This article provides a historical perspective on the trajectory of neocolonialism and the current systemic crisis before revisiting some of the open questions on systemic transition. The key aspects of this trajectory include the permanent crisis of monopoly capitalism and the manner in which peripheral social formations have evolved. A real trend toward recolonization is clearly evident at the current juncture. The specific questions considered derive from the revolutionary experiences of the twentieth century. They concern two perennial contradictions—between popular alliances and national defense, and between communism and nationalism—which naturally emerge in the peripheries in the struggle against imperialism and colonialism. It is argued that Marxist–Leninist doctrine, as the vanguard of historical materialism, must continue to clarify the role of colonialism and its legacies if we are to grasp what is at stake in the transition to a polycentric world. The article proceeds to sketch out the elements of a general theory of systemic transition.
Late neocolonialism has frayed the political sovereignty regime that twentieth-century national liberation built. This article argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran contested that erosion by converting forced, partial delinking into a sovereignty envelope: extending state-level defense–industrial capacity to peoples, movements, and states possessing none. Drawing on US planning documents and Iranian, Arab, and Western strategic scholarship, this study traces defensive industrialization, development under sanctions, and the class composition which sanctions remolded. Against the proxy framing, it shows that Iran absorbs the commodity form so that weapons reach its allies as use values rather than as sales. Sovereignty and the wars it engenders in turn damage core realization circuits by eroding their political conditions—the domestic assent on which war-making rests. Such sovereignty functions as a rising wage share: not a qualitative break with capital, but a slow erosion of its command.
This article demonstrates how protected areas in ejidal lands of Baja California Sur, Mexico, generate labor subordination among peasants working with endemic and invasive species. Drawing on formal and hybrid subsumption, we analyze fishermen, goat farmers, and hunting guides as their labor is reorganized under conservation capital. We propose epistemic subsumption to describe the appropriation and dismissal of situated knowledge through technocratic frameworks that re-signify nature as a service provider. Through a comparative ethnographic case methodology, we show how conservation proponents deploy deception ( embuste ), unpaid labor, enclosures, and ejidal political capture to position themselves as leaders of the productive process. These mechanisms do not extract surplus value in the classical sense; rather, they appropriate biodiversity-rich territories, reorienting them toward environmental services. The analytical focus aims to understand the separation of original producers from their means of production toward increasingly alienating activities.
We aim to foreground the importance of enslaved children within the context of the coffee expansion in São Paulo. To this end, in addition to engaging with relevant scholarly literature on the subject, we work with a broad base of primary data drawn from handwritten bills of sale of enslaved individuals. These documents were collected in the municipality of Rio Claro (Province of São Paulo, Brazil) and cover the period between 1861 and 1869. Based on the consulted bibliography and compiled data, we seek to highlight both the significance of enslaved children and the social, economic, and demographic elements related to the dynamics of the domestic slave trade involving this group, such as the volume of sales; the interaction between price and variables like sex, age, type of domestic trade (local, intraprovincial, and interprovincial), and occupation/experience; the number of children sold individually or as part of groups; and the participation of enslaved families in the transactions analyzed.
This is a study of the social and ecological transitions around erstwhile agriculture-centered water bodies at the periphery of a rapidly expanding city. It critically engages with the concept of horizontal and vertical (scale) conflicts through an empirical study of the various processes and challenges faced by different users in the context of the Ossudu tank/lake, a water body near Puducherry city in South India. The study finds that in the transition to the urban sphere, local use for recreation rises in importance, while environmental concerns and real estate demands form opposing pressures on the lake area. Issues of power, marginality, and justice mirror and strengthen each other both on the horizontal and vertical axes, determining the future of the lake. It is argued that the neoliberal recreation paradigm leaves out the urban working class, while at the same time being a part of shifts in natural resource management that disempower and alienate dalits, landless, and nomadic communities. The study highlights the need to bring users rather than uses to the forefront of rediscovering the continuing purposes of these water systems.
