest through force and violence over the 鈥渙utside鈥� of the capitalist world.

Subhanil Chowdhury鈥�s chapter departs from the classical notion of imperialism based on the division of the world into two clear segments of advanced and the other (third world). Imperialism, seen as a thwarting capitalist development in the developing countries, is no longer true in today鈥檚 world, at least for a set of large countries, such as India and China. The 鈥渢hird world鈥� countries, now located within the overall circuit of global capital, have access to global finance, markets and technology, and their big bourgeoisie have become major players in the international market However, the significant factor remains that the workers in these countries are way behind those of the United States, in terms of their wages, and their lives are not on par with those of the workers in developed countries. Through reforms and globalisation, we witness a process of enrichment of the ruling classes, while the vast masses of people remain detached from these capitalist processes and remain impoverished.

Contemporary imperialism

The variety of imperialism as domination through financialisation and neo-mercantilism is the background of all three following chapters. The discussion looks at the region where this domination originated (the United States) and examines how it impacted on Latin America and other world regions.

Noemi Levy鈥檚 Latin America in the new international order: new forms of economic organisations and old forms of surplus appropriation examines the performance of six Latin American economies and points out that the region failed to adopt a successful neomercantilist model, also that the region did not benefit from the new international division of labour, which shifted the manufacturing industry from the United States to developing economies. The imperialist relationship between the United States and Latin America forms the core of Amiya Bagchi鈥檚 chapter, which reviews the US domination through military and political control, with complicity of the domestic elite in Latin America.

The points raised tally with the next chapter by Gerald Epstein on the role of military spending in US, with imperialism as the velvet glove as opposed to the iron fist of the rise of neoliberal policies and globalisation. Quantifying the effects of the military expenses  Epstein  arrives at the conclusion that workers do not, on balance, gain from US imperialism, at least since 1985. This contrasts the  previous three decades when US workers had much more power to get a piece of the imperialist pie. Oil prices were extremely low and very stable. Taxes were more progressive and trade competition was not as intense.

India, colonialism and contemporary issues with imperialism

Utsa Patnaik鈥檚 chapter provides the general framework of British domination by providing data on the exceptionally large magnitude of India鈥檚 export earning appropriated by Britain. The mode shows the major role the colony was made to play in providing real and financial resources for sustaining the British Empire. Britain largely re-exported imported tropical goods and secured imports from temperate lands, providing wage goods (corn) and raw materials (cotton, iron) without which a large part of its domestic output could not be produced.  She concludes that Britain, the world capitalist leader at the centre of the global payments system, was crucially dependent on India鈥檚 export earnings for financing the current account deficits with the rest of world.  With access to the rising foreign exchange earnings of its colonies, Britain could settle its own external deficits as well as to export capital overseas.

In the next chapter Sunanda Sen looks at another dimension of the imperialist relationship between India and Britain in colonial times. This include the 鈥渢rading鈥� so to say, of indentured labour鈥� from India. Faced with a shortage of labourers at the end of slavery, the planters in the British colonial islands pressurised their imperial government to find ways to supplement labour cheaply. The desperately poor and famine-stricken populations of colonies in Asia and in India, in particular, turned out as the target of an organised large-scale emigration of indentured labourers from India to plantation colonies, on basis of coerced labour in sugar plantations. It can also be seen that the waves in immigrant flows were singularly linked to the fortunes of sugar plantations. A triangular network involving labour (indentured), commodities (both raw sugarcane and processed) and finance characterised the relationship between Britain and the such colonies. This was the variety of imperialism, rooted initially in slave trade and later in movements of indentured labour which proved a lucrative source of earning surpluses and it鈥檚 appropriation  by commercial and financial interests of imperial Britain.

Indenturing of labour, as above from India (and China) continued till the 1920s, followed by the commencement of a new era in labour welfare and labour control in colonial India. This is the theme of the next chapter by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya that looks at the interaction between the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the welfare and labour legislation in India between 1919 and 1929. The post-First World War time saw the emerging global economic system, the growth of transnational capital and the internationalisation of the labour market, which required the devising of an international normative on labour. One of those aims was to make sure that the higher wages and benefits did not become an impediment in developed countries to compete with less developed countries where wage costs were lower. As for labour laws in India, the colonial state put on the statute books an impressive number of labour laws, however ineffective in terms of applications.  Those only  show the pressure coming from Britain, where lobbying was active to promoting labour legislation in India  since cheaper labour in India was perceived as a threat.

Next chapters of the book address the issues connected with liberalisation and deregulation in contemporary India,  viewed  as a process  in  new pattern of imperialism, with effects damaging in terms of income distribution, poverty and social inequality within the country. The piece by Sukanya Bose and Abhishek Kumar looks at the role of finance and services in the Indian economy. Examining the contrasting evidence  in empirical studies  the authors offer their main hypothesis that several service sectors, namely, banking, insurance, real estate and business services, did not contribute to the growth of industrial sectors and vice-versa. The linkages of these sectors with the rest of the economy have 鈥減robably been weak such that their expansionary phase has not been accompanied by a revival of overall economic  growth鈥�. The hypothesis is put to test in the paper by using empirical exercises, which confirms their hypothesis that there has not been any finance/service-led growth in India. Next, Byasdeb Dasgupta looks at the Indian labour market and the effects of the neoliberal reforms, in particular the dismantling of the welfare-state and of the system of labour protections, especially in India. This is followed by Surajit Mazumdar鈥檚 closing piece bringing together various threads of analysis relating to  imperialism as presented in the previous chapters, and with particular reference to India. Attention is drawn to  the distribution of income  moving very sharply in favour of corporates, which is to the disadvantage of India鈥檚 working population, mostly in agriculture and in the informal non-agricultural sectors.

The volume seeks to provide a global panorama of imperialism, across time and space. The conceptual arguments support the analysis of the disadvantaged part of the world in South America and major parts of Asia, like India. The study will provide new ideas and insights in the continuing pattern of expropriation in the global economy.

Sunanda Sen is former Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She researches contemporary capitalism, international finance, economic history and development. She tweets at .

is Professor of Economics, University of Rome, 鈥楲a Sapienza鈥�, Italy, and Fellow of the Italian Academy of Lincei. She has worked on classical monetary theory, the Cambridge School of Economics, Keynesian economics and, more recently, on Keynes’s investments in financial markets.

Photo: Andreas Lehner

Writing about Indigenous rights or climate and environmental justice movements as a non-Indigenous person is difficult and complex. The magnitude of difficulty becomes manifold if the authorial voice falls somewhere on the white, western knowledge spectrum. What we have to say matters less than what we have learned in thinking with the Indigenous people and their knowledge forms. For non-Indigenous scholars, there is a constant need to be alert to the possibilities of reproducing colonial power structures and epistemic frameworks while engaged in knowledge production. The only way out of this conundrum is to constantly learn from Indigenous voices and epistemologies and be sensitive to structural inequities and epistemic injustices that have marred the academe. It is not adequate to merely provide nodding acknowledgement to the idea of environmental justice. Interrogating the colonial and settler colonial structures within environmental movements must be a continuous process. Particularly, the idea of Indigenous environmental justice is yet to assume the place it deserves in the literature on environmentalisms, environmental activism, or even Marxist ecology. While Black-Green solidarity and alliance is an indispensable condition for the flourishing of the environmental movements, the work towards achieving it has been disappointingly slow. These concerns resurfaced as I read Andreas Malm鈥檚 new work .

While I do not intend this to be a book review, there are certain elements of How to Blow Up a Pipeline that demanded a response of another kind 鈥� an interrogation of the nature of the writing itself. Some of us who had been familiar with Malm鈥檚 earlier work, , which was most articulate about the vicious capitalist economic relations that bind and sustain fossil economy, had great expectations about How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Well, as far as titles are concerned, the book (manifesto?) was promising. The associational space for pipelines is firmly within the vast expanse of climate justice movements and Indigenous resistance to anti-capitalist and anti-colonial expansion. Malm could have situated his work anywhere within this space. Surprisingly, after finishing the book, it is difficult to answer what the book aims to do, who should blow up the pipeline, or worse, who is it addressing. The first thing one notices about the book is the startling whiteness of the authorial gaze and voice. The book critiques the environmental movement鈥檚 reliance on non-violence and how it is quite ineffective, despite the apparent advantages of strategic pacifism. Malm builds a sound foundation for his arguments of why amplifying violence is a non-negotiable, especially because 鈥渞uling classes will not be talked into action鈥� (p.20). He also uses a bevy of white philosophers who have ruminated about violence and non-violence in environmental movements (John Lanchester, William Smith, Steve Vanderheiden). The core of the book draws from some of Malm鈥檚 anecdotal experiences 鈥� geographically limited to Sweden 鈥� where he participated in deflating the tyres of SUVs until the winter hit that year (p.84) and storming the compound of a power plant once, which gave him an unparalleled 鈥渞ush of exhilaration鈥� (p.159).

It is difficult to believe that one can write about environmental activism with two vague references to Indigenous people in the passing and no mention of settler colonialism. The framework of violence, non-violence, and sabotage is meaningless if one is irreverent to the long tradition of Indigenous resistance, which has fought against the exploitation of the land by throwing their bodies in the way. The narrative violence is scripted on Indigenous bodies as much as it is on the land and its resources. While arguing for escalation of tactics, there is also a need to remember that  are slaughtered for merely asking the right questions and resisting the state鈥檚 iron hand. One must only look outside of Sweden and Berlin to realise that sabotage cannot be done softly. If only Malm had looked, Sami people鈥檚 resistance to mining and environmental destruction would have been instructive of  and not an episodic adventure.   

There is something terrifying about the citational practice, which fondly studies immaculate theories of white men, but describes the resistance to Dakota Access Pipeline through scattered news reports (again, no reference to long-standing Indigenous struggle against extractive capitalism that precedes even the pipeline). Is it possible to talk about pipelines in the Anthropocene without understanding how capitalism can draw oil from the ground only when settler colonialism draws the life out of Indigenous people? The #NoDAPL and Standing Rock movement emerge from a . One must understand how the Water Protectors of #NoDAPL resisted the pipeline while also resisting the ongoing destruction unleashed by the state against their bodies, the land, the river, and the very notion of indigeneity. When the pipeline ends, Indigenous movements want to know what happens with the land 鈥� their land. Without answering this question, a climate justice movement sounds hollow. Writing about it sounds even more vacuous when one does not refer to a single Indigenous scholar on the topic.  

The Water Protectors of the First Nations did not sabotage the pipeline. They built the camps, they insisted on living in the face of extreme violence that visits every Indigenous anti-capital, anti-colonial resistance. Not remembering them or not learning from them before we set out with grand notions of revolution is a reproduction of settler colonial erasure. Although, this time, it is in the sophisticated garb of knowledge production. Fighting for the environment, while being allies to those who bear the full brunt of capitalism and settler colonialism does not leave individuals in a self-congratulatory elation. Working towards justice, with and for Indigenous people, leaves one drained and exhausted. Indigenous peoples鈥� collective struggle for sovereignty and self-determination makes room for mourning and grieving the losses endured in the process of resistance as much as it sets its sight on defeating capitalist, colonialist forces. Those who resist the mines and the pipelines have been maimed, killed, subjected to surveillance. Nevertheless, they persist, for their struggle is for the land and their identity. It is a struggle that cannot be defeated by a mere onset of winter or lack of interest from those involved in the movement.  

As , if you have the privilege and the platform, use it to be a good ally. Use it for speaking about the land defenders fighting a more meaningful fight against capitalism and settler colonialism. Nick Estes concludes Our History is the Future with: 

鈥淭he Water protectors also ask us: What does water want from us? What does the earth want from us? Mni Wiconi 鈥� water is life 鈥� exists outside the logic of capitalism. Whereas past revolutionary struggles have strived for the emancipation of labor from capital, we are challenged not just to imagine, but to demand the emancipation of earth from capital. For the earth to live, capitalism must die.鈥�

Environmental movements are about justice 鈥� they must directly address climate and Indigenous environmental justice. Even  the primacy of Indigenous voices in environmental protection. It would be unfortunate if those who use Marx prolifically fail to see this elementary point. To talk about radicalism or revolution while being white demands a careful awareness that in the process, one should not be talking down to Black, Indigenous, people of colour who have been subjected to and resisted the combined forces of capitalist and (settler) colonial violence as long as the land can remember.  

Sakshi Aravind is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, working on Indigenous Environmental Justice in Australia, Brazil, and Canada. Previously, she graduated from the University of Oxford, where she studied for the Bachelor of Civil Law (2014-15), specialising in criminal law and evidence. Her research areas include legal and indigenous geographies, comparative environmental law, multispecies justice, and political ecology.

This post was originally published at .