Violence toward the indigenous Baka people of southeastern Cameroon is carried out by both conservation and trophy-hunting guards. This visual essay examines the effects of violence and its relationship with the enclosure of the forest by conservation entities, trophy-hunting outfits, and a logging company. Photographic images provide a textured and embodied experience to the themes of violence and enclosures. Drawing from Ren & eacute; Girard's work on violence and sacrifice, Alice B. Kelly's work on conservation and primitive accumulation, and Kalyan Sanyal's analysis of primitive accumulation and postcolonial capitalism, this essay explores how the forest becomes a production machine for capital accumulation, one that is continually maintained through violence.
The fundamental challenge before the trade union movement is to find a new discursive space which will allow it to accommodate the reality of diverse labour practices and relate these practices to their created, appropriated and distributed wealth. For this to happen, the authors’ provide a theory of labour that incorporates the varied labour practices and the manner in which wealth from these practices are appropriated, distributed and received, thereby widening the imagination of what is possible in trade union practice.
Using class-focused Marxist theory we examine the received category of the informal sector in order to demonstrate two results. First, we explicate the process of ‘making’ the informal sector in terms of the formal sector. Derived from a centrist logic that shapes the mainstream development paradigm, this involves a process of its devaluation in terms of the norm of the formal sector. Moreover, attempts to introduce heterogeneity within an already homogeneously defined informal sector are shown to be failing. Second, we show how placing the concept of the informal sector within the non-centric class-focused economic terrain fundamentally displaces, indeed ‘unmakes’, the received definition of the informal sector. Our analytical frame of a non-centric class-focused economic terrain reveals, on one hand, how the ‘making’ of the informal sector serves as a political rationale for shaping societal transition in favor of modern capitalism, and on the other, the problematical nature of the rationality.
Using a class focused Marxist approach, we elucidate the adopted position of Indian small-scale sector as a devalued other within the adopted development paradigm that accords primacy to Capital and West. In the background of this understanding of small-scale sector, we demonstrate how the New Economic Policy in the era of globalization could be theorized as a tool to obtain the (post) colonial hegemony of capital over the small-scale sector.
This chapter is based on the study of economic qua labour qua class processes in a village, called Emaliguda, in the Rayagada district of South Odisha. It often happens that the standard 'answer' to a particular question only appears to be an answer. The genealogy of the term 'rural' shows that one of the origins of the term can be traced to the Latin noun rus, meaning an "open area", at times described as a "space that lay outside the cities"; in other words, that which was outside4 the urban. In addition, what remains paradigmatic of rural myths, idylls, descriptions, prescriptions, characteristics, and representations (whether these be imagined, material, social construct, understood through rural practices, or a category of thought), is that rural has always been rendered as that which is not-urban or not-yet-urban.
A training in Marxist tradition requires a knowledge of these broad approaches, the theories therein, their critique of the ruling ideas of political economy and their ideas of post-capitalism and of the debates within Marxian tradition as such. In the social production of their existence, men enter into definite, necessary relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life-process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness. Forces of Production (FOP) consist of facilities and devices used in the process of production; it is the sum total of productive forces at the disposal of organisers of production in any society at any point in time. The term 'correspond' accordingly harbours a puzzle.
Revisiting, from a Marxist perspective, the World Bank's discourse on Social Funds, we highlight three findings. One, Social Funds gets deployed in the context of a larger Third Worldist discourse of poverty management, which in turn helps deepen the logic of capitalist development. Two, generating a class-focused understanding of Social Funds (via the concept of social surplus), we argue that class processes and need processes constitute one another and through this conduit emerges a relation between global capital and the poverty alleviation programme of Social Funds. Lastly, interrogating the management approach underlying Social Funds leads us to question claims of decentralisation and participation. Our analysis exposes an underlying process of subjectification by way of a control mechanism exercised through the code of conduct encapsulated in that managerial approach.
