Category: Race

Condensing the Gaza crisis

kjayasuriyaLeave a comment

The Gaza crisis has underscored the deep fractures of domestic politics in Western Europe, the US and Australia. It is as much a domestic political crisis as a conflict in the Middle East.

What is the nature of this crisis? Well, it is not one but multiple crises that are condensed around the Gaza war. Now condensation is an interesting concept 鈥� first used by Freud to show how a single idea or dream stands for multiple associations and ideas. We can think of the Gaza crisis as a political condensation of several multiple and intersecting crises and their  different temporalities. It condenses a series of fracture points: the crisis of representation, an increasingly authoritarian response to the political conflict, the unravelling of the international liberal order and the politics of race and class. It reinforces a shift to what the Marxist political theorist Nicos Poulantzas termed authoritarian statism which is the intensification of authoritarian tendencies within ostensibly democratic institutions and processes.

First, it is now fashionable to apply the term decolonisation to global politics but this decolonization is always seen as 鈥榦ut there鈥� and distinct from the politics of class. Instead, I want to argue the Gaza crisis has brought decolonisation back home to the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney and New York. It is often forgotten that many of those on the streets are demanding not just a ceasefire in Gaza but a political voice that is marginalised.  And let’s not forget that this plays out in the register of both class and race.  Many 鈥� but by no means all – of those in the streets are the new migrant working class and Gaza is an expression of their political discontent. The social theorist 鈥� Stuart Hall 鈥� famously said that race is the medium through which class is lived and in the Gaza crisis we see an intersection of class and race. It is return of the political time of colonial politics but this time in the metropolis of the old colonies. This class and domestic dimension is often forgotten in the sanitised version of decolonisation that circulates within academia. Again, the Gaza crisis condenses existing political fractures.

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The labor of land

ramasalladieng1 Comment

Contemporary  and agricultural investments have generated huge attention. The transformations in land tenure, production and social reproduction in the aftermath of land rushes have generated a  . A central question is about , and its implications for structural transformation and .

Extraversion, exports and the labor question

In Senegambia, the intersecting pressures of food, land, and capital were historically linked to the quest for new labor and cash crops (cotton, then groundnut, followed by fresh fruits and vegetables) in frontier markets for Europe. Some of these transformations have been widely documented by Egyptian economist , Senegalese historian  and American historian . In 1819, the Ndiaw Treaty between France and the leaders of the Waalo Kingdom (in northern Senegal) was signed, allowing France to . This agricultural colonization project failed mostly because of the resistance of the inhabitants of the Waalo Kingdom (the Waalo-Waalo) and the inability of  French colonial leaders to secure land concessions they thought were automatically and permanently transferred to them through the treaty. The Waalo leaders, who managed the land on behalf of their community, understood otherwise. This conflicting interpretation on how land is governed became a recurrent source of conflict.

Another problem was the shortage of labor鈥攖he Waalo-Waalo refused forced labor and preferred to cultivate their subsistence crops rather than those for export. This refusal led to the return of clandestine slave trade and related abuses. The insecurity created by Waalo鈥檚 neighbors and the resistance of merchant capital added to the failure. These are key to understanding how various historical dynamics have sedimented to make the Senegal River Valley Region (historical Waalo) the site of the land rush that began in 2007-2008, especially for the production of export fresh fruits and vegetables.

Revisiting this rich history offers us a better understanding of relations of exploitation and contemporary resistance to  by a number of communities in this region. It is a reminder of the violence of primitive accumulation, a violence that is ongoing. Tanzanian historian  puts it well:

The early encounter of Africa with Europe was not commercial involving the exchange of commodities, but rather the unilateral looting of human resources. African slavery was neither a trade, nor a mode of production. It was simply a robbery of a people on a continental scale perpetrated over four centuries through force of arms.

Despite the subsequent attempt to develop new crops in 1826 in Saint-Louis, merchant capital eventually prevailed with the failure of agriculture. As a result, post-colonial leaders 鈥渋nherited a country organized by and for merchant capital鈥� after 1960 as  puts it. In the same vein,  note how merchant capital subsequently established colonial and post-colonial structures of extraction.

Beyond processes of land acquisition, it is important to pay attention to how land becomes capital and how agricultural workers are included, excluded, or rather  into these agri-food networks.For instance, in her 2011  on land grabbing in Southern Africa, Ruth Hall provides a useful typology of agricultural transformations from subsistence to capitalist imperatives. Besides models that are based on the displacement of primary producers and the establishment of large export-oriented agricultural estates, Hall emphasizes 鈥渃ommercialization in situ鈥� and 鈥渙utgrower鈥� schemes whereby petty commodity producers and other land users are incorporated into commercial value chains. This is a further invite to go beyond  in our analyses of the genealogy of  and of processes of exploitation.

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Dependency, gender,聽and race

Felipe Antunes de OliveiraLeave a comment

In the classical works of dependency theory, such as the Dialectics of Dependency (Marini 2011 [1973]); Socialism or Fascism (Dos Santos 2018 [1978]); Dependency and Development in Latin America (Cardoso and Faletto 1979) and Latin American Dependent Capitalism (Bambirra 2012 [1978]), race and gender are absent. This absence is at odds with both the evident reality of racial and patriarchal oppression in Latin America and the concomitant rise of feminist and anti-colonial literature in the social sciences. In fact, in the exciting intellectual and political environment of the 1960s and 1970s, it would not be difficult to imagine productive dialogues between Ruy Mauro Marini and Margaret Benston, and V芒nia Bambirra and Amilcar Cabral. Sadly, these dialogues never took place. Instead, the first generation of dependency scholarship privileged debates with white, male scholars engaged in modernisation sociology, structuralist economics and Marxist orthodoxy. With the sole exception of V芒nia Bambirra鈥檚 forgotten writings about peripheral women鈥檚 liberation, gender and race remain to this day ignored by the dependency tradition.

Although the absence of race and gender does indeed represent a major blind spot in the work of dependency writers, the most seminal concepts coined by some of the early dependency writers such as Ruy Mauro Marini and V芒nia Bambirra have 鈥榠ntersectional鈥� (Crenshaw 1989; 1991) potential. By that, I mean that they can be understood as referring to more than simply class-based dynamics of domination. Let us consider two examples: Marini鈥檚 concept of the 鈥榮uper-exploitation鈥� of labour and Bambirra鈥檚 definition of Latin American ruling classes as 鈥榙ominated鈥揹ominant鈥�.

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