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 Handbook of Diverse Economies displays the extraordinary creativity that infuses the diverse-economies project and forcefully demonstrates that we discover in what we don't know, rather than in what we do know, a deep reservoir of productive naivete and problem solving that might enable us to stumble toward a just, sustainable, and responsible economy, one experiment at a time. In diverse-economies projects, a parallel ethical stance can be found, one grounded in the political choice to not know, and yet to try-a stance elaborated in the work of Albert O. Hirschman. Diverse-economies practitioners presume, look for, and find ways to enact respectful, sustaining, nonexploitative human and human-nonhuman relationships. When a courageous appreciation of that which we don't and can't know comes to guide progressive politics, there are no limits to the initiatives awaiting enactment.
While connecting similar themes and practices from The Handbook of Diverse Economies, with examples from Black American solidarity-cooperative economic activity, this essay explores Black American women's role in creating cooperative enterprises and sustaining just communities. The author reflects on her research on the benefits of cooperatives, including the reasons why and the ways people engage in solidarity and cooperative economies, especially among subaltern populations. Exploring solidarity economics from the bottom up, starting at the community level, the subject turns out to be people: noncapitalocentric economic activities are successful because the participants care about working together, make decisions together, and share both risks and revenues to benefit the total community. Existing efforts in cooperative economics have gained human rights and liberation for participants and illustrate the collective satisfaction that comes from economic cooperation and self determination, a realization that leads to exploring the role of and the need for joy in sustaining these practices.
Given the focus on production and production surplus in Marxian praxis, this paper moves instead to need and social surplus. In the process, it also takes Marxism to questions of poverty and development; and thus by extension to the concerns of the global South. Need however is not seen as divorced from class processes; as is the case in much of the theorization on and of 'need economy.' Building on both Capital and the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) this paper keeps class struggle and need struggle in an overdetermined relationship.
A consistent immanent critique of the natural sciences is crucial in the context of the "Anthropocene." Current appraisals are marked by an antinomy: they are denounced as ideology, as an instrument of domination over nature and women, and are also lauded as the bearers of the truth of climate change. This essay explains the antinomy by situating it in the trajectory of capitalist modernity. The immanent trajectory of capitalism has produced a "planetary general intellect," embedding the knowledge of humanity in a way that can be used to heal nature. This knowledge is based on a qualitatively different science, even though its components originated in capitalist undertakings. The "planetary general intellect" constitutes a "shearing pressure" that highlights the distance between what are and what ought to be the relations between humans and nature. The essay concludes by relating a possible transformation of the current form of production and allocation of resources.
This short essay reviews The Handbook of Diverse Economies. After the authors introduce themselves and explain how they came to the diverse-economies tradition, they describe what they took from an initial directed reading and subsequent systematic reading of the Handbook. They then ask two key questions for further discussion: Is there a role for strong theory when it comes to exploring diverse economies in colonial contexts? And would additional theoretical development on the role of states in diverse-economies theory be useful?
This commentary on The Handbook of Diverse Economies engages with the book and the diverse-economies framework through two entry points. First, it reflects on the degrowth community's recent taking up of the diverse-economies framework, emphasizing the shared ground between the two traditions and the implicit tension between their respective understandings of capitalism. Second, it draws on ecological economics to argue that sustainability depends not merely on the inclusion of environmental values in economic decisions but on how processes of decision making are organized. It concludes with remarks on the political usefulness of a weak theory of capitalism for contemporary social struggles.
The first half of this essay shows that Cedric Robinson's account of Western intellectual history is incorrect and that there are good reasons for thinking that his account of the autochthonous African origins of the Black radical tradition is also incorrect. Robinson underestimates the extent to which the Black radical tradition emerged due to an internal critique of certain intellectual currents in Western social formations. The second half of the essay argues that Robinson's approach amounts to a restatement of the methodological orientation that, in the context of debates about African philosophy in the 1960s, came to be associated with "ethnophilosophy." Like those who engage in ethnophilosophy, Robinson uses the concept of Western civilization to homogenize and essentialize a complex intellectual history. This homogenization and essentialization distort our understanding of both Western intellectual history and the Black radical tradition.
The coeditors of The Handbook of Diverse Economies revisit their work and respond to essays reviewing it, with curiosity amid bizarre and dark times in the global political economy: billionaires co-opt working-class politics in the United States, colonial ambitions in Aotearoa New Zealand undermine Indigenous gains, and environmental devastation deepens despair. The Handbook and review essays together remind us that both old and new thinking tools can offer sustenance. As the reviewers note, wallowing in despair and reifying the bizarre elements of political economy reflects a privileged stance. The fleeting pleasure of being the all-knowing analytical subject-akin to the paranoid subject-offers control over horrors, but at a cost. Inspired by their reviewers, the Handbook coeditors shift from despair and control to the sustained joy of learning from multiplicity and difference, advocating for joy and speculation while inventorying diverse economies to nurture the flourishing Community Economies Collective.
This essay responds to Christian Chun's recent book A World without Capitalism? and its attempt to break through the impasse of being "stuck" in a world in which there is seemingly no alternative to capitalism. It responds to Chun's framing of such an impasse in terms of resistance to capitalism rather than to neoliberalism and to his discussion of the interanimation of class and class interests. Building upon Chun's contribution, the essay highlights the need for a disentangling of the notions of a capitalist class, elites, and/or the establishment for understanding the operation of and resistance to global capitalism. Furthermore, this essay asks how the emergence of a new cloudalist class, which operates within what some have termed tech-feudalism, affects the kinds of questions Chun raises in his book.
This essay argues that the concept of the subaltern, developed by Gramsci in prison, is a fundamental piece of a specific and original Marxist conception of the process of constitution of the political subject. In particular, the place and role occupied by the concept of subalternity in Gramsci's thought can only be fully appreciated if it is placed in close relation to the concepts of autonomy and hegemony. Stated simply and at the same time controversially regarding certain interpretations that can be defined as subalternist, Gramsci is not a theoretician of subalternity; on the contrary, he is a theoretician of the exit from subalternity, of the historical construction of a postsubaltern social and political subject, an autonomous subject who is therefore enabled and capable of disputing hegemony.
Anglophone readers of Gramsci are still awaiting a complete English translation of the prison notebooks. While we wait, a new translation of Notebook 25, translated and edited by Joseph Buttigieg and Marcus Green, offers a valuable opportunity to understand how the rich but complex thinking of one of the most innovative Marxist theorists of the twentieth century evolved over the course of his incarceration, an opportunity made possible by the editors' decision to include earlier versions of the notes included in Notebook 25, later versions written by Gramsci in his final years, and relevant notes from other notebooks. This comment on the new translation focuses on the shift in terminology between the early and late versions, particularly the replacement of the term "class" by "group" in most (but not all) instances in the revised notes, and how this might be seen as an at least implicit challenge to the notion of "class-in-itself."
This essay reflects on Antonio Gramsci's Subaltern Social Groups: A Critical Edition of Prison Notebook 25 (Columbia University Press, 2021), edited and translated by the late Joseph A. Buttigieg and Marcus E. Green. While Gramsci's concept of subaltern groups has long inspired scholars of cultural studies, geography, subaltern studies, and political theory, this work has drawn on a relatively small selection of Gramsci's prison writings. This first complete English translation of Gramsci's writings on subaltern groups and classes represents a major turning point in Gramscian studies, showing how Gramsci provided important "methodological criteria" for analyzing race and class in specific conjunctures. Gramsci's insights about subaltern groups and classes as well as the southern question can be "translated" to confront the current conjuncture.
In this essay, author Christian W. Chun presents a summary of his book, A World without Capitalism? Alternative Discourses, Spaces, and Imaginaries (Routledge, 2022), followed by his responses to commentaries on the book by Peter Ives, William Simpson, and John P. O'Regan. Expanding on the author's positionality and its cruciality in understanding the participants' experiences, this essay rejects the hegemony of "academically mandated methodologies" as the target audience is outside academia. Furthermore, the author insists upon the need to reestablish human connections and move beyond mobile screens and social media as an act of rebellion.
