Authoritarian populism and neo-extractivism in Bolivia and Ecuador: the unresolved agrarian question and the prospects for food sovereignty as counter-hegemony

ABSTRACT

The new economic flows ushered in across the South by the rise of China in particular have permitted some to circumvent the imperial debt trap, notably the ‘pink tide’ states of Latin America. These states, exploiting this window of opportunity, have sought to revisit developmentalism by means of ‘neo-extractivism’. The populist, but now increasingly authoritarian, regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador are exemplars of this trend and have swept to power on the back of anti-neoliberal sentiment. These populist regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador articulate a sub-hegemonic discourse of national developmentalism, whilst forging alliances with counter-hegemonic groups, united by a rhetoric of anti-imperialism, indigenous revival, and livelihood principles such as buen vivir. But this rhetorical ‘master frame’ hides the class divisions and real motivations underlying populism: that of favouring neo-extractivism, principally via sub-imperial capital, to fund the ‘compensatory state’, supporting small scale commercial farmers through reformism whilst largely neglecting the counter-hegemonic aims, and reproductive crisis, of the middle/lower peasantry, and lowland indigenous groups, and their calls for food sovereignty as radical social relational change. These tensions are reflected in the marked shift from populism to authoritarian populism, as neo-extractivism accelerates to fund ‘neo-developmentalism’ whilst simultaneously eroding the livelihoods of subaltern groups, generating intensified political unrest. This paper analyses this transition to authoritarian populism particularly from the perspective of the unresolved agrarian question and the demand by subaltern groups for a radical, or counter-hegemonic, approach to food sovereignty. It speculates whether neo-extractivism’s intensifying political and ecological contradictions can foment a resurgence of counter-hegemonic mobilization towards this end.     

Understanding the silent majority in authoritarian populism: what can we learn from popular support for Putin in rural Russia?

ABSTRACT

This study distinguishes and challenges three main assumptions/shortcomings regarding the silent majority – the majority of the ‘ordinary’, ‘simple’, ‘little’ people, who are the main supporters of authoritarian populism. The silent majority is commonly portrayed as (1) consisting of ‘irrational’, ‘politically short-sighted’ people, who vote against their self-interests; (2) it is analysed as a homogeneous group, without attempting to distinguish different motives and interests among its members; (3) existing studies often overlook the political economy and structures of domination that gave rise to authoritarian populism. I address these shortcomings while analysing the political behaviour of rural Russians, who are the major supporters of Vladimir Putin. I reveal that the agrarian property regime and power relations in the countryside largely define the political posture of different rural groups. Less secure socio-economic strata respond more strongly to economic incentives, while better-off villagers tend to support the regime's ideological appeals. Furthermore, Putin's traditionalist authoritarian leadership style appeals to the archetypal base of the rural society – namely, its peasant roots – and, therefore, finds stronger support among the farming population. Finally, this study reveals that collective interests prevail over individual interests in the voting behaviour of rural dwellers, who support the existing regime despite the economic hardship it imposes upon them.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

Neoliberal developmentalism,authoritarian populism,and extractivism in the countryside: the Soma mining disaster in Turkey

ABSTRACT

While state-society relations in Turkey have historically been top-down and coups d’état periodically interrupted democratic politics, the recent authoritarian turn under Erdo?an is remarkable. Two dynamics are especially salient. First, Erdo?an and his AKP have been particularly effective in deepening the neoliberalisation of economy and society. Their policies have created a new form of neoliberal developmentalism, where solutions to all social ills have come to be seen as possible through rapid economic growth. Second, they have intensified the transformation of the countryside, where new forms of dispossession and deagrarianisation open the way to an unprecedented extractivist drive. Together, neoliberal developmentalism and extractivism have resulted in growing social dissent. The eruption of anger after the Soma coal mining disaster that killed 301 miners is one such case. The paper shows how Erdo?an and the AKP use populist tactics (ranging from an uptick in nationalist discourse to the provision of ‘coal aid’ in winter) to assuage their critics. Where these prove inadequate, an increasingly violent crackdown on social dissent is being deployed in the name of peace and order as the country remains in a state of emergency since the attempted coup of July 2016.     

Immigration and the politics of space allocation in rural Spain: The case of Andalusia

The incorporation of southern European countries into the European Union has transformed the relationship between peasants, the state and the international labour market. In order to illustrate the nature of this change as its affects southern Spain, examined here is its current impact on rural labour and the construction of interethnic ‘difference’ in Andalusia. It is argued that, in order to establish control over migration inland, the Spanish state has allocated to Andalusian peasants a ‘frontline’ role in forging a European identity in opposition to the migrant ‘other’, although this involves what is essentially a class struggle between peasants who – themselves migrants once – are now ‘insiders’ and rural employers, and migrants who are their agricultural workers and the new ‘outsiders’. In the Andalusian village context this takes a specific ideological form: namely, disputes between peasant insider and migrant outsider over such things as their respective occupation of and rights to space in the locality.     

Moving beyond ideas of laddism: conceptualising ‘mischievous masculinities’ as a new way of understanding everyday sexism and gender relations

Abstract

This article engages with current debates on ‘lad cultures’ by questioning how we understand the term in the specific context of everyday sexism and within groups of men varying in age. Further to this, using a feminist and critical masculinity studies perspective, the article will explore how men do not necessarily comprehend their behaviour within the framework of lad culture or within the continuum of sexual violence. Through discussion of ethnographic and interview data collected over a year at a site historically associated with lad cultures, that of a Rugby Union club in Northern England, an alternative way of conceptualising masculinity and everyday sexism, ‘mischievous masculinities’, is proposed. Men in the research practiced what I term mischievous masculinities, whereby they implemented ‘banter’ to aid in both the construction and de-construction of sexist ideas within the rugby space. Performing mischievous masculinity enabled men of all ages to both engage in and simultaneously challenge everyday sexism in ways they understood to be ‘innocent’. However, the continual framing of banter as ‘just a laugh’ demonstrated that this form of sexism can be construed as problematic, due, in part, to its subtlety, in relation to more overt and violent sexist practices. A key difference between the men in my research and previous theorising of ‘lad culture’ is the recurring theme amongst older participants that ‘I should know better’, demonstrating consciousness of the sexist and problematic connotations which could be drawn from this interaction. This notion of mischievous masculinities then, in the context of a life course perspective, can be seen to challenge more established notions of an unreflexive lad culture, thus affording a more nuanced understanding of everyday sexism amongst more diverse groups of men than currently exists, as well as allowing for men’s agency in a specific site.     

THE ‘AUSSIE BATTLER’ AND THE HEGEMONY OF CENTRALISING WORKING-CLASS MASCULINITY IN AUSTRALIA

Abstract This paper explores the ways in which the ‘Aussie battler’ identity of the character Kenny Smyth in the film Kenny (2006) is both visible through its hegemonic status and cultural ubiquity, and invisible as the marker of normative Australian identity. This paper examines the ‘mainstream’ and ‘battler’ identities and the discourse that surrounds them, in particular looking at working-class masculinity which are argued to be both hegemonic and centralising. The paper explores how identities such as these, which exist at the axis of invisibility/visibility, can access narratives of entitlement and marginalisation. As a partially gendered and fully classed construct, the ‘battler’ identity operates within mainstream and mainstreaming culture in often exclusionary ways, denying any real challenge to classed and gendered inequality while using classed narratives to make a claim for more cultural, social and economic space.     

The role of the TUC in significant industrial disputes: an historical critical overview

ABSTRACT

Historically the British Trades Union Congress’s (TUC) role in a significant number of major industrial disputes has been subject to both accusations of ‘betrayals’ and ‘sell-outs’ as well as more sympathetic accounts which emphasise the constraints faced by the TUC both in terms of their institutional role and their relationship with constituent unions. Drawing on evidence concerning the role of the TUC in significant disputes including the 1926 General Strike, the strike wave of 1972, 1975–8 Grunwick dispute, the 1978/9 ‘winter of discontent’, the 1984/5 miners’ strike, the 1986–7 News International strike and more recent examples, the paper highlights four constraints on the role of the TUC in relation to major disputes: their political loyalty to the Labour Party; an aversion to defying the law; the avoidance of appearing to challenge state power; and structural constraints to an extent inherent within trade union officialdom.     

Belly Casts and Placenta Pills: Refiguring Postmaternal Entrepreneurialism

ABSTRACT

This article takes at its starting point the idea that maternalism and entrepreneurialism are necessarily antithetical as Julie Stephens argues in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care [2012. New York: Columbia University Press]. Building on scholarship which shows how motherhood has become commercialised and commodified in contemporary culture, we extend this field by investigating how mothers who are providers of services to other mothers and pregnant women are negotiating neoliberalism and entrepreneurialism. Through an empirical investigation of birth and parenting entrepreneurs – including hypnobirthing classes and placenta pill businesses – in Bristol, UK we argue that our self-employed participants were building community and care economies within neoliberal modes of self-production, thus suggesting a more complex and ambivalent relationship between entrepreneurialism and postmaternalism. We suggest that the experiences of women entrepreneurs or ‘mumpreneurs’ offer insights into how the spaces of work might be, counter to Stephens’ characterisation, places of negotiation and struggle for the politics of feminism, rather than sites of ‘anti-maternalism’ or the ‘forgetting’ of maternalism. Moreover, our participants’ accounts were strongly shaped by feminist ethics of care thus challenging the representation of such services as therapeutic postfeminist technologies of self-work.     

MARRIAGE ‘AMONG THE MURKANS’

Abstract Stella Miles Franklin (1879–1954) is best known for contributions to a uniquely Australian literary tradition. However, during her American years (1906–1915) when she worked in Chicago with the National Women's Trade Union League, Franklin wrote much unpublished fiction in the New Woman literary genre common to early-twentieth-century US women's traditions. This paper focuses on two such little-known unpublished stories: ‘Uncle Robert's Wedding Present’ (1908) and ‘Teaching Him’ (1909), discussing ways their entanglements with questions of marriage and economics are grounded in Franklin's work and personal life and in the intellectual influences that shaped her writing.     

Permanent precarity: capital and labour in the Central African copperbelt

Abstract

This article provides a new history of mine capital and labour in the ‘Central African Copperbelt’ – the cross-border mining region of the Zambian copperbelt and Haut Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It doing so, it seeks to overcome the limitations of earlier structurally minded analysis rooted in modernist notions regarding the transformative capacity of mining capital and a ‘new’ African working class. Building on post-structuralist challenges to such assumptions, the article demonstrates the precarity, unevenness and uncertainty of the actually existing copperbelt economy and society. The comparison of the two copperbelt regions enables consideration of differential outcomes as a way of rethinking apparent inevitabilities. Analysis of how ideas about these mining societies were generated and circulated helps explain how dominant ways of understanding copperbelt capital and labour relations became established and continue to inform nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ of mining-fuelled prosperity at odds with historical reality.     

Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.     

Article 23(4) Trade Union Rights and the United Nations policy of devolution on labour relations

ABSTRACT

Article 23(4) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states ‘Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.’ This article documents the global legislative history of Article 23(4) trade union rights from its original drafting to interpretation by international labour standards. The history includes debates on the fundamental principles of trade union rights, the decision by ECOSOC to ignore a call to establish a permanent UN Commission on Trade Union Rights, the devolution of authority from the United Nations to the International Labour Organization, how ILO international law experts framed trade union rights as a subset of the freedom of association, and the treatment of labour relations policy, including compulsory union membership, that resulted under international human rights norms. The history is discussed as one that confines standards of policy on labour rights in the global political economy and has particular implications for the discourse on labour rights as human rights.     

Mary Wollstonecraft’s divergent attitudes towards trust

ABSTRACT

Mary Wollstonecraft is increasingly being recognized as a philosopher who made a noteworthy contribution to moral and political philosophy. Her work not only encompassed political treatises, such as the now well-known A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also fiction. This article demonstrates how Wollstonecraft’s work comprised three main ways of engaging with trust, namely distrust, virtuous trust, and open trust. It puts these three forms of trust into context with Wollstonecraft’s ambivalent relation to the 18^th-century culture of sensibility. Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s open form of trust is compared with the 20^th-century Danish theologian and philosopher K. E. Løgstrup’s conception of trust. Løgstrup regarded genuine trust as a spontaneous, basic phenomenon that was not rooted in moral reasoning. While there are some similarities between Wollstonecraft’s open trust and Løgstrup’s understanding of trust, Wollstonecraft ultimately reinforced the value of ‘an educated heart’, namely the idea that the feelings of the heart should be cultivated by reason. Accordingly, this article offers some insight into how we may perceive Wollstonecraft’s strong rejection of Edmund Burke’s ‘inbred sentiments’, that is, Burke’s belief in innate, benign moral instincts.     

Authoritarian populism in rural Belarus: distinction,commonalities, and projected finale

ABSTRACT

The paper inspects how agrarian debates apply to rural Belarus. Following the ‘persistence versus disappearance’ debate, it finds the moral economy alongside request for change. Pursuing the ‘adaptation versus resistance’ debate, it spots adaptability and exclusion of those failing to adapt. Here ‘lukascism’ surfaces resting on constructing the ‘other’. A rare case of agrarian populism employed by top authority, lukascism is otherwise humdrum. Proclaiming some principles of the moral economy while disregarding others, inconsistent lukascism undercuts the ‘coexistence scenario’ of households with large-scale farming. Change avoidance is a commonplace foretelling lukascism’s finale: its appeal is limited by the older generation..     

Cindy Sherman in a New Millennium: Fashion,Feminism, Art and Ageing

ABSTRACT

If feminism and the fashion industry were once seen as adversaries, given how the strictures of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) permeated so much of second wave feminism, a consideration of ‘fashion’ is now central to contemporary feminist scholarship. But just as the earlier critique of fashion seemed finally to have been supplanted, certain basic arguments around dress and makeup nevertheless resurfaced within contemporary feminism. The current neoliberal climate has led to the ever-increasing consumption of ‘fashionable’ goods, provoking unease and encouraging the contested ‘protectionist discourse’ within feminism to shield young women from just such excesses. Meanwhile, the fashion world itself, arguably more powerful than ever, has across the last twenty years continued a process of legitimising itself through its various modes of alliance with the art world; it has even hijacked elements of feminist practice in the pursuit of publicity. This article suggests that the fashion industry and contemporary feminism are nonetheless alike in one significant respect: neither have properly engaged with the needs of an ageing population. It is an omission that this article will seek to examine through a discussion of the recent ‘portraits‘ of Cindy Sherman, an artist of great interest to feminist scholars, in whose earlier work there was a discernible ‘anti-fashion’ element. Now ‘fashionable’ herself, a leading figure in the global art world, she has collaborated with the fashion industry in rather different ways. Her ‘portraits’ of 2012, in which she reconfigured herself as imaginary Manhattan socialites in or beyond middle age, and a later series, exhibited in 2016, where she appears as a series of ageing, anonymous ‘movie stars’, reveal more general ideological tensions surrounding the representation of women, the ageing process and the fashionable ideal. It is the dissection of these tensions that underpin this article, for while Sherman’s work has been the subject of academic debate across a forty year period, her use and critique of the ‘fashionable ‘ image has not been examined alongside an exploration of the expanding activities of the fashion industry itself; nor have her recent images of ageing women been examined within this more general context.     

The vanishing exception: republican and reactionary specters of populism in rural Spain

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the dominant European tendency, the 2008 economic crisis and the ensuing austerity in Spain led to the emergence of left populist movements that have kept authoritarian populism at bay. However, those progressive movements have made few inroads in the countryside, potentially ceding this ground to reactionary politics. But if the specter of reaction haunts the countryside, I also suggest that this specter coexists with emancipatory possibilities. To examine these, I discuss a rural protest movement against extractive practices that developed in the early 2000s. This movement, I argue, provides valuable insight into how feelings of abandonment can be given a class-conscious, popular democratic expression.     

Looking for Lela Simone: Singin’ in the Rain and microhistories of women’s sound work behind the scenes and below-the-line in Classical Hollywood Cinema

ABSTRACT

Despite her contribution to some of classical Hollywood’s most renowned musicals, the largely unknown Lela Simone exemplifies one of Hollywood’s ‘anonymous movie workers’ (Leo Rosten) working in the shadows of film history. As music co-ordinator for MGM’s Arthur Freed Unit (1944–1957), Simone’s exacting technical supervision of sound and music recording and post-production ensured films such as The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Gigi (1958) achieved perfect synchronisation and polished production values. Drawing on archival sources this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making visible the labour of women, like Simone, working below-the-line in technical roles. Taking Simone’s work on sound and music in the iconic ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ number as a case study, the article illustrates how a micro-historical focus can bring a previously invisible realm of women’s labour, and agency, into view.     

‘A pretty kettle of fish’: United Nations assistance in the mass dismissal of labor in the Iranian oil industry, 1959–1960

ABSTRACT

This article examines the assignment of John Alexander-Sinclair, a British United Nations (UN) development expert, in Iran. In the late 1960s, Alexander-Sinclair was invited to arrange the ‘redeployment’ of 20,000 allegedly redundant oil workers and mediate between the consortium of European and American companies, which was in de facto control of the country’s oil industry, and the state-led National Iranian Oil Company, which was nominally in charge. His UN mission enabled the cooperation between Iranian officials and foreign companies, which eventually led to the severance of workers on a massive scale. Much of the existing scholarly work on the history of international organizations and labor has focused on the role of the former in advocating international norms to improve the lives of workers across the globe. This article, by contrast, examines the use of UN assistance as a means to circumvent workers’ existing protections and benefits. Second, the notion of a ‘rule of experts,’ which suggests that development practitioners gained unprecedented powers after World War II, dominates much of the secondary literature. By showing how the UN representative in Iran appeared as a rather impotent pawn in the politics of local interest groups, the article demonstrates the limits of this argument.     

From ‘Tramp Stamps’ to Traditional Sleeves: A Feminist Autobiographical Account of Tattoos

ABSTRACT

In this article I use a feminist autobiographical approach to present my ‘tattoo narrative’ as a gendered, embodied account in which I map out key moments in my life over two decades through the images inscribed on my skin. Specifically, I examine how my bodily modifications have magnified the social responses to my body as a woman. For example, as a teenager, I acquired a naval piercing and trendy ‘feminine’, discretely located tattoos to satisfy a heterosexual male gaze. In contrast, as a woman in my late thirties, my tattoos satisfy a different purpose. They are larger, bolder, and more ‘masculine’ in line with the evolution of my feminist politics. However, as an academic, the social responses to my tattoos are more complex. In class defined social spaces such as the university where I work, my tattoos cause trouble because they challenge gendered and classed norms for femininity. I conclude by calling for women to engage in autobiographical writing about bodily modification as a critical feminist political act.