51本色 – Page 4 – A Critical Perspective On Development Economics

Condensing the Gaza crisis

March 22, 2024 kjayasuriyaLeave a comment

The Gaza crisis has underscored the deep fractures of domestic politics in Western Europe, the US and Australia. It is as much a domestic political crisis as a conflict in the Middle East.

What is the nature of this crisis? Well, it is not one but multiple crises that are condensed around the Gaza war. Now condensation is an interesting concept 鈥� first used by Freud to show how a single idea or dream stands for multiple associations and ideas. We can think of the Gaza crisis as a political condensation of several multiple and intersecting crises and their different temporalities. It condenses a series of fracture points: the crisis of representation, an increasingly authoritarian response to the political conflict, the unravelling of the international liberal order and the politics of race and class. It reinforces a shift to what the Marxist political theorist Nicos Poulantzas termed authoritarian statism which is the intensification of authoritarian tendencies within ostensibly democratic institutions and processes.

First, it is now fashionable to apply the term decolonisation to global politics but this decolonization is always seen as 鈥榦ut there鈥� and distinct from the politics of class. Instead, I want to argue the Gaza crisis has brought decolonisation back home to the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney and New York. It is often forgotten that many of those on the streets are demanding not just a ceasefire in Gaza but a political voice that is marginalised. And let’s not forget that this plays out in the register of both class and race. Many 鈥� but by no means all – of those in the streets are the new migrant working class and Gaza is an expression of their political discontent. The social theorist 鈥� Stuart Hall 鈥� famously said that race is the medium through which class is lived and in the Gaza crisis we see an intersection of class and race. It is return of the political time of colonial politics but this time in the metropolis of the old colonies. This class and domestic dimension is often forgotten in the sanitised version of decolonisation that circulates within academia. Again, the Gaza crisis condenses existing political fractures.

So You鈥檙e a Professor? Here鈥檚 What You Can Do to Oppose Genocide

January 14, 2024 51本色Leave a comment

Feeling helpless does not mean being useless. It is possible to support Palestinians from afar.

College instructors, particularly those in Europe and North America, are generally limited when it comes to meaningful intervention in imperialist horrors afflicting the Global South. Nevertheless, it is usually their governments either orchestrating or abetting the horror. They ought to do something, then, even if it seems pyrrhic or inadequate.

People around the world are now witnessing a particularly gruesome event as the Zionist entity, armed by its U.S. sponsor and enjoying the support of capitalist institutions across the globe, commits one atrocity after the other in the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank and at times further afield). The atrocities, anyone with a modicum of integrity agrees, add up to genocide. The depth of grief and suffering Palestinians now experience is indescribable, immeasurable.

Do professors and other campus workers have any ability to mitigate the grief and suffering? Not really. But we鈥檙e not entirely powerless, either. Higher education is an important sector for information and activism and an industry where participants like to contemplate the role of both exceptional and ordinary people in making a better world. Like anybody else, teachers and researchers can be most effective in their own communities, which are not inoculated from the genocide. Zionist groups have organized hundreds of defamation campaigns against Palestinian students and faculty, often resulting in employment termination and other serious forms of recrimination. These campaigns don鈥檛 exist in a vacuum. Targeting Palestinians and anti-Zionists is an extension of the genocide, or at least one of its attendant tactics. And then, of course, many of the campuses are somehow invested in the Zionist entity鈥攆inancially, politically, or logistically. It does no good to say that 鈥渨e鈥� aren鈥檛 affected by what happens 鈥渢here.鈥�

Palestine Changes Everything

December 18, 2023January 17, 2024 Farwa Sial3 Comments

The on-going ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in 2023, marks the end of the fa莽ade of the peaceful Western liberal order. At least people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. While these countries were subject to the different ebbs and flows of US imperial violence. Palestinians have paid the heaviest price. The historical occupation of Palestine has always been a socio-economic precondition for the cohesion of the but the current ethnic cleansing can no longer be contained through the usual narrative control tools and an ever intensifying climate of fear promulgated to the ends of silencing and chilling legitimate support for Palestine internationally. As notes, the genocide has shown us that 鈥�Impunity isn鈥檛 beholden to disapproval鈥�, and we continue to bear witness to the genocide for ourselves and for the next generation. The current genocide is the clearest expression of the decrepitude of the Western order in a state of ongoing entropy. What follows shall be bereaved of the usual pretences of 鈥榙emocracy鈥� and 鈥榟uman rights鈥� and thus more naked, brutal and yet more reactionary. The Western order is generating the conditions for its demise. In this, Palestine leads the way. Palestine changes everything.

When economists shut off your water

December 11, 2023December 7, 2023 jethron akallahLeave a comment

*Researcher Irene Nduta in Kayole-Soweto.*

By Adrian Wilson, Faith Kasina, Irene Nduta and Jethron Ayumbah Akallah

In August 2020, people all over the development world about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of (RCT), run by two American development economists, working together with the World Bank. In order to compel property owners in Kayole-Soweto鈥攁 relatively poor neighborhood in eastern Nairobi鈥攖o pay their water bills, this experiment disconnected the water supply at randomly selected low-income rental properties.

There鈥檚 no doubt that water is a problem in Nairobi. As Elizabeth Wamuchiru , the water system in the city has a built-in spatial inequality inherited from the British colonial era. Visitors to the city can readily see the differences between the cool, leafy, green neighborhoods of Kilimani and Lavington鈥攕egregated white neighborhoods under colonialism, now home to rich Kenyans, foreigners, and NGOs鈥攁nd the gray and dusty tin-roof neighborhoods of Mathare, Kibera, Mukuru, and Kayole, home to the lower-income Kenyans excluded from Nairobi鈥檚 prosperity.

Today鈥檚 water system reflects this history of inequality. Nairobi鈥檚 water is harnessed from a combination of surface and groundwater sources; however, the city鈥檚 groundwater is naturally salty and . Piped water systems, provided to upper- and middle-income housing estates, do not exist in the vast bulk of the city鈥檚 poorer neighborhoods, where people must instead buy water from vendors鈥攐ften salty water pumped from boreholes, or siphoned off from city pipes through rickety connections that are frequently contaminated with sewage. In the richer neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company, a public utility, sells relatively clean piped surface water for a fraction of the price paid by poorer Nairobians鈥攁 disparity that to often be the case in other cities in the global South. , in poorer neighborhoods such as Kayole-Soweto, 鈥渨ater provision costs more, is less safe, and is less consistent than in other richer parts of the city.鈥�

Palestine and the Meaning of Global Antifascism

December 6, 2023December 6, 2023 martinarboledaLeave a comment

Photo: Courtesy of the Laura Rodig Brigade, Coordinadora Feminista 8M.

What is particularly harrowing about the current situation in Gaza not only has to do with the multiplication of war crimes and with the moral and ideological bankruptcy of a Western liberal order that seeks to obfuscate, by all means 鈥� media blackouts, censorship, stigmatization, blackmail, etc. 鈥� what is already patently clear for most. The resonances with the darkest side of 20th century fascism, in particular, are a clear warning sign. In the words of Israeli intellectual : 鈥淎s a historian whose field is the Holocaust and Nazism, it鈥檚 hard for me to say this, but there are neo-Nazi ministers in the [Israeli] government today. You don鈥檛 see that anywhere else 鈥� not in Hungary, not in Poland 鈥� ministers who, ideologically, are pure racists.鈥� Also, a recent essay by draws worrying parallels between the Israeli government and fascism in its specifically Nazi variant: virulent racism with biologicist overtones; political operations driven by a totalitarian mentality; contempt for weakness and lust for violence; homophobia and anti-intellectualism.

How to position ourselves in this situation? Or more specifically, what are the consequences that arise from the act of taking a stance? In recent weeks, the war between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front has been discussed as a relevant precedent for understanding the situation in Gaza, and Frantz Fanon as an important interpreter of the Algerian struggle for decolonization and national liberation. However, it is in the foreword that Jean Paul Sartre wrote for the 1963 French edition of The Wretched of the Earth where the ethical question of taking a stance (one of the most recurrent themes in the existentialist philosophy of the time) is powerfully posed. In this text, Sartre indicts the reader for his veiled complicity with colonial violence. In an accusatory tone whose stylistic construction is clearly designed to create discomfort, the author states that not taking sides and simply remaining silent is equivalent to siding with the aggressor. I often find it difficult to write in the first person. However, under the current circumstances I cannot bear to remain silent. I am also not clear about the register in which I should write these lines; what is clear, however, is that it is imperative for me to raise my voice against the genocidal violence and systematic dehumanization to which the Palestinian people are being subjected to.

The three-stage process through which African resource sovereignty was ceded to foreign mining corporations

December 4, 2023November 26, 2023 Ben RadleyLeave a comment

In the 1960s, newly independent African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources, in a reversal of their prior colonial exploitation by European mining corporations. In this excerpt from his new book , Ben Radley shows how transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force assuming ownership and management of industrial mining projects. Radley argues this latest reversal has taken place through a three-stage process grounded in a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards. Recent mining code revisions in several countries have been heralded by some as marking a new era of resource nationalism. Yet the new codes remain a far cry from the earlier period of resource sovereignty. The first three chapters of the book can be downloaded for free .

Impotent Capital

November 27, 2023November 26, 2023 Thomas F. PurcellLeave a comment

It is an uncontroversial observation that the history of capitalist development in South America is characterised by its subsumption to global capital accumulation through the production and export of agricultural and mining commodities for the world market. From this common starting point, however, there emerge divergent ways to account for the reproduction, and development limits, of this mode of insertion into the global economy. For many working in Latin American traditions of political economy it is almost common sense to assume, depending on one鈥檚 political and theoretical tastes, that a combination of centre-periphery power relations such as imperialism, monopoly capital, declining terms of trade and/or super-exploitation are the conceptual tools to understand, analyse, and strategize the overcoming of so-called 鈥榗ommodity dependence鈥� and embark on genuine development. It is noteworthy that in this new book – , edited by Javiera Rojas Cifuentes, Gabriel Rivas Castro, Mauricio Fuentes Salvo, and Juan Kornblihtt, not only are these concepts eschewed but their underlying trade premise 鈥� the transfer of 鈥榮urplus鈥� from periphery to the centre through mechanisms such as 鈥榰nequal exchange鈥� 鈥� is turned on its head. As opposed to structural power relations operating as the barrier to development, this collection opens an internal window onto the impotence of capital to develop the productive forces and, in doing so, offers distinctive strategic implications for the centralised organisation of working-class political action across the region.

The book builds on work that has been developed under the auspices of the in Buenos Aires, following the original contributions of Argentine scholar Juan I帽igo-Carrera to the Marxian critique of political economy. It is I帽igo-Carrera鈥檚 opening chapter that frames the distinguishing features of this Marxian scholarship and the original critique of structuralist and dependency theories of Latin American development. Rather than the pitfalls of international exchange determined by direct power relations between geo-spatial containers, the cause of uneven development in South America is predicated on the valorisation of capital through its position in the international division of labour through production relations. This bears emphasis because, for all the authors, capital is not an asymmetric relation between countries, a factor of production, a social group, or a firm wielding monopoly power but an objectified general social relation of private and independent production (i.e., capitalism), subsumed under the movement of formation of the general rate of profit. Indeed, the antagonistic formation of the general rate profit is the concrete form in which capital organises and reproduces itself as a social relation behind the backs of states, capitalists, labour, and landlords. The crucial category here, and what all the chapters demonstrate, is the extent to which capital valorises in South America, as an aliquot part of the international division of labour of global capitalism, through the appropriation of ground rent.