Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya: Q&A with Matteo Capasso

Farwa Sial1 Comment

In Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Matteo Capasso provides an alternative analysis of Libya鈥檚 history and regime under Colonel Gaddafi leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. The book offers a compelling counterargument to the mainstream narrative of Libya as a stateless, authoritarian and rogue state by focusing on international and geopolitical dynamics impacting Libya鈥檚 governance.

Q.1 Your book argues against the dominant western analysis of Libya under Colonel Gaddafi as a dictatorship, completely dependent on its economic legitimacy from oil. To quote:

鈥This book has cautioned readers from rushing to define the Jamahiriya as an umpteenth authoritarian regime in the Arab world that crushes and controls its people. The significance of this issue lies in how the increasing repressible characteristic of the regime inevitably reflected wider power鈥. 

What do you mean by wider power dynamics?

When you pick any book on the political history of Libya, you are bound to encounter the argument that Qaddafi鈥檚 Libya (not the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya or the Libyan government) was a stateless society, governed ruthlessly by a dictator who was aiming to disrupt the US-led international order.聽 In the book, I define these arguments as a conceptual tryptic, including the ideas of statelessness, authoritarianism and rogue state. The book starts off questioning the use of these analytical frameworks and instead proposes to address questions of political legitimacy and authority via the study of the everyday. To do so, however, brought me to face another problem, namely the fact that most academic studies approach the 鈥榚veryday鈥 with an overemphasis on the agency and power of the people. This, in turn, has led to dismiss a bit too quickly the impact of global and structural factors; and this is where I come to answer your question. While the everyday gained prominence and became a privileged site for studying politics in the Arab region, especially in the aftermath of the 2011 mass uprisings, these analyses 聽remain disconnected from long-standing international dynamics of politics and political economy. In other worlds, how were these states integrated in the wider international political economy? Did the political projects pursued by the Libyan government, especially in the aftermath of the 1969 revolution, challenge the interests of Western geopolitical forces? Why was Libya progressively subject to military assaults and geopolitical pressure?聽 If one ignores鈥攔ather conveniently鈥攖hese aspects, it ends up to square one, basically explaining the politics of the country as the result of internal factors. In this manner, one not only delinks the socio-political formation of countries in the Global South from the international world, but also ends up flattening out its hierarchies existing.

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The Salaried Man and His Others: Rethinking Pressure in the Longue Dur茅e

Jordanna MatlonLeave a comment

Colon statue, C么te d鈥橧voire. Author鈥檚 collection, 2023.

The burgeoning scholarship over the past several decades documenting youth stalled in their quest for adulthood, the scholarship on waiting, on restless underemployed laborers buying time in the informal economy, on the crisis of African masculinities, on the accumulating material and psychic pressures of unmet familial and community responsibilities 鈥 all these are ways of depicting the longue dur茅e of failure best contextualized within the beguiled patriarchal promise of colonial civilizing missions: the breadwinning wage.

In this blog, I draw from my recent book, , to explore how socioeconomic forces particular to the postcolonial African city induce a permanent state of pressure among young men at the interrupted point of social becoming. Observing that the crisis of work is also a crisis of masculinity, I historicize the pressures of late capitalism in African cities 鈥 namely, surviving in informal economies 鈥 within the longue dur茅e of the wage economy. I show how the introduction of wage labor during European colonial rule produced at its outset an overwhelmingly unachievable male breadwinner norm. The salary was both an entitlement and a source of intense pressure as it produced a novel form of patriarchal privilege but also the social and domestic responsibilities that came to collapse manhood with this exceptional, and exceptionally rare, form of economic activity. Examining these pressures within the long shadow of colonialism critically illuminates the role of race-making and racial difference in the emergence of financial expectation and deeply personalized societal failure among contemporary urban African men.

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Walt Rostow鈥檚 development theory shows that capitalism relies on brutal violence

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Economist Walt Rostow advanced an influential development theory while working as an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow鈥檚 advocacy of murderous violence in Vietnam flowed directly from his theory of how to promote capitalist growth.

Commonsense notions of development associate it with capitalist modernization. Such notions assume that cumulative economic growth enables poor countries to become more like rich ones.

To facilitate such growth, policymakers, international institutions, and many academics urge poor countries and their populations to adopt modern ways of thought and action, dispensing with familial or communal loyalties and embracing the benefits of capitalist markets and impersonal bureaucracies.

Those who adopt this perspective insist that such modernization will be beneficial for developing societies in the long run, even though there will always be those who lose out and seek to resist the process. However, since the benefits of economic growth and cultural change outweigh the losses, it is legitimate to forcefully suppress such opposition.

No thinker was more influential in theorizing and popularizing such notions of development underpinned by violent coercion than Walt Whitman Rostow (1916鈥2003).

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Colonialism and Indian Famines: A Response

Tirthankar RoyLeave a comment

Tamoghna Halder criticized one of my writings on nineteenth-century Indian famines. Halder distorts my views and wrongly implies that I suppressed data. He misreads the very nature of the Indian famine debate, thinking it is about facts. It is not. It is about method, about how economic historians and development scholars should read the history of climatic shocks. The piece demands a response and a clarification of the issues involved.

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The Academic Labour Movement: Lessons from the New School and Beyond

Robert NobleLeave a comment

鈥淎t its best, one of the most creative activities is being involved in a struggle with other people, breaking out of our isolation, seeing our relations with others change, discovering new dimensions in our lives 鈥 it [is] a powerful collective experience鈥.

Silvia Federici, 1984

News broke on the very last day of 2022 that members of the New School鈥檚 part-time faculty (PTF) union – ACT-UAW 7902 – had voted to ratify a new five-year contract, following what some are calling the longest adjunct strike in American history (Hamberg, 2022). A 鈥檛entative agreement鈥 was reached on December 10th, after almost a month of strike action where more than 1,600 PTF members had taken to the picket line. Their existing contract had expired, and there was no sign of a satisfactory renewal. The dispute was multifaceted, but primarily concerned poor pay, uncompensated labour time, general job security and health insurance coverage.

The agreement solidified a historic pay increase (the largest PTF at the New School have ever received), as well as an enhanced offer for paid family leave, improved terms for annualisation, compensation for labor performed outside of the classroom and improvements in health care access (Hamberg, 2022). Whilst there is much to be celebrated in these gains, for the New School community this was a month-long struggle marked with uncertainty, tension, and growing hostility. The disconnect between the university鈥檚 administration and its community of faculty and students was made painfully, publicly evident. Observers couldn鈥檛 help but call hypocrisy on an institution founded on radical values employing 鈥渃orporate union-busting tactics 鈥 antithetical to [its] progressive heritage鈥 (Hamberg, 2022).

Much can be gleaned from this contained episode: the state of higher education following a period of its incessant marketisation; the power of organised labour to rally against exploitation; the role higher education specifically can play in a wider workers鈥 movement. This blog post will attempt to place the New School鈥檚 recent ACT-UAW 7902 strike in its wider context, that of an (inter)national worker movement, both within the higher education sector and beyond. By doing this, I will elicit some of the unique contributions academics, other university workers and students themselves can offer such a movement.

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Structural Transformation: Then and Now

yadu chandranLeave a comment

by C.R.Yadu and Sahil Mehra

A major theme that dominates the literature on development economics is the narrative of 鈥楽tructural Transformation鈥, which, based on the experience of developed economies, envisages a gradual 鈥榤odernisation鈥 of the economy. This process is expected to unfold in a similar way across the economies of global South, where the importance of non-agriculture/high-productivity/capitalist sectors in terms of both contribution to national income and labour employment would increase and that of agriculture/low-productivity/pre-capitalist sectors would fall, ultimately leading to dissolution of this dualist structure of the economy (Lewis, 1954; Kaldor, 1967; Kuznets, 1968). This transformation is expected to bring productivity gains across all sectors, reduce poverty, and lead to high levels of economic prosperity. According to Monga and Yifu Lin (2019), structural transformation is 鈥渁rguably the single most significant concept and social goal in the global quest for prosperity and world peace.鈥

However, many of the economies of the global South have not been able to undergo this expected path of structural transformation. For example, in 2019, for sub-Saharan Africa, the average contribution of agriculture to GDP has been around 14% while the proportion of population employed in agriculture is 53%. The GDP contribution and employment figures range from 8% and 27% for East Asian and Pacific economies to 17% and 42% for South Asia respectively (World Development Indicators, 2021).

The dominant narrative, largely propagated by international agencies like the World Bank, still advocates the validity of the process of structural transformation, continues to use this framework to understand the labour and employment transition in the global South, and advocates policies to achieve the same. In contrast, within various critical strands of literature, there is an increasing realization that the nature and pattern of structural transformation that unfolded in the global North might not be replicable in the global South (Dorin, 2017; Scherrer, 2018; Breman, 2019). Building on some of these criticisms, we argue that the possibilities of attainment of a North-style structural transformation remains bleak in the contemporary global South. This is majorly because the socio-economic and political context which facilitated the process of structural transformation of the economies in the global North is no longer available to the global South. The process in the North was, to a large extent, fostered by colonialism which allowed these economies to undertake expropriation and extraction of resources, without much concern for ecological limits, as well as to transfer a proportion of their population to the newly found lands in the temperate regions. Given the significant changes in the structure of capitalism now as compared to the earlier phase, it is worthwhile to investigate the possibilities of the global South experiencing the envisaged path of structural transformation.

In the following sections, we elaborate on why the received wisdom in development economics no longer provides an adequate framework to understand capitalist development in the global South.

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Limits to Supply Chain Resilience: A Monopoly Capital Critique

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

As the COVID-19 pandemic expanded across the world in early 2020, it generated the 鈥渇irst global supply chain crisis.鈥 Global supply chains represent the integrative structure of contemporary global capitalism, and any disruption to them potentially threatens the functioning of the system itself.

In response to the crisis, the global supply chain community, encompassing academics and policymakers keen to promote their purported benefits, are proposing ways to increase supply chain 鈥渞esilience.鈥 The notion has been defined by the World Trade Organization and Asian Development Bank as 鈥渢he ability of these chains to anticipate and prepare for severe disruptions in a way that maximizes capacity to absorb shocks, adapt to new realities, and re-establish optimized operations in the shortest possible time.鈥 Enhanced global supply chain resilience is to be pursued through a range of policies to be implemented by lead firm managers and supported by states.

While global supply chains are promoted as generating positive gains鈥攆or firms and workers, North and South鈥攖here is mounting evidence to suggest that they represent organizational forms of capitalism designed to raise the rate of surplus value extraction from labor by capital and facilitate its geographic transfer from the Global South to the Global North. As demonstrated in a previous Monthly Review article (鈥,鈥 November 2021), global supply chains have contributed to dynamics of concentration in leading firms, and a marked shift in national income from labor to capital across much of the world.

Capitalism, as Karl Marx observed, is rooted in the exploitation of labor by capital through the latter鈥檚 ability to extract surplus value from the former. It is characterized by dynamics of concentration and centralization of capital, where fewer and larger firms increasingly dominate each economic sector. These dynamics are intrinsically related to capitalism鈥檚 uneven geographical development and the reproduction of geopolitical tensions and rivalries. As Harry Magdoff once wrote:

Centrifugal and centripetal forces have always coexisted at the very core of the capitalist process.鈥 Periods of peace and harmony have alternated with periods of discord and violence. Generally the mechanism of this alternation involves both economic and military forms of struggle, with the strongest power emerging victorious and enforcing acquiescence on the losers. But uneven development soon takes over, and a period of renewed struggle for hegemony emerges.

In fact, a recent World Bank publication explicates how the COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating capitalism鈥檚 inner monopolistic tendencies:

COVID-19 could cause a further rise in corporations鈥 market power because large corporations are in the best position to withstand the economic downturn and deploy new technologies.鈥 In the past three recessions, the share prices of US firms in the top quartile across 10 sectors rose by an average of 6 percent whereas the share prices of those in the bottom quartile fell by 44 percent. The same divergence has been evident since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak.

This article argues that the resilience agenda represents an ideological justification and fortification of these very same tendencies鈥攐f labor exploitation, of concentration and centralization of capital, and of an increasingly geopolitical dimension to capitalist competition.

Following this introduction, the first section of this article outlines the emerging notion of resilience as formulated within the global supply chain community. The next section discusses how the first response by firms and states to the COVID-19 crisis was to make workers bear the brunt of the crisis. The concluding section identifies the geopolitical dynamics of resilience, focusing on the White House鈥檚 2021 report,聽Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth.

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