In the latest issue of the London Review of Books under the title of 鈥淩ed Power: Indigenous Political Strategies,鈥� Thomas Meaney has written a review of three recent award-winning books by historians of Native North America: Pekka H盲m盲l盲inen鈥檚 Indigenous Continent; Ned Blackhawk鈥檚 The Rediscovery of America; and Nick Estes Our History is the Future. In some ways, the review is impressively learned. Meaney uses the occasion to canvass a generations-spanning array of scholarship on the history of Native North America and engages figures, events, and historiographic questions of which only a very small body of Native and non-native scholars on these topics are even aware.
Marks of erudition aside, Meaney is out to weave together a broader narrative that extends beyond the historical bona fides of these books. The key moment in setting up this narrative comes after Meaney has raised his readers鈥� hopes by opening with a quite historically literate summary of European settler expansionism and Indigenous peoples鈥� responses to it. In the paragraph that then really begins the substance of his review, Meaney pivots: 鈥渂ut recent roadmaps of the historiography either sidestep material questions or mistake a colonized mindset for progressivist one.鈥� This is where Meaney divides the three books under review into three categories of political and historical errors: H盲m盲l盲inen鈥檚 revisionist history overstretches the notion of 鈥渆mpire鈥� in his account of 鈥淚ndigenous power鈥� by labeling the Lakota (and in earlier work, the Comanche) as such. (I agree with this critique, so I leave it aside in this review). Blackhawk represents a trend of scholars of Native history and federal Indian law who 鈥渉ave so thoroughly internalized constitutional ideology that they seem not to notice how their cause has been instrumentalized by the most fanatically libertarian segment of American society.鈥� And finally, 鈥渁 nominally [!] left-wing Native scholarship鈥� that romanticizes Indigenous experiences, engaging in a politics of authenticity. The latter is how Meaney represents the work of Lakota scholar Nick Estes.
After establishing these categories, Meaney argues that these various limitations are 鈥渁ll the more regrettable because the 20th century offered examples of Indigenous co-operation with the left, cases contemporary political theorists have examined with more care than their historian peers.鈥� This is a strange thing to assert at the outset, given that there was no recognizable anticolonial 鈥渓eft鈥� in the US settler colony that Native nations could possibly have 鈥渃ooperated鈥� with in the 19th century. The consensus on the necessity and inevitability of land dispossession and structural predation cut across almost all categories of white society, including almost all of those on the far left of the political spectrum. Moreover, this included, as many others have noted, some key figures in the history of African-American political thought such as Douglas and Du Bois. What these historians鈥攑articularly Blackhawk and Estes鈥攁sk us to do is to suspend some assumptions about what constitutes the commitments of 鈥渢he left鈥� at all, given the deep investments of American republicanism and many later iterations of US leftism (let alone the liberalism of the Democratic Party) in colonial dispossession or just racialized indifference.
Imperialism is still a relevant concept today, woven much more tightly into the structures of countries and economies than ever. The outcome of those seeking to expand their ownership or influence has stayed just as colonial and imperialist as ever before, especially now with the massive amount of capital accumulated in developed countries and the influence these countries have over the rest of the world. In a paper by John Foster, he quotes Harry Magdoff when he said, 鈥淚mperialism is the way of life of capitalism,鈥� when asked if it was still necessary (Foster et al., 2019). To expand, capitalism needs a mode or justification or framework that it adopts and has a history of working so well with, and that is imperialism. Colonizing, occupying, and dominating are blatant ways that imperialism effectively occurs in history. It has not changed significantly except that the people furthering their 鈥渆xpansion鈥� are not outrightly removing, killing, or taking resources from people; they now sign policies, laws, or rules, and then people follow this or follow it by force. Historically, the effects of imperialism have remained. We see this in the Native Americans who are forced to live on reservations whose way of life and traditions are limited due to state and private ownership of surrounding land in the form of preservations, parks, or plants for resourcing.
Imperialism can manifest in various forms: military, economic, cultural, agricultural, technological, and political influence. The United States, for example, has the largest military in the world, spending billions of dollars on funding its military and weaponry and maintaining this presence in countries worldwide. It has military bases all over the U.S. but also in Japan, Germany, and South Korea, amongst the most significant bases, and then in at least 80 countries such as Turkey, Bahrain, Spain, Honduras, and Cuba (O’Dell, 2023). This form of maintaining an imperialist presence is, in many ways, a reminder of the global hegemon that is the U.S. militarily and economically. The 鈥渟ilent鈥� presence of the military that Prabhat Patnaik discusses in his paper 鈥淲hatever Happened to Imperialism鈥� symbolizes the coercion of power the U.S. has over the rest of the world. A reminder that the United States could quickly get involved in smaller countries’ affairs (Patnaik, 1990). It is an effective tactic since massive amounts of weaponry can easily overpower another country or group of people.
Even more significantly, imperialism has manifested in global food systems. During the rise of the United States into its power today, there are clear examples of state-sponsored policies that changed the diets and modes of producing food. This mode of controlling and forcing people to consume food of the dominant hegemonic power has been seen throughout history, especially with indigenous peoples’ communities. An example of this state influence over food in indigenous communities is in what is now known as California; during the 1850s, with the invasion of European Americans, the people that lived in the Klamath Mountains, the Karuk People, were severely affected by the racial formations and domination for land and resources that the state was forcing upon them. The Karuk people lived near the Klamath River, and fishing was a primary form of survival in 1970. Although they had legal rights to fish in their river, state officials often arrested them for fishing, destroying their way of life and traditions. In this example, we see the state forcing people to assimilate. Since many of the Karuk people were trying not to be arrested or even killed, many of them resorted to eating government food, which lacked nutrients and was also forcing the native people to consume and engage in practices that were 鈥淲hite鈥� behaviors via boarding schools and other consumption behaviors that were not a part of their culture (Norgaard, 2011). Also, arresting the indigenous people is trying to erase the existence of these people in the first place, which is genocide continuing. This example of the Karuk people demonstrates how taking over land, either physically or legally(coercively), is perhaps a dominant way to maintain and gain control of people. The ability to own land or own the means of how food is produced is vital in being able to live healthily and sustainably. Also, food in almost any culture has significant meaning and symbolizes traditions passed down. Removing traditional food and practices removes culture and identity. If imperialism is how a state or group of people exercises control to maintain power via economic and social relations, then the first and most dominant way is to remove the ability to access resources for food. This is followed by the stripping away of culture and traditions. This happened with the Native Americans and still occurs in the global south and north today, although how those limitations exist in each may vary.
The spread of corporate power and how quickly it has dominated food and other consumed agricultural resources is also relevant to how it impacts development. Using the United States as the example in this analysis, how it produces its food and is influenced by corporate power in agricultural industries affects other developing countries where many of the subsidized crops grown here are exported. Philip McMichael highlights the corporate food regime in their analysis of food regimes and their history in the Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies by Akram-Lodhi. McMichael denotes that a corporate food regime has risen in this neoliberal era of corporate power. A food regime plagued with exporting grains and crops to developing countries while continuing its high grain growth here in the U.S. The Farm Bill heavily subsidizes corn, wheat, soy, and rice and directly fuels this. He writes
In the 1990s, trade agreements (notably the WTO and associated free trade agreements) instituted liberalization measures to universalize 鈥榤arket rule鈥� via neoliberal agricultural investment and trade freedoms for transnational agribusiness. US and European Union subsidies for agribusiness artificially cheapened foodstuffs for dumping in world markets at the expense of now unprotected Southern farmers’ (Lodhi et al., 2021).
This advanced the dominance of the United States imperial programming and subjugated developing countries into cycles of foreign debt and political unrest. Artificially deflating the price of crops, countries struggled to develop large agricultural industries and could not develop economically past the agricultural stage. The United States used this domination to convince developing countries that they could develop manufacturing and resource extraction-based industries by increasing their reliance on foreign aid and foreign investment. However, they were subordinated into global structures of domination and colonization that few countries have been able to escape. In this conceptualization of corporate food regimes, McMichael denotes how the corporate influence of power affects not only U.S. consumers but also the livelihoods of small agricultural producers, domestically and internationally. Having power over food and agriculture is a prevalent form of imperialism and capitalism, and this severely impacts the course of development. If the most basic form of sustainment is unavailable, then, from a nutrition standpoint, how can people function and live properly? Malnutrition from starvation or nutrient deficiencies severely impacts survival or health outcomes.
An example of food imperialism can be seen in Palestine, which, under its occupation, cannot control its access to land and water resources. This has led, over the decades, and more prominently now in the current crisis, to severe food insecurity and malnutrition. In the West Bank, 63% of the cultivable land is under Israeli government control, and they only have about 15% access to groundwater from the Western Aquifer Basin. In contrast, the Israeli government controls and uses the rest (~85%). Controlling land and limiting what food can be grown and imported have impacted the course of development for these people (Shaban, 2022). In the relevance and different forms that imperialism has, this is a current example of the historically brutal forms in which power is exercised over people through agriculture and food.
Seeing corporate power reflected here in the United States, we can turn to the poultry industry and labor practices that occur here in the efforts to produce massive quantities of meat and profit. In 2019, the U.S. poultry industry produced 42 billion pounds of chicken, more than any other country globally, enough to give every person on Earth about 5.32 pounds of chicken (Freshour et al. 2020). Most of the workers in the processing plants are Black, and many are ex-felons since this is one of the few industries that will hire them. Many workers are subjected to long hours of standing and monotonous work on a processing line that will often speed up, and workers must work faster to process the meat. Not only creating health issues such as arthritis but also the time taken away from these workers to rest.
Agriculture and food are areas of extreme relevance to the concept of imperialism. Manifesting through corporate power, the economic and social relations that spread hegemonic domination over agriculture and food is one of the fastest ways to extend a state鈥檚 or group’s influence over countries and people. What people need to survive more than anything is food and water. To have influence or control over how it is produced and distributed, as well as who produces and distributes it, is a clear demonstration of the relevance of the concept of imperialism. This is why steps taken to remove much of the corporate power held in the global agricultural industry are essential in creating a more just and sustainable future.
References
Akram-Lodhi, A. H., Dietz, Kristina, and Engels, Bettina, eds. 2021. Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies. Chapter 25. Food Regimes Philip McMichael, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. Accessed December 15, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Foster, John B., Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik, Samir Amin, Intan Suwandi, Hannah Holleman, Brett Clark, Ricardo Antunes, Harry Magdoff, and Firoze Manji. 2019. 鈥�.鈥� Monthly Review.
Freshour, Carrie, Nick Estes, Roxanne Dunbar, Charisse Burden, Bill Fletcher, Lilia D. Monz贸, Jesse Benjamin, et al. 2020. 鈥�.鈥� Monthly Review.
Norgaard, K. M., Reed, R., & Van Horn, C. (2011). A continuing legacy: Institutional racism, Hunger and nutritional justice on the Klamath. in Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (Eds.). (2011). Cultivating Food Justice: Race: Class, and Sustainability. MIT Press.
O’Dell, Hope. 2023. 鈥溾�� Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Patnaik, Prabhat. 1990. 鈥溾�� Monthly Review.
Shaban, Omar. 2022. 鈥�.鈥� Arab Center Washington DC.
Mirette Nunez is a master’s student in Economics at The New School. Her research interests are in the effects of corporate power and capitalism聽on global food and agriculture systems.聽
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.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 was awarded to Claudia Goldin, professor of economics at Harvard University, for 鈥渉aving advanced our understanding of women鈥檚 labour market outcomes鈥�. Goldin is now one of three women who have been awarded the prize, and, more importantly, this is the first time that the prize recognises research that makes a fundamental distinction between economic outcomes of men and women. Her work makes significant contributions to both the empirical and theoretical aspects of the theme, particularly in the context of the US.
Empirically, she applied innovative ways to unearth data for women鈥檚 labour market outcomes in the US at a time when the labour force surveys only collected this information for men. This allowed her to uncover the long-term trend of economic outcomes for women. Her work revealed that there was no linear relationship between economic growth and development and the women鈥檚 labour force participation. Instead, bringing together cross-country evidence and historical data, she empirically established a U-shaped relationship between women鈥檚 employment and economic growth. This implies that at low levels of economic growth, larger share of women tend to participate in the labour market, largely in agriculture. However, with economic growth and a sectoral shift away from agriculture, women鈥檚 participation faltered. Goldin argued that the 鈥渋ncome effect鈥� — the rise in household incomes alongside economic growth along with the increasing use of technology in agricultural activities — may explain women鈥檚 initial withdrawal from employment. However, beyond a certain level of economic growth, women鈥檚 participation rose as their education levels increased and as more white-collar emerged by replacing the factory jobs that are often stigmatised for women.
鈥淎t its best, one of the most creative activities is being involved in a struggle with other people, breaking out of our isolation, seeing our relations with others change, discovering new dimensions in our lives 鈥� it [is] a powerful collective experience鈥�.
Silvia Federici, 1984
News broke on the very last day of 2022 that members of the New School鈥檚 part-time faculty (PTF) union – ACT-UAW 7902 – had voted to ratify a new five-year contract, following what some are calling the longest adjunct strike in American history (Hamberg, 2022). A 鈥檛entative agreement鈥� was reached on December 10th, after almost a month of strike action where more than 1,600 PTF members had taken to the picket line. Their existing contract had expired, and there was no sign of a satisfactory renewal. The dispute was multifaceted, but primarily concerned poor pay, uncompensated labour time, general job security and health insurance coverage.
The agreement solidified a historic pay increase (the largest PTF at the New School have ever received), as well as an enhanced offer for paid family leave, improved terms for annualisation, compensation for labor performed outside of the classroom and improvements in health care access (Hamberg, 2022). Whilst there is much to be celebrated in these gains, for the New School community this was a month-long struggle marked with uncertainty, tension, and growing hostility. The disconnect between the university鈥檚 administration and its community of faculty and students was made painfully, publicly evident. Observers couldn鈥檛 help but call hypocrisy on an institution founded on radical values employing 鈥渃orporate union-busting tactics 鈥� antithetical to [its] progressive heritage鈥� (Hamberg, 2022).
Much can be gleaned from this contained episode: the state of higher education following a period of its incessant marketisation; the power of organised labour to rally against exploitation; the role higher education specifically can play in a wider workers鈥� movement. This blog post will attempt to place the New School鈥檚 recent ACT-UAW 7902 strike in its wider context, that of an (inter)national worker movement, both within the higher education sector and beyond. By doing this, I will elicit some of the unique contributions academics, other university workers and students themselves can offer such a movement.
In this post we show that an increase in aggregate demand first generates an increase in the use of productive equipment and then an increase in productive capacity. This suggests we do not need to worry about inflation after a fiscal or monetary stimulus to boost aggregate demand, but can rather expect higher investment in the long term along with utilisation returning to its pre-shock levels.
A stylised fact that characterises modern economies is that part of the installed productive capacity is persistently idle. By productive capacity I mean the productive equipment (mostly fixed capital goods) in existence, together with that part of the workforce which is required to operate it. As we can see in Figure 1, in countries as diverse as Belgium, Finland or Lithuania, the effective utilisation of installed capacity often gravitates below 100%, and around 80% on average worldwide.
Figure 1. Installed capacity utilisation by country (1998Q1-2017Q4).
Source: see Appendix I.
The academic consensus is that there are large margins of idle capacity planned by entrepreneurs. The reasons why entrepreneurs plan to operate with idle capacity vary according to the school of thought considered. At the risk of making a drastic simplification, we can say that while some authors think that entrepreneurs do so in order not to lose market share in the face of changes in demand, others tend to think that there is a rate of utilisation of installed capacity that does not accelerate inflation (Non-accelerating inflation rate of capacity utilisation, NAICU).
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.
“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.
黑料社区 