‘Our songs were our stones’: song and struggle in the treatment action campaign

With 3 million people receiving anti-retroviral therapies (ARV) in South Africa, it has the largest public ARV programme in the world. The implementation of this programme was made possible by the efforts of AIDS advocacy groups that lobbied the government to make ARV available. Chief among these was the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The group mobilised South Africans across socio-economic and racial lines against the AIDS denial of key members of the African National Congress (ANC). Through interviews with TAC members and ethnographic accounts of ©current activism, this paper examines song as a method of mobilisation against HIV/AIDS-related injustices. As instrumental components of the liberation struggle, songs have become ubiqioutus within protest action, as demonstrated by the recent hashtag student movements. By utilising similar forms of rights-based activism found in the country's liberation struggle, TAC is able to tap into reservoirs of emotional potential rooted in political struggle.     

Using the State for Change: Towards an Effective Labour Government

The capacity of the state to deliver transformative social and economic change appears more limited today than since Labour was last in government. A future Labour government will therefore need to reckon with the challenges this presents when it comes to harnessing the power of the state to distribute power, wealth, and opportunity, effectively. This article considers two aspects of state power. The first is the ability of the state to enforce laws, and in doing so shape social and economic norms. With reference to past successes and failures, there is discussion of how laws and regulations could be made more effective. The second aspect is state intervention in the economy, and the circumstances in which it is possible and desirable to nationalise key industries. The case is made for a thorough assessment of the efficiency and efficacy of such interventions in the economy, especially when weighed against other policy priorities.     

Guyana Gold: A Unique Resource Curse?

ABSTRACT

This article offers explanations for the underwhelming economic performance of Guyana, a country heavily dependent on the revenue generated from gold mining. Here, government intervention has spawned a gold mining sector which today is comprised exclusively of local small and medium-scale operators. But whilst this rather unique model appears to be the ideal blueprint for facilitating local development, the country seems to be experiencing many of the same setbacks that have beset scores of other resource-rich developing world economies. Unless these problems are anticipated, properly diagnosed and appropriately tackled, a resource curse-type outcome is inevitable, irrespective of the context.     

Avoiding the Economic Crisis: Pragmatic Liberalism and Divisions over Economic Policy in Poland

Although liberalism has been the dominant economic ideology in post-communist Poland, liberal parties have tended to struggle to win political majorities. After winning the 2011 parliamentary elections, Citizens' Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) became the first party in Poland's democratic history to win two consecutive elections. Despite its liberal ideological background, Platforma Obywatelska took a more pragmatic and cautious approach to economic policy, avoiding the introduction of strong austerity economic policies. This paper considers the debate within the liberal camp about Platforma Obywatelska's economic policies, with particular reference to the reform of pensions. It also looks at the plans of the government for more strident liberal economic reforms in its second term, at what impact these will have on the popularity of Platforma Obywatelska and at how this reflects a tension between the party's pragmatic concerns of government and commitment to liberal ideology.     

Debt Politics and the Free Trade ‘Package’: the case of the Caribbean

While much has been written on how powerful institutions have used debt crises to foist free trade agreements on poorer states, this paper explores how the foisting of free trade agreements on poorer states has resulted in debt crises. Part one critiques the common-sense understanding of ‘free trade’ as a mere technical or policy issue, arguing that it is an intricate political, economic and ideological ‘package’ rooted in complex social, historical and cultural forces. Part two explores the role of debt in the free trade package by examining the impact of free trade agreements on the Caribbean over the past decade, during which time the region has experienced growing public and personal debt crises, further fuelled by an aid packages that included millions of dollars of concessional loans. It is argued that the contradictions of ‘free trade’ are mitigated through a ‘debt for trade’ paradigm, which Caribbean states are beginning to subvert through new preferential South–South partnerships.     

Introduction—Politicising Debt and Development: activist voices on social justice in the new millennium

In contrast to mainstream development economists’ and policy makers’ insistence that relatively straightforward, technical and apolitical solutions exist to the problems of debt and development, debt is inscribed in powerful, unequal and contested structures and relations. This is vividly depicted in the articles in this special section, written by activists and researchers with years of experience mobilising and supporting grassroots struggles, which reveal the often obscure or unspoken relations of power that underpin the highly unequal dynamics of debt on a global scale, while promoting and offering fresh insights from a diverse array of new initiatives and subversive tactics that confront the dominant debt and development paradigm. They offer sober reflection on what organisations need to do to get things done in continuing and future battles for debt justice.     

Socio‐economic differentiation and relations of production among rural‐based petty producers in central Peru, 1880 to 1970.

In an attempt to uncover the complexity of socio‐economic differentiation, detailed evidence is presented of the changing production relations among the Huasicanchinos of Central Peru over a period of ninety years.

It is argued that the process of differentiation can only be understood within the context of a quite specific system of production. An examination of the specificity of the relations of production in a particular period then reveals the complexity of this differentiation process and exposes some of the difficulties involved in a class analysis where capitalist relations have not been generalised throughout the social formation.

The study of this group of Central Peruvian petty producers over ninety years reveals that the differentiation process was a function of specific features of the relations of production in each of three periods; these relations were themselves emergent from the articulation of huasicanchino petty production with the changing form of dominant capitalism in Peru. As a function of differing relations to large capital, petty production units took on a variety of forms. Qualitative differences in the form of small production units in one period then gave rise to quantitative differences in control over resources in a subsequent period. Quantitative differences were in turn expressed in variations in relations of production between controllers and direct producers, and so on.

It is concluded that assumptions about inevitable polarisation should not obscure the complexity of a process which can only be understood by reference to the particular history of a social formation.