In the realm of听, the 鈥榳hite saviour鈥� trope has long been a subject of听. This phenomenon, often rooted in colonialist attitudes, positions Western individuals or entities as benevolent rescuers of non-Western communities, usually without acknowledging or addressing systemic multidimensional inequalities, colonial/racial privilege, and local agency of indigenous communities. The white saviour complex has not only perpetuated听听but has also听听the efforts and voices of those it claims to help.
As artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a global force to potentially , we see a new manifestation of the white saviour industrial complex within emerging global AI governance.
It is widely believed that Marx did not systematically consider the role of colonialism within the process of capital accumulation. According to听, Marx concentrated on a self-closed national economy in his main work. Although he did mention colonialism in Part 8 of听Capital听Volume 1 on the so-called primitive accumulation, this would only belong to a pre-history of capital, not to its everyday development. Based on a similar assumption, some postcolonial scholars criticise Marx for being Eurocentric, even a complicit supporter of Western imperialism, who ignored the agency of non-Western people.
If we read some we could think that they are right. How can we explain otherwise Marx and Engels praising the role of the bourgeoisie drawing even the most barbarian nations into civilisation or the view that the liberation of colonised peoples depended on the victory of the revolution in Europe?
Before I start, let me make a short premise. In my first book I read Marx鈥檚 Capital in the light of his writings and articles on Ireland, China, India, Russia, and the American Civil War. At the time I believed that Marx only published a significant, but still limited amount of writings on the colonial question, those available in the Collected Works and in collections like Marx & Colonialism. But then in 2007 I worked at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, contributing to the complete edition of Marx鈥檚 and Engels鈥檚 writings. I thus 鈥渄iscovered鈥� some of Marx鈥檚 20,000 print page long notebooks (just to give you an idea, the printed notebooks alone would look like a new Collected Works). These writings show that Marx was interested in colonialism all his life, including when he wrote the Manifesto.
What came out of my reading? Let me start with the question of Marx鈥檚 field of analysis in听Capital听Volume 1. To analyse capital reproduction 鈥榠n its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances鈥�, Marx treats the world of commerce as one nation (1976: 727) and presupposes the full worldwide imposition of the capitalist mode of production. Does this mean that Marx analysed a 鈥渟elf-enclosed national economy鈥� as Harvey and others believe? In my view, this abstraction means exactly the opposite. Marx鈥檚 positing a coincidence between the national and global levels is a premise for conceptualising the world market, which includes both internal and foreign markets of all nations participating in it. This abstraction makes it possible to include expansionism into the analysis of capital accumulation. In this framework, a country鈥檚 economic system is not confined within its national borders but consists of all production branches where capital is freely transferable, including the colonies and dependent economies.
Books abound on what is wrong with economics (; ; , , , ), and what we would have to do to change it. Given the little change we have seen in economics training and policy-effective economic thinking since of 2007/08, and in light of the global environmental, inequality and health crises, it is to be seen whether these interventions can make any meaningful impact. What is good though: Half of these impactful books were written by female economists. Despite this 鈥榳ind of change鈥� in an overtly male discipline, it is striking that these books still offer a glaring lacuna: the issues of race and racism (except for brief mentions in and ). For many people around the world, these are no mere 鈥榠ssues鈥�, but integral to their daily struggles and experiences in White majority countries. These are part of a differentiated life鈥� a life differentiated so much that it can be full of unrealized potentials, suffering and trauma, physical harm and violence, and premature death in the worst of cases. Therefore, while we could move on, building on these interventions and many others (e.g., ; or ), to discuss what would have to change in economic thinking (which includes economics training), policy and praxis to help achieve a 鈥渟afe and just operating space for humanity鈥� (), the goal of this blog entry is more firmly tied to the question of how economic thinking would change if race and racism were taken seriously as structural-relational problems?
Much of economic thinking happens via economics. Therefore, my entry will often refer to economics as an institutionalized field. That said, expertise about the economy is not just rooted in economics. In fact, economists should not hold an intellectual monopoly over explaining how the economy works and should work (even though many of them, ironically, seem to appreciate that monopoly). That is why I as an economic geographer dare write this post. Pluralizing the economy, economics and economic thinking are separate but still interconnected projects. Some of the arguments that follow apply to other disciplines, too. Nevertheless, economics is singular among the social sciences in terms of its socio-demographic homogeneity (at least in countries of the Global North), prestige, student intake volumes, policy influence and partial self-isolation from other disciplines. It thus deserves particular scrutiny.
So what would an economics that takes race and racism seriously as structural-relational problems have to look like? To what kind of epistemic and institutional practices would it have to commit itself in an effort to effectively engage with these lived realities? A partial answer is already provided by economists who do study race and racism in a field called , not to be mixed up with the so-called that is largely rooted in a neoclassical economics framework. Building on some the insights of the former, and adding a few more perspectives, we can call for at least 10 ways of how to challenge the broader field of economics (i.e. variants of neoclassical and behavioural economics, but much more than that, as we saw above!) via race and racism.
What鈥檚 Wrong with Economics? The title of economic historian Robert Skidelsky鈥檚 latest book captures well a prevailing mood of popular disaffection with the dismal science. Many have come to associate the discipline with specific lines of political partisanship鈥攊ncluding forms of and the . Economics has also been widely criticised for its failure to grapple with actual, urgent economic problems. Within academic circles, the discipline has become widely regarded as of the contributions other fields of social and historical inquiry make to the study of economic life. Among the public at large, the has faced considerable scrutiny, even while individual by dissenting economists are and generally .
Recent political developments like the rise of the Movement for Black Lives and the #MeToo movement have helped broaden the sense of crisis in economics; encouraging examination of the discipline鈥檚 deeply problematic relationship with realties of race, gender, and other elements of people鈥檚 social identity. As a number of critics have noted, the problems are reflected most obviously in the profession鈥檚 basic institutional composition, which is grossly unrepresentative. In the United States women account for in PhD-granting departments. Of all doctorates conferred in the academic year 2015鈥�2016, . This dismal performance was significantly worse than the 3 percent average across all STEM disciplines. That same year, only 3.6 percent of all full economics professors at PhD-granting institutions were Latino; a meagre 1.6 percent were Black.
The problem is also evident in prevalent attitudes and values among economists. Casual and among leading economists appears to have few or no repercussions. A 2019 of academic economists by the American Economic Association found that nearly half of Black economists reported being targets of discrimination in the profession. It also found that 鈥渙nly 45 percent of all . . . respondents (regardless of race) believed economists who are not White are respected in the field.鈥� When the work on the economics of racial stratification by scholars like and was finally included in the alphanumeric classification system for research topics in economics, it was placed in the last, residual category, 鈥淶 – Other Special Topics.鈥� Recent work by Alice Wu uncovered evidence that these attitudes are , while work by Valentina Paredes, Daniele Paserman, and Francisco Pino found evidence suggesting that economics programs both bigotry.
What has so far received comparatively less attention are the ways these attitudes are embodied in the basic concepts and analytical tools that most contemporary economists use to understand the world. Yet it is over this terrain that the discipline鈥檚 problems with issues of social identity prove most harmful to society at large.
The frameworks at the heart of contemporary economic thinking reflect analytical choices that ultimately betray the social position and outlook of those developing economic theory. In all of these choices, contemporary economic thinking has created a stilted conceptual terrain where it is easy to ignore or downplay the economic expressions of systemic inequities by social identity and class. This is evident in some of the discipline鈥檚 core analytical stances, like what is and what is not considered as economic activity, and in its rejection of social categories like gender, race, and class as useful in the analysis of markets and economies. It is also evident in the ways most economists think about the nature of discrimination, its relationship to market competition, and the statistical measurements of its effects on economic outcomes.
Given the outsized influence economics exerts across all fields of social inquiry and policy, these biases exert an insidious, conservative influence over public thinking and over the very framing of debates about those iniquities. Countering this influence requires understanding these biases, which in turn requires engagement with a few foundational methodological and technical issues in economic analysis. In what follows we draw on contributions by many critically minded economists and political economists, and on some of our own recent work, to contribute to a conversation among social scientists and political actors about these biases and about how they may be overcome.
“Without community there is no liberation, no future, only the armisticemost vulnerable and temporary between me and my oppression.” Audre Lorde to Tony Morrison
The 黑料社区
Toni Morrison is one of the writers who wrote the most about 鈥榯he home and racial justice鈥�. In her emblematic novel , set in the post-Civil War South, she tells the story of a young girl murdered by her formerly-enslaved mother, Sethe. Sethe is importantly surrounded by the unheimlich (Freud), the stranger, where the foundations of our ethical judgment on slavery are found. In the United States, in the period 1882 to 1895, approximately one-third to half of the average black mortality rate corresponded to children under the age of five (). We face the dilemma of judging these acts.
Sethe, in an act of love, kills her daughter Beloved to avoid her master’s appropriation of her daughter. Sethe was a pariah in the post-slavery society of the United States. She knew from when she was a slave what it meant for a woman to have her children taken when her breasts were full of milk; that she would have been beaten to exhaustion for others to take her milk. She was raped by her master, as was the case for many of the slaves of Sweet 黑料社区; that name itself being a mockery of a plantation that was held under a system of slave laws that collaborated on that tragic fate. If a female slave escapes, there is a double loss; the capacity for reproduction and for manual labor. The slave society must permanently produce new slaves for reproduction ().
Sethe insistently repeats:”It wasn’t a story to share. They forgot it like a nightmare (鈥�) What should be forgotten before it is shared; what should be hidden and silenced as to not interrupt our present?鈥�. I wondered in my Perturbando el texto colonial. Los estudios poscoloniales en Am茅rica Latina (2010): “This is not an easy story to transmit” but it needs to, as says Bhabha (2002), so that it may be engraved in our subconscious.
The recent 鈥榠nsurrection鈥� on Capitol Hill should put an end to any liberal illusions that 2021 would usher in, in Biden鈥檚 words, a return to decency. Surreal images of the roaming the US Senate may yet become one of the defining photographs of the Trump presidency. In many ways it is symbolic of the President himself – and unashamedly atavistic yet, emboldened by , obstructive and corrosive.
Many of these themes are touched upon in Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth鈥檚 short book . In many senses it is a timely book, published just weeks after the murder of George Floyd and in the midst of the largest global recession since the Second World War, these are fertile grounds for anger. Certainly there is very little to dispute about Lonergan and Blyth鈥檚 premise:
鈥淲e have an abject failure of policy. Rather than presenting a major programme of economic reform, the global political elite has offered nothing substantive, instead choosing either to jump on the bandwagon of nationalism or insist that nothing fundamental is wrong鈥� The political classes, bereft of ideas, are now desperately peddling old ideologies and instincts, or pursuing bizarre distractions like Brexit.鈥�
As a result of this abject failure, people are angry. They are either publicly anger or privately angry. That public anger either manifests itself in moral outrage (think, for instance, of an Extinction Rebellion protest) or tribal rage (for example, and this is used in the book, fans at a football match). Private anger, meanwhile, gives us an insight into the daily micro-stresses of people鈥檚 lives. This is the Lonergan and Blyth typology of anger.
Whose Anger?
While the authors are clear that 鈥渨e need to draw a clear distinction between legitimate public anger and cynical manipulation of tribal anger for political ends鈥� (22), their analysis often fails to live up to the task. Through the centrality of 鈥渓egitimate moral grievances in the Rust Belt鈥� in explaining the election of Trump (25) and the 鈥渞eal stressors鈥� of immigration driving the Brexit vote (111-112), Angrynomics ends up sidestepping important discussions of race for an overly simplistic explanation of class.
In the wake of the current uprising in support of Black Lives Matter, there has been increasing interest in the use of mainstream empirical methods in economics — like randomized control trials (RCTs) and administrative data evaluation — to address issues of racism and violence in the institution of policing. These interests are well intentioned, but similar to prior debates, we are reminded that about the relevance of these approaches amidst a mass movement calling for deep structural and institutional change. In just two weeks, mass protests have sprung up across the U.S. and the world calling for the defunding, disbanding, and abolition of police as well as the dismantling of white supremacy. This moment has the potential to bring about an institutional and structural shift in our politics, society, and economy. Given this, we will echo many of the concerns shared by economists about the limits of some empirical methods, the biases embedded in administrative data, and the relevancy of these approaches to the current moment calling for immediate change.听Read More »
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