The World Computer: derivative conditions of racial capitalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Cengiz Salman
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 9.1-9.9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriyam Aouragh ◽  
Seda Gürses ◽  
Helen Pritchard ◽  
Femke Snelting

The COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as a major crisis, with calls for debt moratoriums that are expected to have gruesome effects in the Global South. Another tale of this crisis that would come to dominate COVID-19 news across the world was a new technological application: the contact tracing apps. In this article, we argue that both accounts ‐ economic implications for the Global South and the ideology of techno-solutionism ‐ are closely related. We map the phenomenon of the tracing app onto past and present wealth accumulations. To understand these exploitative realities, we focus on the implications of contact tracing apps and their relation with extractive technologies as we build on the notion racial capitalism. By presenting themselves in isolation of capitalism and extractivism, contact tracing apps hide raw realities, concealing the supply chains that allow the production of these technologies and the exploitative conditions of labour that make their computational magic manifest itself. As a result of this artificial separation, the technological solutionism of contract tracing apps is ultimately presented as a moral choice between life and death. We regard our work as requiring continuous undoing ‐ a necessary but unfinished formal dismantling of colonial structures through decolonial resistance.


2022 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-207
Author(s):  
Nivi Manchanda ◽  
Sharri Plonski

Abstract This article wrestles with the question of ‘national’ borders in racial capitalism. We do so through an examination of border and capitalist corridors. We focus particularly on the Israeli border, branded and then sold to the rest of the world by the epistemic community of border-makers and interlocutors. In tracking the Israeli border and showing the implication of the experts and their markets, we ask how the border reflects and is refracted through a global order organized by the twin dictates of racism and capitalism. We are especially interested in how racialized processes of bordering, ostensibly governed by national exigencies, are transplanted on to other contexts. Two points emerge from this: in the first instance, we ask who and what enables this movement of the border. And in the second, we interrogate which logics and practices are transplanted with the border, as it is reproduced and seemingly fixed in a new place. We examine the violent ontologies that give shape and reputation to Israel's high-tech border industry, which has become a model for the ever-growing global homeland security industry. We ask: has Israel's border become an exportable commodity and who are the actors who have enabled this ‘achievement’? Related to this, what sort of occlusions and structural violence does the fetishization of the Israeli border rely on?


2018 ◽  
pp. 129-150
Author(s):  
Tavia Nyong'o

Intervening in debates over post-humanist responses to climate change, this chapter engages black feminist and indigenous critique to explore the role afro-fabulation plays in contemporary catastrophism. Reading the play and film Beasts of the Southern Wild in relation to a Foucauldian and indigenous critique of sovereignty, this chapter argues that our dreams of rewilding the world after racial capitalism will still need to be decolonized.


2020 ◽  
pp. 74-92
Author(s):  
Jesse Benjamin

The history and nature of racial capitalism remain primary questions of our times. Its true significance and gravity threaten to reveal everything about our contemporary world, from our immediate social arrangements to the global system. Within this, corporate power and the hegemonic culture shape the world at the limits of our perceptions. We must simultaneously engage the contemporary politics of knowledge production around these issues, both within the academy and in popular culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 81-105
Author(s):  
Hrvoje Cvijanović

This paper examines the ways in which modern philosophical and literary accounts have shaped and produced European modernity. The author looks at the myth as such, but especially in the quest, justifications, and narratives provided by Rousseau, Locke, and Daniel Defoe, among all. They are seen as grounding examples of modern mythmaking in which the concept of savagery has been uplifted and opposed to cultivating and civilizational practices, and used as a conceptual axis for articulating ideas of progress, self-preservation, and the state of nature. It is shown that modern bourgeois power of mythmaking through writing cannot be detached from racial bourgeois-capitalist worldmaking, or from the production and reproduction of racial capitalism – a structural and historical nexus of capitalism and racial oppression. The article concludes that by perpetuating myths of rational individuals rationally organizing the world, cultivating the wilderness, and enjoying freedom of production and consumption, European bourgeoisie conceptualized and constructed a fictional framework of modern man set within the mechanism of the modern state and capitalist production, that legitimized the predatory socio-economic practices based on harvesting social and natural resources, the same practices held by global capitalism as well.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (36) ◽  
pp. 01-32
Author(s):  
Jason Thomas Wozniak

In this article, I examine what the ethical and political implications of conceptualizing and practicing philosophy for/with children (P4wC) in the neoliberal debt economy are. Though P4wC cannot alone bring about any significant transformation of debt political-economic realities, it can play an important role in cultivating oppositional debt ethics and consciousness. The first half of this article situates P4wC within the current global debt economy. Here, I summarize the analyses made by critical theorists of the ways that debt impacts public institutions (including schools), and shapes individual subjectivity. The second half of this article builds on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of “counter-conduct.” For Foucault, counter-conduct is an ethical/political act of resistance against governmentality, one that makes possible alternative social relations and ways of being in the world. I argue in this section that P4wC should be conceptualized, and practiced, as form of counter-conduct that challenges power in the debt economy. Both the form of P4wC pedagogy, and the content that can be taken up in a collective manner in communities of inquiry, make P4wC a potential site for debt counter-conduct practices. Thought of as counter-conduct, P4wC is an educational practice with liberatory promise. I conclude this piece with brief ruminations on practicing P4wC in the time of COVID, and during the uprisings around the world against racial capitalism. It is suggested here that P4wC not only be practiced within formal education settings, but also in the social movements that are fighting to bring into being a world more just for all of us. En este artículo, examino cuáles son las implicaciones éticas y políticas de conceptualizar y practicar la filosofía para / con niños (P4wC) en la economía de la deuda neoliberal. Aunque P4wC no puede provocar por sí solo ninguna transformación significativa de las realidades político-económicas de la deuda, puede desempeñar un papel importante en el cultivo de una ética y una conciencia de la deuda opuestas. La primera mitad de este artículo sitúa a P4wC dentro de la economía de deuda global actual. Aquí, resumo los análisis realizados por teóricos críticos sobre las formas en que la deuda afecta a las instituciones públicas (incluidas las escuelas) y configura la subjetividad individual. La segunda mitad de este artículo se basa en la conceptualización de la "contra-conducta" de Michel Foucault. Para Foucault, la contra-conducta es un acto ético / político de resistencia contra la gobernamentalidad, que posibilita relaciones sociales y formas de estar en el mundo alternativas. Sostengo en esta sección que P4wC debe conceptualizarse y practicarse como una forma de contra-conducta que desafía el poder en la economía de la deuda. Tanto la forma pedagógica de P4wC, como su contenido adoptados de manera colectiva en las comunidades de investigación, hacen de P4wC un sitio potencial para las prácticas de contra-conducta de la deuda. Pensada como una contra-conducta, P4wC es una práctica educativa con promesa liberadora. Concluyo este artículo con breves reflexiones sobre la práctica de P4wC en la época de COVID y de los alzamientos en todo el mundo contra el capitalismo racial. Aquí se sugiere que P4wC no solo se practique dentro de los entornos de educación formal, sino también en los movimientos sociales que luchan por crear un mundo más justo para todos nosotros. Key Words: Debt (Deuda), Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC) (Filosofía para / con niños), Counter-Conduct (contra-conducta)


Author(s):  
Steed Vernyl Davidson

The article examines how liberal discourses and practices become central to modern European empire. Liberalism as a discourse of uplift and progress resonates with the goals of Christian evangelism to make the world a better place. This article explores two different poles of the Bible in the midst of empire—the polarities of justification and resistance. The first part of the article examines how race and capital form strong motivations for empire that set the stage for the second section, which describes how the Bible provides justification for empire. At the heart of the article is the notion of the Bible’s function as a mechanism for the manufacturing of consent to empire at home and abroad. The final section of the article offers a treatment of Rastafari textual traditions that function as an overt rejection of the Bible as an example of the disruption of the logic of empire.


2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 723-735
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon ◽  
Kate Simpkins

Abstract Key aspects of the plantation economy, centered in the early Caribbean, include the theft of Indigenous land, agricultural monocropping, and racial capitalism as well as an epistemological effort to separate out humans, animals, and plants into discrete species. This essay identifies the current pandemic as a crisis in knowledge—one in which assumptions such as Linnaean categories and species boundaries need re-examining—and explores historical and disciplinary means of challenging the limited and often deadly knowledge regime of the Plantationocene. Turning to the historical revolutionary figure of François Makandal, the essay explores alternative knowledge systems that help us to understand modes of human-environmental connection, semiotics of relation, and text networks of literature and oral history. These alternative ways of knowing the world are fugitive from, and revolutionary with respect to, racial capitalism and the plantation project and are traceable within a line of literary Makandal texts.


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