After the Frontier: Problems with Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian Amazon

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cleary
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Economic Structure ◽  
Brazilian Amazon ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theoretical Interpretation ◽  
Regional Economies ◽  
Central Brazil ◽  
Frontier Development

The theoretical interpretation of social and economic change in the Brazilian Amazon has been dominated by a political economy in which the notion of the frontier, variously defined, has been central. Brazil is of course not the only country where a fuzzily defined idea of frontier development has been important, and we can think, as Turner did for the United States, of a Brazilian frontier thesis. It can be boiled down to a simple contention, although the arguments are often complicated: the frontier, now restricted to Amazonia, is the absorption of peripheral regions by an expanding capitalism. This perspective, fundamental to numerous studies of Amazonia, sees a tendency towards homogeneity in economic structure and social relations in the cycle of frontier development, with capitalism ending up as the dominant force. It regards the key subjects in the dynamic of the frontier as the peasantry, who are acted upon by the bourgeoisie and the state, and argues that the dynamic of events within the frontier is determined outside it, in the forms of capital accumulation in the national economy and the way regional economies are articulated to it. Although first formulated in the 1970s, it remains overwhelmingly the most influential theoretical approach to explaining Amazonia's modern history, irrespective, one is sometimes tempted to think, of the direction that history has actually taken.

The Broken Windows of Rosa Ramos

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Heatherton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Broken Windows ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
And Behavior

This chapter considers how “broken windows” policing as both philosophy and practice emerged alongside and also facilitated major transformations of the neoliberal political economy. It further proposes the concept of imminent violability as an analytic through which this vulnerability might be comprehended within the racial, spatial, and ultimately gendered dimensions of neoliberal securitization. By thinking within and across scales, from the regulation of bodies and behavior to the refashioning of spaces for global capital, it argues that imminent violability can serve as a radical feminist critique linking racism, capital accumulation, and the increasingly commonplace vulnerability to state violence most keenly experienced by poor and working-class communities of color across the United States.

Brokering Servitude

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Urban
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Labor ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
Border Controls ◽  
Static Space

Brokering Servitude examines how labor markets for domestic service were identified, shaped, and governed by philanthropists, missionaries, commercial offices, and the state. Because household service was undesirable work and stigmatized as menial and unfree, brokers were integral to steering and compelling women, men, and children into this labor. By the end of the nineteenth century, the federal government—as the sovereign power responsible for overseeing immigration—had become a major broker of domestic labor through border controls. By determining eligibility for entry, federal immigration officials dictated the availability of workers for domestic labor and under what conditions they could be contracted. Brokering Servitude is the first book to connect the political economy of domestic labor in the United States to the nation’s historic legacy as an imperial power engaged in continental expansion, the opening of overseas labor markets in Europe and Asia, and the dismantling of the unfree labor regime that slavery represented. The question of how to best broker the social relations of production necessary to support middle-class domesticity generated contentious debates about race, citizenship, and economic development. This book asserts that the political economy of reproductive labor, usually confined to the static space of the home, cannot be properly understood without attention to labor migrations, and especially migrations of workers who were assisted, compelled, or contracted. Their interventions responded to household employers who were eager to not only compare the merits of different labor sources, but also pit these sources against each other.

Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1: The False Messiah, Alan Hart, Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2009; Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 2: David Becomes Goliath, Alan Hart, Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2009; Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 3: Conflict Without End, Alan Hart, Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2010

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 159-180
Author(s):  
Max Ajl
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Main Determinant ◽  
The Real ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis review-essay looks at a recent trilogy of works on Israeli history, the political history of the relationship between the United States and Israel, and the effect of the Israel lobby on the relationship between the two states. While the books attempt to construct a narrative that essentially blame the lobby for close to one hundred years of American malfeasance in the Middle East, they falter due to their idealism, their weak grasp of regional political economy and American capital accumulation, and their conspiracism. Instead, this review proposes a reinterpretation of regional political economy, materially grounding the lobby and the Special Relationship while situating the two within the patterns of accumulation pushed by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s ‘weapondollar-petrodollar coalition’, the main determinant of American foreign policy in the Middle East.

scholarly journals Economic Integration and Convergence: U.S. Regions, 1840–1987

1998 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sukkoo Kim
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Economic Integration ◽  
Economic Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regional Economies ◽  
Secular Changes ◽  
Industrial Structures ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Per Capita

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centureis, the regions of the United States went from a set of relatively isolated regional economies to an integrated national economy. Economic integration, as we as long-run secular changes in the economic structure associated with economic growth, played an important role in determining U.S. regional industrial structures. Moreover, although differences in regional industrial structures do not explain all the variations in regional income per capita, they played an important role in causing U.S. regional incomes to diverge and converge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The United States’ Arctic Foreign Policy

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-153
Author(s):  
Jonathan N. Markowitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Economic Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Military Presence ◽  
Arctic State ◽  
Substantial Investment ◽  
The Impact

Chapter 6 examines how the United States, the most powerful production-oriented Arctic state, responded to the revelation of Arctic resources. If capabilities drive intentions, then the United States should project the most power to the region. However, if economic structure influences states’ preferences, as this book argues, then Washington should be more interested in securing access to markets and less concerned with seeking control over Arctic resources. This chapter provides a detailed account of the impact the United States’ production-based economy and broad governing coalition had on its Arctic foreign policy. Compared with the other Arctic states, the United States invested far less in bolstering its existing Arctic bases and icebreakers. In line with the book’s core predictions, the United States’ domestic political economy best explains Washington’s reluctance to make greater Arctic commitments and a concomitant lack of substantial investment in increasing the United States’ Arctic military presence throughout multiple administrations.

scholarly journals Prenatal Nondiscrimination Laws: Disability, Social Conservatism, and the Political Economy of Genetic Screening

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Denbow
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Social Conservatism

This article analyzes recent state laws and legislative debates in the United States concerning the prohibition of abortions performed because of a diagnosis of fetal disability. The article brings together critical theories to analyze the legislative records—including floor debates and committee hearings—in the four states that enacted disability PRENDAs before 2019. This analysis shows how social conservatives use disability PRENDAs to present themselves as the protector of the oppressed, while advancing their views about family and gender. Furthermore, I argue that PRENDAs place the burden for structural economic and political concerns on the shoulders of individuals, especially pregnant persons, while largely ignoring the medical-industrial complex as well as the government's own poor funding of social services for people with disabilities. Critical attention thus needs to be paid to how factors such as the ascendancy of genetics, the privatization of medicine, and the state's facilitation of capital accumulation for biotechnology corporations help constitute the ideal self-regulating risk-averse pregnant neoliberal subject. To bring attention to these factors, the article examines the political economy of non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPTs).

Black Market

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Market ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Modern Nation State

On the eve of the Civil War, the estimated value of the U.S. enslaved population exceeded $3 billion--triple that of investments nationwide in factories, railroads, and banks combined, and worth more even than the South's lucrative farmland. Not only an object to be traded and used, the slave was also a kind of currency, a form of value that anchored the market itself. And this value was not destroyed in the war. Slavery still structured social relations and cultural production in the United States more than a century after it was formally abolished. As Aaron Carico reveals in Black Market, slavery’s engine of capital accumulation was preserved and transformed, and the slave commodity survived emancipation. Through both archival research and lucid readings of literature, art, and law, from the plight of the Fourteenth Amendment to the myth of the cowboy, Carico breaks open the icons of liberalism to expose the shaping influence of slavery's political economy in America after 1865. Ultimately, Black Market shows how a radically incomplete and fundamentally failed abolition enabled the emergence of a modern nation-state, in which slavery still determined--and now goes on to determine--economic, political, and cultural life.

scholarly journals A PROSPECTIVE STUDY OF THE ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE SURPLUS VALUE IN THE UNITED STATES BASED ON A MACROECONOMIC MODEL: CONSEQUENCES FOR RUSSIA

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-190
Author(s):  
Alexander V. Ryzhenkov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
National Income ◽  
Economic Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Macroeconomic Model ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
Congressional Budget Office ◽  
The Usa ◽  
A Prospective Study

This article develops an optimization neoliberal scenario 1 and a socially-oriented scenario 2 of capitalist reproduction based on US statistics for 2020-40. Scenario 1 preserves the socio-economic structure that generated the systemic, structural, and cyclical crisis of capitalism; it assumes a regular repetition of overproduction and paroxysms. The transforming social relations in the direction of tightening the workers’ control over production and the primary distribution of national income take place in scenario 2. Comparison of these pioneer scenarios with the projections by the Congressional Budget Office in the USA for 2020-2030 reveals the underestimation by the latter of the depth and duration of the epoch-making corona-crisis, which owes its name to the Covid-19 pandemic. The necessity for Russia of revival of the ideology of socialism, understood as the first phase of communism, is substantiated.

Gendered differences in emigration and mobility perspectives among European researchers working abroad

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
The Future ◽  
Highly Skilled

This paper focuses on gendered mobilities of highly skilled researchers working abroad. It is based on an empirical qualitative study that explored the mobility aspirations of Austrian scientists who were working in the United States at the time they were interviewed. Supported by a case study, the paper demonstrates how a qualitative research strategy including graphic drawings sketched by the interviewed persons can help us gain a better understanding of the gendered importance of social relations for the future mobility aspirations of scientists working abroad.

Civil sphere and democracy in Latin America

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Ch. Alexander ◽  
Carlo Tognato
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Civil Sphere ◽  
The Everyday

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate that the civil spheres of Latin America remain in force, even when under threat, and to expand the method of theorizing democracy, understanding it not only as a state form, but also as a way of life. Moreover, the task of the authors goes beyond the purely application of the theory of the civil sphere in order to emphasize the relevance not only in practice, but also in the theory of democratic culture and institutions of Latin America. This task requires decolonizing the arrogant attitude of North theorists towards democratic processes outside the United States and Europe. The peculiarities of civil spheres in Latin America are emphasized. It is argued that over the course of the nineteenth century the non-civil institutions and value spheres that surrounded civil spheres deeply compromised them. The problems of development that pockmarked Latin America — lagging economies, racial and ethnic and class stratification, religious strife — were invariably filtered through the cultural aspirations and institutional patterns of civil spheres. The appeal of the theory of the civil sphere to the experience of Latin America reveals the ambitious nature of civil society and democracy on new and stronger foundations. Civil spheres had extended significantly as citizens confronted uncomfortable facts, collectively searched for solutions, and envisioned new courses of collective action. However when populism and authoritarianism advance, civil understandings of legitimacy come under pressure from alternative, anti-democratic conceptions of motives, social relations, and political institutions. In these times, a fine-grained understanding of the competitive dynamics between civil, non-civil, and anti-civil becomes particularly critical. Such a vision is constructively applied not only to the realities of Latin America, but also in a wider global context. The authors argue that in order to understand the realities and the limits of populism and polarization, civil sphere scholars need to dive straight into the everyday life of civil communities, setting the civil sphere theory (CST) in a more ethnographic, “anthropological” mode.

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