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Showing posts with the label “political economy”

‘A Racist Society Can’t But Fight a Racist War’ – James Baldwin

A reminder: There is no separation between the social relations inside the US and its imperialism.  “The intimate relationship between America’s internal and external wars, established by its original sin, has long been clear. The question was always how long mainstream intellectuals could continue to offer fig-leaf euphemisms for shock-and-awe racism, and suppress an entwined history of white supremacism and militarisation with fables about American exceptionalism, liberalism’s long battle with totalitarianism, and that sort of thing. *** From a critical take on the American journalist and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates “Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R.James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Tran...

UK: Something Monstrous

“[T]he vilification of migrants and Muslims forms part of a primitive persecutory phantasy, shaped by the UK’s colonial history and by its entrenched material disparities.” “[I]t would be more accurate to view contemporary British bordering as a continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically – and withheld from former colonial subjects.” This goes with the rhetoric of politicians who stress that UK needs migrants, but they have to be skilled ones and the country ‘legally’. They did not mind before – in fact encouraged – the hundreds of thousands of Polish and others, many of whom were unskilled, when British capital needed cheap labour. During the ‘great boom’ of capitalism in the 1959s and 1960s liberal democracy could thrive at home without the need to scapegoat the Other. On the contrary, many workers from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean were e...

A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics

A must read. “The text’s principal argument is that inequalities in most areas of American life, from traffic patterns to the delivery of health care, are an outcome of ‘historic and systemic racism’. The book is organized around four themes:  1) a retelling of the story of race, demonstrating how it emerged as an elite discourse to justify restricting equality and liberty to the few;  2) an exploration of how mass resistance, particularly against slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow, expanded the ideas of liberty and equality in order to make them truly universal;  3) an examination of the relationship between racial inequality and class inequality, with special attention to how a narrow focus on racial inequality obscures how class exploitation works to produce and reproduce racial inequality;  and 4) how identity politics is a form of class politics that operates with equal perniciousness on the Right and the Left. Malik points out that identitarians on the Right an...

The U.S. in the Middle East

“ In short, the political economy of the Abraham Accords may serve as the new anchor of a regional security arrangement that is US-stamped, but no longer necessarily directly backed militarily by a US presence on the ground. They facilitate a region-wide, Israeli-produced surveillance architecture; new flows of weaponry to repressive states known to target civilians; and trade and investment patterns that promise an authoritarian model of prosperity at the expense of the most vulnerable communities of the region. This is, of course, in addition to the violation of the most basic rights of Palestinian and Sahrawi communities.” The empire is changing its strategy Related Israel-Egypt-EU gas deal

A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa

Introduction by Joel Beinin Political economy addresses the mutual and historical constitution of states, markets, and classes… In this perspective, causes are simultaneously effects; all events are situated in a relational matrix; all social hierarchies are subject to contestation. The historical development of social formations dominated by capital is inextricably intertwined with genocides, slavery and other forms of unfree labor, racialization, patriarchy, national oppression, and empire. Capital accumulation by individuals, partnerships, and even contemporary corporations can occur through exploiting many different forms of labor as well as cheap nature. The ambit of political economy also includes the legal, political, and cul- tural forms of the regulation of regimes of capital accumulation; relations among local, national, and global forms of capital, class, and culture; the so- cial structure of reproduction; the construction of forms of knowledge and hegemony; technopolitics;...

Universalism and Identity Politics

This is good! “Most critics are hardly capable of identifying the major problems of identity politics: firstly, its widespread disregard for the importance of intersectionality, knowledge and expertise (that is independent of the respective identity) and secondly, the lack of a critique of capitalist structures and socio-economic inequalities (beyond specific identities), which, in turn, prevents a comprehensive understanding of discrimination, oppression, exploitation and emancipation.” The poverty of mainstream universalism and exclusive identity politics

Petrodollars and Profit

Rethinking Political Economy through the Middle East "What if oil prices are not received, but made? What if cartels raise prices by constricting supply, and use war, legal chicanery, and international property deeds to do so? Such questions led Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, two political economists, to examine the production, distribution, and political structure of the oil business. They derived from these patterns a theory of prices and power distinct from orthodox and heterodox worldviews alike. They see prices as the result of social processes, “a symbolic quantification of power.” One of them is sabotage, or the strategic disruption of production. Power, then, is the ability to create and order the world to ensure just the right mix of sabotage and supply in order to ensure profit rates beat out those of your competitors. It is this novel, fascinating, brash, and contested theory of capitalism which they lay out in a new book,  The Scientist and the Church ....

Lineages of Revolt

Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East by Adam Hanieh. "Conventional accounts of political economy in the Middle East tend to adopt a similar methodological approach, which begins, typically, with the basic analytical categories of “state” (al-dawla) and “civil society” (al-mujtama’ al-madani). The former is defined as the various political institutions that stand above society and govern a country. The latter is made up of “institutions autonomous from the state which facilitate orderly economic, political and social activity” or, in the words of the Iraqi social scientist Abdul Hussein Shaaban, “the civil space that separates the state from society, which is made up of non-governmental and non-inheritable economic, political, social and cultural institutions that form a bond between the individual and the state.” All societies are said to be characterized by this basic division, which sees the state confronted by an agglomeration of atomized individuals, organiz...