Natural capital must be defended: green growth as neoliberal biopolitics

ABSTRACT

This contribution addresses the growing global trend to promote ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA) in support of environmental conservation. NCA seeks to harness the economic value of conserved nature to incentivize local resource users to forgo the opportunity costs of extractive activities. We suggest that this represents a form of neoliberal biopower/biopolitics seeking to defend life by demonstrating its ‘profitability’ and hence right to exist. While little finance actually reaches communities through this strategy, substantial funding still flows into the idea of ‘natural capital’ as the basis of improving rural livelihoods. Drawing on two cases in Southeast Asia, we show that NCA initiatives may compel some local people to value ecosystem services in financial terms, yet in most cases this perspective remains partial and fragmented in communities where such initiatives produce a range of unintended outcomes. When the envisioned environmental markets fail to develop and benefits remain largely intangible, NCA fails to meet the growing material aspirations of farmers while also offering little if any bulwark against their using forests more intensively and/or enrolling in lucrative extractive enterprise. We thus conclude that NCA in practice may become the antithesis of conservation by actually encouraging the resource extraction it intends to combat.     

Origins of debt,mortgage and alienation of land in early modern Punjab

The agrarian structure of the Punjab in Pakistan and India was fashioned by the socio‐economic and legal institutions established by the British after their annexation of the Province in 1849. One of the consequences of this was an increase in usury/money‐lending capital and a resultant rise in endemic debt among the peasantry and alienation of proprietors’ land by money‐lenders. These changes alarmed the colonial authorities who attempted to deal with the situation simply through legislation, without addressing the complexities of Punjab's political economy. The problem of debt and the reliance of cultivators on the moneylenders for finance continued after 1947. Based on evidence from settlement reports and other original documents this article explores the origin of this problem.     

Contested landscapes: the global political economy of climate-smart agriculture

Analysing key initiatives in the area of climate-smart agriculture and the politics which surround them, this paper identifies the dominant discourses shaping the debate through a discussion of discursive sites of power and by mapping the emerging ‘regime complex’ of institutional power that operates at the interface of the climate and agrifood system. This is connected to forms of material power that derive from control over production, finance and technology in the neoliberal food regime by transnational capital. Such an analysis has important implications for which solutions are promoted as part of climate-smart agriculture and which actors are likely to benefit from the flows of technology, finance and institutional support that are mobilised in the struggle to define a viable global agrifood system in a warming world.     

《1857-1858年经济学手稿》中的资本逻辑与共产主义展望

资本逻辑是马克思解剖资本主义的核心视角,也是他展望共产主义终将实现的理论支持.依据《1857-1858年经济学手稿》,从资本运动的发生原因出发,资本逻辑可理解为资本自身进行辩证否定运动的内在规律,以否定性和必然性为核心规定.马克思以资本逻辑为线索,揭示资本主义社会问题产生的内在根源,论证共产主义终将实现.他认为资本本身...     

"商船社会"中一种特殊的角色及其功能--一种具有中国特色的管理制度的调查研究报告

在中国的江轮、近海船舶、远洋船舶上,设置有政委制.这是一种有中国特色的管理制度.本报告是对中国商船随船政委角色和功能进行实证性研究的结果.政委这一特殊角色在中国商船上的出现,影响到"商船社会"的其他组成部分.比如,船长、船员、工会组织等.使他们的角色和功能不同于没有政委的欧美商船.     

Rodney Hilton and the Peasant Road to 'Capitalism' in England

Arguing that Rodney was an original thinker among British Marxists, this article examines his historiographical approach to the English medieval peasantry, and in particular his contribution to the transition debate. As a consequence of their focus either on landlord enclosure or on the role of merchant capital, Marxists such as Dobb and Tawney maintained that the prosperous peasants who emerged towards the end of the fifteenth century bacame the capitalist farmers of the sixteenth. Opposed to both class and market determinism, however, Hilton insisted that the distinctiveness of the medieval peasantry lay in the possession of its own means of subsistence and access to community property. From the latter stemmed peasant resistant against feudal lords, based on peasants' self-perception as free producers with ancient rights, because of which landlords had to use military and political power to extract surplus labour. For Hilton, the agrarian conflict that culminated in the 1381 rebellion was a struggle between seigneurial power and peasant market power.     

非正规金融组织“合会”的运行与风险控制研究

传统金融理论认为随着正规金融的深化发展,非正规金融将逐渐消失。与这种观点相反,合会作为一种典型的非正规金融组织,在金融市场不断发展和深化的现代经济社会依然存在,甚至在一些地区盛行。从信息经济学、社会资本和社会约束等角度来看,合会的特征、构成要素和运行过程使得合会在非正规金融的发展中有着独特的优势。     

Women,Money and Debt: Notes for a Feminist Reappropriation Movement

ABSTRACT

What are the consequences and implications for women of the imperative of waged work and the rolling back of welfare provisions? In this article Silvia Federici charts how the consequences have not only been increases in unpaid labour but also a financialisation of social reproduction. These phenomena have turned every aspect of daily reproduction into a means of capital accumulation and led to a significant increase in women’s debt. In a world where finance has become a dominant force, Federici argues that the economic situation that women face demands a rethink of the ‘right to work’ strategy that mainstream feminists have embraced in the pursuit of economic autonomy. This is so not least because the quest for autonomy has been turned into an engine for the production of a large female underclass for whom dependence on men has been replaced by dependence on banks.     

Merchants and peasants in the Nazareth region, 1922 – 47

In Nazareth, the wholesale merchants of agricultural commodities made every effort to acquire crops during harvest time, when commodity prices were at their lowest, and to sell them a few months later when demand (and prices) had increased. To facilitate this, merchants established close economic ties with peasant proprietors, in particular by providing them with a ‘safety net’ in lean years in the form of loans at comparatively attractive rates. An unwritten part of this arrangement was that a peasant in such a relationship with a merchant would market most of the surplus of his cash crops at harvest time. A contract in the credit market was thus simultaneously a contract in the goods market, ensuring that merchants would receive payment in crops, while peasants were paid in advance for their produce. It was also the custom that in cases of default, the merchant became the owner of the mortgaged land and the former landowner became the tenant. In such circumstances, the new tenancy agreement was usually interlinked with other agreements, especially in regard to animal husbandry.     

Situating private equity capital in the land grab debate

This paper examines the private equity investment landscape in African land and agriculture markets by exploring two underlying questions: (1) Within the global land grab trend, how is power manifested for private equity investors? and (2) What are the development implications of private equity-backed investments? The essay begins with an overview of the recent rise of private equity in African land markets. It then analyzes the power relations embedded in this trend, particularly exploring the issues of information asymmetry and ‘creative destruction’ inherent in private equity finance, and their implications for governance and labour. Finally, the paper examines the power dynamics that characterize the relatively new relationship between private equity groups and development finance. Drawing on several illustrations of the World Bank Group's involvement in private equity-backed land investments, this paper demonstrates how the overlapping interests between development finance and private equity groups, in part, explain private equity's presence in emerging farmland markets.     

‘You do manage it so well that I cannot do better’: the working life of Elizabeth Jeake of Rye (1667–1736)

This article contributes to the debate around early modern women’s work. It concerns not waged labour but rather the unpaid contributions made by women to both home and the business undertaken by their husband. It focuses on Elizabeth Jeake, the wife of Samuel Jeake, a merchant from the Sussex port of Rye. Through the letters exchanged between the family, it explores Elizabeth’s skilled work in support of her husband. This included giving instructions to contractors, gathering and disseminating business and investment information, negotiations with Samuel’s business partners and acquaintances, managing property and tenants, negotiating credit relationships and purchasing and selling commodities.     

The new World Bank programme for the self‐liquidation of the third world peasantry

For many years, the World Bank, whose task is to expand and strengthen the private enterprise system throughout the world, financed agricultural development projects whose beneficiaries were almost exclusively the s landed oligarchy in the underdeveloped countries and, directly or indirectly, the multinational concerns. Many of the Bank's loans helped to finance the modernization of the large estates and progressively weakened thereby the status of the underdeveloped countries’ peasants. Recently, in what at first sight might appear to be an about‐face in its strategy, the Bank added a credit scheme to help 100 million smallholders. Upon closer analysis of this scheme and how it would operate within the framework of underdeveloped agricultures, it is found that it is in reality the most antisocial programme yet to be invented by this so‐called development agency. It is bound to have such catastrophic consequences for the peasantry that it will make the ‘green revolution’ and similar modernization programmes look like child's play, although it guarantees significant additional sales and profits for the multinational concerns.     

The expansion of capitalist relations of production in Mexican crafts

Significant changes are occurring in the relations of production and exchange in rural Mexican crafts, with increased merchant control over production constituting one of the more salient aspects of this process. Among the factors stimulating this development are the continuing proletarianisation of the Mexican peasantry and the considerable growth of the tourist market. This article discusses the changes in production relations taking place in the artisan industries of Yucatan and the parallel developments reported elsewhere in Mexico. It is concluded that although retaining certain ‘precapitalist’ features, relations of production in rural artisanty are increasingly determined by the larger capitalist economy.’     

Food and finance: the financial transformation of agro-food supply chains

This article draws upon existing literature to document and describe the rise of finance in food provisioning. It queries the role of financialization in the contemporary food crisis and analyzes its impacts upon the distribution of power and wealth within and along the generalized agro-food supply chain. A systematic treatment of key nodes in the supply chain reveals four key insights: (1) the line between finance and food provisioning has become increasingly blurred in recent decades, with financial actors taking a growing interest in food and agriculture and agro-food enterprises becoming increasingly involved in financial activities; (2) financialization has reinforced the position of food retailers as the dominant actors within the agro-food system, though they are largely subject to the dictates of finance capital and face renewed competition from financialized commodity traders; (3) financialization has intensified the exploitation of food workers, increasing their workload while pushing down their real wages and heightening the precarity of their positions, and (4) small-scale farmers have been especially hard hit by financialization, as their livelihoods have become even more uncertain due to increasing volatility in agricultural markets, they have become weaker vis-à-vis other actors in the agro-food supply chain, and they face growing competition for their farmland. The paper concludes by identifying themes for future research and asking readers to reimagine the role of finance in food provisioning.     

Capitalism obscured: the limits of law and rights-based approaches to poverty reduction and development

The Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP) was established by the United Nations in 2005 and concluded in 2008. Although inspired by Hernando de Soto's analysis of the role of property rights in economic development, the scope of the Commission was defined as ‘legal empowerment’ in general. This commentary offers a critique of the CLEP report, and argues that its underlying assumptions rest on an idealised version of liberal democratic capitalism in which a dynamic market economy assures ‘win-win’ solutions for all. This implies that there are no tensions between the four ‘pillars’ of legal empowerment identified by CLEP (the rule of law, property rights, labour rights, and business rights). However, in the real world of capitalism, in both democratic and authoritarian versions, there are structural tensions between classes of capital and classes of labour, which result in the economy and its underlying institutional order becoming a key site of contestation. The case of farm labour in rural South Africa is used to illustrate this argument. A focus on legal rights can, however, be ‘empowering’ to a degree, when it helps defend poor people from exploitation and abuse, or is located within broader strategies to eradicate systemic poverty.     

Wage labour deferred: The recreation of unfree labour in the US South

Contrary to the mainstream economic view that unfree labour in the US ended with the Emancipation, this article argues that an unfree labour system continued to dominate southern agriculture in the post Civil War period. Part I details how the southern land tenure system, contract labour laws, and credit system combined to create a social structure of accumulation [Edwards, Gordon and Reich, 1982] that effectively trapped a majority of sharecroppers in debt peonage. However, unlike Ransom and Sutch [1977] I argue that it was the planter and not the merchant, class who were the chief architects and beneficiaries of the unfree labour system. Part II creates a model showing how this ‘unfree’ social structure of accumulation led to the limited and skewed patterns of industrial development, the low level of technological innovation in agriculture, the eventual creation of a large surplus labour pool, and the depressed wage rates that have characterised the American South up to the 1970s.     

European capitalism and the effects of agricultural commercialization on slave labor in Tunisia, 1780s–1880s

Abstract

The paper argues that while the significance of Tunisian state economic and political reforms during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has reflected the changing patterns of the caravan slave trade in previous research, much of this research has not considered the role of slaves in the emergent Tunisian economy. Nowhere is this negligence more apparent than in the agricultural sector, which was predominantly responsible for strengthening economic growth from the late eighteenth century until its weakening as a result of encroaching European capitalism by the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on Tunisian state population data known as the Majba Census and the extant economic literature, the paper addresses this gap by exploring the implications of the Tunisian state economic reforms on enslaved labor in the agricultural sector. Exploring this research gap will enable us to ascertain the extent to which enslaved labor contributed to Tunisia’s burgeoning agricultural sector in a manner that has dodged academics’ attention. After providing a historical context of European capital penetration and its implications on political and economic reforms from the Ottoman conquest through the Husaynid periods, the paper looks at how European capital infusion after the first quarter of the nineteenth century transformed the agricultural sector and examines the role of slave labor prior to the European capital infusion and commercialization of the agricultural sector. Using the Majba Census records’ regional distribution of blacks in the Regency the paper sheds light on the implications of the precarious economy engendered by agricultural commercialization under the aegis of European capitalism on the structure of enslaved labor.     

Social Status Attainment During the Transition to Adulthood

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a critical time for status attainment, with income, education, work experience, and independence from parents accruing at varying speeds and intensities. This study takes an intergenerational life-course perspective that incorporates parents’ and one’s own social status to examine the status attainment process from adolescence into adulthood in the domains of economic capital (e.g., income) and human capital (e.g., education, occupation). Survey data from three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (analytic n = 8,977) are analyzed using latent class analysis to capture the ebb and flow of social status advantages and disadvantages from adolescence (Wave 1) through young adulthood (Wave 3) into adulthood (Wave 4). The analytic sample is composed of 50.3 % females and 70.2 % Whites, 15.3 % Blacks, 11.0 % Hispanics, and 3.5 % Asians ages 12–18 at Wave 1 and 25–31 at Wave 4. Four latent classes are found for economic capital and five for human capital. The importance of parents’ social status is demonstrated by the presence of large groups with persistently low and persistently high social status over time in both domains. The capacity of individuals to determine their own status, however, is shown by equally large groups with upward and downward mobility in both domains. These findings demonstrate the dynamic nature of social status during this critical developmental period.     

Attention under repair: asceticism from self-care to care of the self

This essay examines the contemporary mindfulness movement as a cultural response to a larger problem of attention in the United States. As raw material for both capital (re)production and subjectivity, attention is a zone of indeterminacy and struggle for workers in a so-called immaterial economy. This essay suggests that the rise of concern around “paying attention” from the 1950s onward is driven by post-Fordist labor requirements more than networked technologies. First, it examines mindfulness as a technique of attention management for businesses and gives a broad survey of its current popularity and prevalence in US culture. Second, it proposes viewing techniques of attention like mindfulness through a triple lens of repair: (1) as managerial tools to repair psychic labor capacity for capital; (2) as practices that subjects use to repair alienation; and (3) as sites for reparative reading. Third, the essay illuminates the ties between Eve Sedgwick’s repair and Michel Foucault’s care of the self in order to suggest that resistance to practicing the self is founded on a paranoid defense. Its central argument is that attention is a method in Foucault's care of the self, and, as such, a potential portal into pleasure and political change rather than a mere feedback loop into capital.     

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.