Armed conflict,land grabs and primitive accumulation in Colombia: micro processes,macro trends and the puzzles in between

Armed conflict is widely believed to disrupt agricultural production and ‘reverse’ development, but it may also involve the violent transformation of rural economies from subsistence to commercial agriculture. The case of Las Pavas, an estate in northern Colombia, provides further evidence that armed conflict created opportunities for violent land grabs and the expansion of commercial agriculture in Colombia. However, aggregate data suggest that primitive accumulation may be only part of the story behind the massive scale of forced displacement and dispossession. A research strategy that accounts for the diversity of subnational contexts, processes and outcomes is needed.     

The dynamics of rural poverty in Latin America

The development and perpetuation of a functional dualism between the subsistence sector and the commodity‐producing sector is an objective outcome of the laws of capital accumulation in the periphery of the world capitalist system. The necessity for this dualism derives from the drive of capitalists to maximise profits and thus maintain low wages. Its possibility arises from social disarticulation whereby labour's income does not participate in expanding the market for the modern sector. Through dualism, surplus value is increased not only by the orthodox means of central economies—principally increasing the productivity of work to reduce necessary labour embodied in wage goods—but, in addition, and dramatically more effectively, by collapsing the price of agricultural labour by an amount equal to the production of use‐values by the worker's family in the subsistence plot. In this way, subsistence agriculture supplies cheap labour to commercial agriculture which, in turn, supplies cheap food to the urban sector where it sustains low wages. Socially disarticulated accumulation and functional dualism between capitalist and precapitalist modes perpetuate primitive accumulation in the modern sector based on surplus extraction from the peasant sector fundamentally via the labour market. This specific form of overexploitation of rural labour implies a particular dynamic in the use of labour and natural resources in subsistence agriculture. The pattern of rural poverty and the subjective contradictions of peripheral capitalism can thus largely be understood by identifying the antagonistic contradictions to which the subsistence economy is subject in adjusting to domination.     

刑事拘留条件质疑

刑事拘留是公安机关、人民检察院在刑事诉讼中经常采用的一种剥夺人身自由的审前羁押措施 ,其条件、程序和期限都应该有严格的法律限制。我国现行刑事诉讼法规定的刑事拘留 ,存在条件上的不合理性 ,成为了对任何犯罪嫌疑人都可适用的强制措施 ,导致刑事拘留在实践中的大量滥用。应进一步修改以完善刑事拘留条件。     

Determination of succinyldicholine in different tissue samples from guinea pigs after injection of a single intravenous dose

The distribution and postmortem stability of succinyldicholine in different tissues and urine from guinea-pigs has been studied. Succinyldicholine was extracted from tissue homogenates and urine samples from animals sacrificed by intravenous injections of succinyldicholine hydrochloride (40 mg/kg). The bis-quaternary ammonium compound was demethylated and the tertiary amine was analysed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. The concentrations found in muscle, kidney and urine were often low; in muscle below 5 pmol/g, in kidney from 5 to 1500 pmol/g and in urine from 5 to 650 pmol/ml. The eye proved to be the best tissue sample, with a rather high and constant concentration (280 +/- 36 pmol/g) of succinyldicholine. The postmortem stability was studied by storing the bodies at 4 degrees C. After 6 days storage the drug concentrations in the eyes started to decline. Four weeks after death it was not possible to detect any succinyldicholine in this tissue.