Green multiculturalism: articulations of ethnic and environmental politics in a Colombian ‘black community’

This paper analyzes the intersection of two parallel developments that have had a curious impact on agrarian politics in Colombia: on the one hand, attempts to appropriate land for ‘green’ ends such as biofuel production, which have become ubiquitous all across Latin America, and on the other, the implementation of multicultural reforms, which in Colombia resulted in the collective titling of more than five million hectares of land for ‘black communities’. Although these two developments can be read as contradictory – with ‘green grabs’ threatening ethnic groups’ territorial rights and multicultural reforms purportedly safeguarding them – I argue that, together, they produce a unique political articulation which I term ‘green multiculturalism’.

My analysis of oil-palm cultivation in a ‘black community’ in southwestern Colombia reveals three interrelated consequences. First, I suggest that green multiculturalism produces ‘black communities’ as ‘green’ collective subjects charged not only with being wardens of nature, but also bearers of the responsibility to right environmental wrongs. Second, I note that the agrarian practices associated with oil-palm cultivation act as disciplining technologies that seek to transform local rationalities into entrepreneurial ones. Finally, I contend that these initiatives are ‘landscaping projects’ that seek to transform forms of interspecies relating.     

The Making of the Feature Film Suffragette

In this article the author, the director of the feature film Suffragette, released in the autumn of 2015, reflects on the making of the film and the years of preparation. Suffragette, which is not a documentary but historical fiction, tells the story through the eyes of an ‘ordinary’ working-class woman Maud Watts, a laundry worker in the East End of London. Maud is played by Carey Mulligan and around her are a network of female characters, including Violet Miller (a fellow laundry worker, played by Anne-Marie Duff), and Edith and Hugh Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter and Finbar Lynch), a couple who run a suffragette operation from the back room of their East London pharmacy. Romola Garai plays Alice Haughton, an upper-class woman who recruits new women to the cause. A policeman is played by Brendan Gleeson and an MP by Sam West. Ben Whishaw is Maud's husband. Two ‘real’ historical characters are introduced––Emmeline Pankhurst, played by Meryl Streep, and Emily Wilding Davison, played by Natalie Press.     

The factory and the welfare state: redundancy,benefits and workers’ organization at Alfa Romeo Arese, 1963-1986

ABSTRACT

The article tracks the relationship between the Italian welfare state and the social relations of production at a Fordist factory, showing how social policy influenced the pattern of workers’ contention on the industrial shop floor. Welfare state analysis has concentrated on the institutional aspect of social policy but neglected the role that state benefits played in industrial organization and workplace relations. The article ‘nests’ the analysis of social policy in a micro-history of the factory, using the case study of Arese – a plant owned by the carmaker Alfa Romeo – Milan, Italy. Tracking the history of Arese, the article shows how the Italian system of short-time work subsidies, the Cassa Integrazione Guadagni (CIG), served to quell industrial unrest and target unions’ organizational resources. From the late 1960s, the CIG was used by managers to suspend workers during strikes and acted as a deterrent against their mobilization. As redundancies increased during the 1980s, workers were put on short-time for prolonged periods and prevented from entering the factory. This degraded their professional identity and eroded their political ties with the workplace, curtailing the basis of unions’ organizational strength within the factory.     

Toilets and resistance in Italian factories in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

In the literature on industrial conflict, the Italy of the 1950s is often described as marked by worker acquiescence and an absence of conflict, ensured by high unemployment and the severe repression of union activism. My research challenges this. While formal, organized collective action subsided, workers continued to show their defiance and opposition to factory authorities by means of diverse acts of individual resistance that have escaped scholarly study. Drawing on anthropological theory, particularly Scott’s notion of ‘weapons of the weak’ – the strategies used by subordinate classes when facing heavy repression or lack of resources – this article undertakes an innovative analysis of the use of insults, irreverent behaviour, rumours and mockery of foremen and bosses to undermine the authority and legitimacy of factory hierarchies. It casts new light on the protest cultures and practices of Italian workers in the 1950s and improves our understanding of post-1945 industrial conflict.     

Soy states: resource politics,violent environments and soybean territorialization in Paraguay

Soy production has radically transformed the social, ecological, territorial and political form of Paraguay. This paper traces waves of sojización – soy territorialization – to analyze how soybean resource politics are changing environmental governance and state–society relations in Paraguay. I argue that political, social and ecological ruptures mark each territorialization: agrarian reforms that reconfigured land control, the introduction of genetically modified soy varieties, and most recently a ‘parliamentary coup’ preceded by spectacular acts of violence against campesinos. The violent rejection of post-neoliberal politics espoused by former President Fernando Lugo marked the beginning of a third wave of sojización defined by the increasing influence of the soy industry, campesino and indigenous dispossession, and violent environments. Paraguay reveals unexpected consequences and contradictions of the Left Turn in Latin America. The country’s experiment with post-neoliberal politics created conditions that eventually broadened and deepened neoliberalizations of nature. The term ‘soy states’ indicates three conjunctures of soy production and how they reconfigure state–society relations and conceptions of ‘the state’ in Paraguay vis-à-vis soy production. My arguments draw from extensive qualitative field research and applied work in Paraguay coupled with secondary source analysis, contributing to debates about neoliberalizations of nature, plant territoriality, agrarian political ecology and state formation.     

Charles Stelzle: Apostle to labor

The great British miners' strike of 1984–1985 began 30 years ago. This personal reflection centres on the debate over trade union strategy during the strike. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CP) had long been an important influence in the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers, but the strike also coincided with and exacerbated divisions within the CP and the wider left about how to respond to the ‘New Right’ Thatcher Conservative Government. This article focuses on the distinctive Eurocommunist analysis of the journal Marxism Today. The political atmosphere of the time is recalled, and then the Gramscian industrial relations strategy of winning the political argument through a ‘broad democratic alliance’ is reconstructed. Arguably, this ‘social movement’ approach could have produced a better outcome to the strike, while it provides lasting lessons about the limitations of a narrowly economistic view of trade union power.     

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.     

关于企事业民主管理与工资集体协商工作的认识与思考

维护职工权益是工会的基本职责,维权的重点是要维护职工在劳动关系中依法享有的民主政治和劳动经济权益。工会通过民主管理制度和集体合同制度建设、推动职工权益的实现。当前,厂务公开民主管理中职代会建设和工资集体协商工作存在不规范、简单化及缺乏实效、质量不高的问题。必须依法落实职工知情权、参与权、表达权和监督权及拓展协商内容,规范协商程序,推动行业、工种(岗位)工资标准的制定,落实职工经济收入权,实现体面劳动,最终实现劳动关系的和谐与稳定。     

The genesis of a scientific community: the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and the field of industrial relations in Britain,c.1950–1983

Scholarship dealing with labour-related topics has been prevalent in Britain from the early twentieth century, but a scientific field dedicated exclusively to the study of industrial relations did not emerge until the second half of the century. Although the socio-economic context of the post-war years provided a fertile ground for the field's emergence, the reason for its eventual development was a socialization process that took place in the early 1950s with the establishment of an informal group of industrial relations scholars. The group would grow to become the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and its activities would help the emerging community develop a ‘disciplinary identity’ and form the institutions that would subsequently define the field of Industrial Relations.     

Exit from agriculture: a step forward or a step backward for the rural poor?

World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development recommends that rural smallholders unable to compete in higher value production should exit agriculture. For the old and new landless, the way forward is wage labour in agriculture, in rural off farm work, or in urban areas. Disjunctively, the Report also proposes ‘farm-financed social welfare’ as a safety net when urban workers are ejected back to countryside at times of ‘urban shock’. My essay contrasts the Report's narrative about felicitous trajectories away from and back to the farm with the historical and contemporary experience of Asia's rural poor.     

Contesting Rural Resources: Emerging ‘Forms’ of Agrarian Production in Uzbekistan

The most recent land reform in Uzbekistan, in which Large Farm Enterprises (LFEs) were split into medium-sized fermer enterprises, left, alongside the country's overwhelming majority of small dekhan peasants, continued strong state intervention in agrarian production. Three ‘forms’ (rather than ‘modes’) of production emerged: (1) state-ordered production of cotton and wheat; (2) commercial production, in particular of rice; and (3) household production of other food staples, including wheat and rice. These production ‘forms’ or processes are characterised by distinct input and output relations, terms of trade and technical requirements. They interrelate through competition for limited resources, such as land, water and other inputs, rather than competition amongst the actors themselves (the state, the new medium-sized fermers and the small dekhan peasants). A contest over resources is particularly evident between the (state-ordered) cotton crop and the (commercial) rice crop in the case study on which our argument is based, namely the province of Khorezm, a downstream part of the Amu Darya river basin, in the western part of the country.     

Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist women and the politics of consumption

Abstract

Historically, socialist strategy has privileged production over consumption, yet consumption was a space in which socialist women could have constructed a woman-focused politics. This article discusses the possibility of a politics of consumption where consumption provided the focus for overt political demands around which consumer-centred tactics were developed. It explores an attempt by British socialist women to create a politics of consumption around shopping for food. Although Margaretta Hicks and the National Women's Council of the British Socialist Party ultimately failed to reorder socialist priorities, they did try to build a politics of consumption in the years 1912 to 1915. Their significance was to imagine one way in which the border between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘political’ could be dissolved so that consumption and production could be recognised as complementary and equally necessary spheres of socialist politics.     

工会要在促进企业安全生产中发挥重要作用

安全生产关系人民群众的生命财产安全,关系改革发展和社会稳定的大局。工会组织要站在"三个代表"的高度,充分认识抓安全的重要性和必要性;把安全生产作为企业民主管理的重要内容,切实加强民主管理和民主监督;认真贯彻劳动保护工作的"三个条例",在保障职工身体健康和生命安全上搞好源头维护。     

Reviews

Kate Lilley's long-awaited first book Versary is a most sophisticated and varied work with many turnings involved in its dynamic Janus-faced construction, looking both backwards and forwards in time, and brimming with imagination and many droll summaries of contemporary life—‘The shoes match the situation’—and in particular the constructs of gender and sexuality. Versary's complicated revolving symmetry begins with ‘Nicky's World’, partly inspired by The Young and the Restless, and ends with the appropriately disjointed ‘Sapphics’; that is, Versary moves backwards historically through artistic representations of love/sexuality and gender while the ‘story’ moves forward into self-realisation. Divided into five sections, the first and longest section ‘Lady in the Dark’ sets a racy tone:     

Editing the 1930s: The Lost Work of Josephine Johnson Excerpts from Josephine Johnson's published and unpublished writings are quoted with permission of the Estate of Josephine Johnson Cannon. All quoted materials © Estate of Josephine Johnson Cannon 2005.

The radical avant-garde has aged profoundly. Yet, led by director Judith Malina, the Living Theatre, founded in 1947, remains the longest surviving political theatre collective in the US. The Living Theatre opened its doors at a new theatre/home on New York City's Lower East Side in 2007, where Malina directed a much lauded revival of the company's groundbreaking 1963 production of Kenneth Brown's The Brig, and performed the role of Maudie in the premiere production of Hanon Reznikov's adaptation of Doris Lessing's Maudie and Jane. Vibrant and luminous at 81, an aged Venus rising from the half shell, Malina (dis)played the decaying and decrepit Maudie, standing naked onstage, sensually and lovingly bathed by Pat Russell, playing Jane. Malina's ageing activist/artist's body and voice spoke volumes about decades of societal and cultural transformations, of sexual revolutions, and of wounds that never heal.

Evoking Pierre Nora's ‘sites of memory’—this performative lieu de memoire ‘talks back’ on many levels, both in contemporary contexts and re-membering the zeitgeist of Malina's earlier performances—nearly naked, strident and much younger in the Living Theatres’ legendary production of Paradise Now (1968–70), and eloquently, flamboyantly anarchist, if too old, playing Antigone in Malina's adaptation of Brecht's version of Sophocles play (1967–84). This essay analyses the mise en scène and the reception of Maudie and Jane in light of the working processes and performance history of director/performer/inspirator Malina. Finally, the challenges and hope made visible and corporeal in Malina's on- and off-stage performances are explored.     

A picture in black and white: modernism,postmodernism and the scene of ‘race’

‘Writing, in its noblest function’, says He´le`ne Cixous, ‘is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.’ Cixous' hopes for the possibilities of writing are the starting point for a very new and startling piece of Australian writing, Kathleen Mary Fallon's ‘how violence made a real mother-of-a-mother of me’, writing that possibly gets closer to the ‘heart of the matter’ of contemporary Australian black-and-white relations than any other white-signed literary text. What might Fallon's writing attempt to ‘unerase’, to ‘unearth’? What is the primitive picture, according to Fallon, that so frightens us? Here, I want to explore the questions Fallon's writing asks, and to explore more generally what ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ might mean in the contemporary Australian context, and I do this in terms that might seem at first to be surprisingly anachronistic. I read this very contemporary, some would say postmodern, example of Australian writing in terms of a paradigm that is described by the field of critical studies of literary modernism. This is a paradigm that emphasises what feminist critic Marianne DeKoven calls the ‘irreducible ambiguity’ of some texts, their ‘radical undecidability’, their ‘impossible dialectic’. I am seeking to recuperate this paradigm and the critical impulses that it generates for a project whose objectives are far from those of literary modernism with their alleged origins in a white European and, for some, a masculinist aesthetic of the late teens and 1920s. I am interested in revisiting modernism, not only as a kind of writing practice but as a critical practice, and therefore as a reading practice, one that has possibilities for reading ‘black’ and ‘white’ in Australia now: for reading what might be called the ‘impossible dialectic’ of relations between whites and Indigenes. How might we read Australian writing now, in particular its efforts to ‘unerase’, to ‘unearth’, that picture that, I argue, frightens ‘us’, as white Australians: the picture in black and white, the original scene, the scene of invasion and dispossession, the scene in which the words ‘terra nullius’ were first uttered, the scene that continues to structure our perceptions of the Indigenous ‘other’ and of our white selves into the present?     

Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War

Abstract: This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin's autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin's major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin's name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others' construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin's world-view and highlights how Dworkin's own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.     

Dorset,Kincardine and peasant crisis: A comment on David Craig

David Craig's paper ‘Novels of Peasant Crisis’ is to be warmly welcomed. But Craig provides no adequate analysis of the peasant crises underlying the novels which he considers. This paper considers one of Craig's novels; Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song. Craig's explanation of this book in terms of depopulation and the destruction of the Kincardine peasantry from outside is seen to be inadequate. Sunset Song is about the crumbling of a peasant mode of production through the working out of internal contradictions within that mode of production. As an introduction to this discussion of Sunset Song Craig's dismissal of the utility of Thomas Hardy's work for the analysis of rural class relations is argued to be distinctly premature.     

高校工会与学校民主管理机制的网络调研——以陕西省六所高校为例

对西安交通大学、西北工业大学、西北大学、陕西师范大学、长安大学、西安理工大学等六所高校的工会与学校民主管理机制的网络调研表明,上述高校在"双代会"及提案工作机制、二级民主管理机制、"三公开"工作机制、理论研讨与对外交流机制等方面的建设做得比较好,且各具特色。并可在工会工作及学校民主管理方面学习和引进清华大学、北京大学等高校的先进成果和理念。中国高校在民主化管理中要形成长效机制,要把制度的建设、落实与创新统一起来,走出一条具有中国特色的高校工会与学校民主管理的发展道路。