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 .
I am writing this short commentary to bear witness of the ethnic cleansing that is going on since 7 October. As I write this short text, over 13000 including 5000 children have been killed by Israel in Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), many thousand people are missing under the rubbles and as many have been displaced from their homes. Twelve-hundred people have been reported to have been killed in Israel by Hamas, and over 200 people have been abducted by Hamas.
It is important to historicise the current genocide which many observers and Palestinians themselves have called the second Nakba. The People of Palestine have survived and continuously resisted seven decades of occupation and violations of their basic rights. Their genocide has taken many forms: occupation, waves of land and sea grabs, dispossession, expropriation, displacement, assassinations, sexual violence. The genocide we are witnessing did not start today. This violence has been going on for 41 days鈥nd 75 years. And it has continued because of the many green lights, or lack of reactions to the countless acts of violence that the Israeli apartheid state has inflicted for decades. But most importantly, the spree of violence started with hate speeches and with the slow and insidious dehumanisation of Palestinians through the routinisation of their deaths. A social death. Countless, faceless scores of fatalities, wounded, jailed, and displaced civilians have over the decades been buried under seconds-long reporting at the radio or on TV, paragraph-long accounting of loss of lives in newspapers.
It is an uncontroversial observation that the history of capitalist development in South America is characterised by its subsumption to global capital accumulation through the production and export of agricultural and mining commodities for the world market. From this common starting point, however, there emerge divergent ways to account for the reproduction, and development limits, of this mode of insertion into the global economy. For many working in Latin American traditions of political economy it is almost common sense to assume, depending on one鈥檚 political and theoretical tastes, that a combination of centre-periphery power relations such as imperialism, monopoly capital, declining terms of trade and/or super-exploitation are the conceptual tools to understand, analyse, and strategize the overcoming of so-called 鈥榗ommodity dependence鈥� and embark on genuine development. It is noteworthy that in this new book – , edited by Javiera Rojas Cifuentes, Gabriel Rivas Castro, Mauricio Fuentes Salvo, and Juan Kornblihtt, not only are these concepts eschewed but their underlying trade premise 鈥� the transfer of 鈥榮urplus鈥� from periphery to the centre through mechanisms such as 鈥榰nequal exchange鈥� 鈥� is turned on its head. As opposed to structural power relations operating as the barrier to development, this collection opens an internal window onto the impotence of capital to develop the productive forces and, in doing so, offers distinctive strategic implications for the centralised organisation of working-class political action across the region.
The book builds on work that has been developed under the auspices of the in Buenos Aires, following the original contributions of Argentine scholar Juan I帽igo-Carrera to the Marxian critique of political economy. It is I帽igo-Carrera鈥檚 opening chapter that frames the distinguishing features of this Marxian scholarship and the original critique of structuralist and dependency theories of Latin American development. Rather than the pitfalls of international exchange determined by direct power relations between geo-spatial containers, the cause of uneven development in South America is predicated on the valorisation of capital through its position in the international division of labour through production relations. This bears emphasis because, for all the authors, capital is not an asymmetric relation between countries, a factor of production, a social group, or a firm wielding monopoly power but an objectified general social relation of private and independent production (i.e., capitalism), subsumed under the movement of formation of the general rate of profit. Indeed, the antagonistic formation of the general rate profit is the concrete form in which capital organises and reproduces itself as a social relation behind the backs of states, capitalists, labour, and landlords. The crucial category here, and what all the chapters demonstrate, is the extent to which capital valorises in South America, as an aliquot part of the international division of labour of global capitalism, through the appropriation of ground rent.
The Gaddi community of the Indian Himalayas experience the present as fraught with various, entangled pressures 鈥� pressure to ensure upward social mobility and inclusion in India鈥檚 middle class, pressure to secure stable domestic incomes, pressure to maintain sexual and gendered propriety. Written by , this piece examines how such pressures are not evenly distributed across the community but are absorbed by particular people through the experience of bodily and mental 鈥榯ension鈥�. 鈥榯ension鈥�, Simpson argues, both registers these pressures in the body, and allows people to push back against them, issuing a particular and paradoxical account of power and the body.
A view of the Dhaula Dhar range from below. Photograph by the author.
The Gaddi people, who inhabit the lower foothills of the Indian Himalayan Dhaula Dhar range, experienced a number of structural transformations in the past century. An ecological crisis, precipitated by neo-colonial environmental policies, has dramatically shifted their landscape. They have given up their traditional agro-pastoral livelihood in favour of waged labour as pastures and properties in Himalayan foothills have become enclosed.聽 Hierarchies of caste and social status have become unyoked from livelihood practices. They have shifted their religious practice from Shaivite animism toward more muscular Hindu mainstream religion. Their practices of kinship and marriage have become increasingly nuclearized, dependent on a. As a result of these changes, the Gaddi community experience the present as fraught with various, entangled pressures 鈥� pressure to ensure upward social mobility and inclusion in India鈥檚 middle class, pressure to secure stable domestic incomes in a boom-and-bust entrepreneurial economy, pressure to maintain sexual and gendered propriety in an increasingly politicised public sphere.
Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, has attracted significant attention for his in which he advises Indian youth to work 70 hours a week to contribute to the nation鈥檚 growth. Mr. Murthy, who also happens to be the father-in-law of the UK鈥檚 Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, supports his advice by drawing parallels to the post-war recoveries of Germany and Japan. He suggests that Indian corporate leaders should similarly consider increasing employees鈥� working hours to enhance productivity
In my view, Mr. Murthy鈥檚 advice is ignorant and misinformed at best, or highly malicious at worst. In either case, it is profoundly misguided. In this blog, we will critically assess his statement, examining both its intent and factual accuracy. This discussion will also lead to broader reflections on the themes of work and leisure
The degrowth movement is a radical attempt to challenge our current economic system, arguing that its excessive focus on economic growth will ultimately harm people and planet. It has recently gained increasing attention, not only because it has found its way into mainstream political debates (see, for example, the at the European Parliament), but also because related research projects have won prestigious international funding awards (see, for example, ). However, as you may have noticed, these events are mainly taking place in the Global North. The concept as such was also originally developed in the Global North. At the same time, the movement is strongly committed to the idea of global justice and a decolonization of relations between the Global North and South.
This begs the question: What is the role of the Global South in the contemporary degrowth discourse? To what extent does the discourse take into account Southern perspectives? Does it think that the South should also degrow, or is Northern degrowth mainly seen as a self-prescription? And to what extent does the degrowth community reflect on the implications of Northern degrowth for the Global South? To answer these questions, we have taken stock of . But before we go into the details of what we found and what we make of it, let us briefly outline what degrowth is all about.
Neoclassical economics 鈥� and contemporary extensions of it 鈥� has an outsized presence in academic and policy making circuits. This position of privilege builds upon more than a century of theoretical development, comprising the contemporary 鈥渕ainstream鈥� of economic science. The characteristics and rise of this mainstream, determined in many cases by means beyond pure intellectual merit, has been regularly documented in the existing scholarship.
Economic imperialism has been one of the results of mainstream dominance, and its academic impact on other social sciences has been widely documented, including their corresponding areas of policy making. In this regard, I present here an approach to the problematic relationship between Neoclassical Urban Economics and Urban Planning. These are two related social science disciplines, which however have very different epistemologies and approaches to policy advice.
The main difference between academic mainstream Economics and Urban Planning is methodological, in terms of what is considered a valid approach to scientific knowledge. Economics builds upon logical positivism; it first performs deductive theory construction that 鈥渄escribes鈥� reality, and then subsequently tests its theoretical predictions, which in some cases (not all the cases) lead to policy prescriptions. In contrast, Urban Planning is an action-oriented and problem-solving scientific discipline. It inductively produces normative theory, which explicitly shows the analyst鈥檚 point of view regarding the topic and how to intervene on it (public policy advice).
Mainstream Economics is in essence defined by the method and theoretical approach, not by the topic (the economy). This allows it to engage with a wide variety of topics, one of them being the spatial analysis of the built environment, which is also the topic of academic Urban Planning.
Since 2017, Cotonou 鈥� the economic capital of Benin 鈥� has witnessed several urban development projects. Aiming to showcase the city as the new face of a new Benin, attractive to both businessmen and tourists, the plans have involved extensive tarmacking projects, the development of the city鈥檚 first shopping malls, the rebuilding of several markets to 鈥榤odern鈥� standards, the erection of emblematic statues 鈥� notably that of 鈥樷��, branded as an ode to feminine courage and a national emblem 鈥�, and the design of a new coast line. The urban poor have paid a disproportionate price in the implementation of this new 鈥� that is, a shiny urban renovation project disconnected from the sociological realities of the city and from the needs of whole swathes of its population, especially in the urban precariat.
In what follows, we argue that the successive waves of evictions of thousands of poor urban dwellers have pressurized in multiple ways and in the longer run already fragile existences. As neighbourhoods and livelihood were dislocated, their ex-residents were simultaneously witnessing their life chances shrinking for the foreseeable future, and faced with the traumatic aftermath of dislocated homes. A 鈥榞enerative鈥� process in itself, as Gunv贸r Jonsson recently argued on this blog about evictions in Dakar, there is no doubt that state pressure grounded in neoliberal urbanism affects the urban poor in multiple ways. The following paragraphs explore such multi-layered consequences, from degraded economic conditions to tarnished senses of one鈥檚 place in the social world.
黑料社区 