A world in reverse: The political ecology of racial capitalism

Politics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 026339572199443
Author(s):  
Bikrum Singh Gill

This article advances a ‘political ecology of racial capitalism’ approach to further our understanding of the underlying systemic relations and logics of power driving planetary ecological crises. The particular concern here is to demonstrate how race underwrites the distinctively exhaustive society/nature relation fuelling both the productive excess and ecological exhaustion of the capitalist world-system. It does so by first identifying, as a foundational space-time of racial capitalism, a socio-ecological contact zone within which Indigenous and Black peoples’ earth-worlding capacity, situated in deep time and place, is indispensable to the survival of ‘late arriving’ Euro-Western settlers. It is out of the refusal of an emergent settler-master to recognize their dependence upon Indigenous and Black earth-world-making gifts that, this article argues, race emerges as a structuring relation of power transmuting such earth-worlds into lands and bodies given by nature/Earth. Such a transmutation functions to conceal the underlying reproductive conditions – Indigenous and Black earth-worlding capacity – of that which is now marked as nature/Earth. It is, then, the racialized production of nature that accounts, ultimately, for both the excess (from appropriation of Indigenous and Black earth-worlds) and exhaustion (from erasure of their constituting conditions) of the political ecology of racial capitalism.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (3) ◽  
pp. 52-64
Author(s):  
Vasylyna Podliesna ◽  

In the cyclical dynamics of the capitalist world system, politics and economics are closely intertwined, which is manifested in the development of political business cycles of individual countries, as well as in the development of cyclical political and economic processes in the long run on a global scale. The development of political business cycles is due to the influence of interrelated factors - competition of political forces, economic expectations and political preferences of voters. The immanent to the capitalist world-system deep internal contradictions lead to a variety of forms of long-term socio-economic cycles, including such a form as political cycles of a global nature. In the modern conditions of transition from the industrial-market system to the information-network society, the factors continue to exist and the contradictions emerge that both lead to the development of political cycles. Technical and technological transformations that contribute to the formation of information and network society, are strengthening the possibilities of ideological and propaganda activities that affect the cyclical political and economic processes. In such conditions, political cycles are becoming more and more emergent, which is largely due to the influence of social networks, computer games, and "new media" on people's political preferences and their political activity. The cyclical processes of establishing economic and political hegemony in the capitalist world system determine the dominance of the political cycles of leading countries over those of less developed countries. Improving production and dissemination technologies enhances the ability of leading countries to influence the political cycles of less developed countries, and the use of "soft power" is becoming an increasingly important tool of geopolitical struggle in the process of deployment of long-term global political cycles.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christof Parnreiter

AbstractThis paper discusses Donald Trump’s presidency and his motto “America First!” against the backdrop of the notion of a declining U.S. hegemony. For that purpose, conceptualizations of hegemony by word-system scholars, namely Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, are being contrasted with John Agnew’s account in political geography. The main difference refers to the geographies of hegemony: For Agnew, a stateless hegemony is conceivable, while for Wallerstein and Arrighi hegemony in the capitalist world-system requires a state to exercise it. The paper than goes on to argue that in order to operate successfully capitalism needs the cooperation of political and economic power and hence the bringing together of the spaces of places of the former and the spaces of flows of the latter. Against this backdrop I contend that Trump’s nationalist rhetoric and (so far conceivable) politics embody and communicate the loss of U.S. hegemony both inwards and outwards. While Trump’s geographical imaginations of power are downscaled to the national, U.S. big business is ever more moving in and using global commodity chains. The fusion of the political spaces of territory and the economic spaces of flows are drifting apart. Moreover, hegemony in the capitalist world-system is global by definition. In the paper’s conclusion, the notion of a stateless hegemony is questioned.


Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Hugo Córdova Córdova Quero

Within the modern capitalist World-System, Missionary work was mostly developed through the connubiality with colonial powers. The missionary work of the Anglican Church is no exception. This article centers on the missionary enterprise carried out in Argentine Patagonia in the nineteenth century. Missionaries’ reports carefully narrated that venture. However, the language and the notions underlying the missionary work’s narration reveal the dominion of colonial ideologies that imbued how religious agents constructed alterity. Connecting the missionaries’ worldview with the political context and expansion of the British Empire allows us to unfold the complex intersections of religious, ethnic, racial, and geopolitical discourses that traverse the lives of indigenous peoples in South America.


2000 ◽  
pp. 19-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wilkin

There are good grounds for taking seriously Wallerstein's dictum that the world system has entered what he describes as an interregnum. By this he means two important things: First, that the world is moving between two forms of world system, from a capitalist world system to something new; Second, that in such an interregnum questions of structure become less signi? cant than those of agency. The world system is one that has been produced, reproduced and will ultimately be transformed by human actors. The direction that it takes will be the result of the political struggles that ensue in the interregnum. In this paper I examine some of these claims in the context of a series of events that have taken place over the past decade and in the run up to the protests that occurred in December 1999 at the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle. In so doing I hope to put some empirical ?esh on the bones of the idea that Wallerstein has suggestively offered us.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-140
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Vidotte Blanco Tárrega

O escravismo colonial, como vetor de um processo de organização do capital e de construção de um sistema mundo, engendra uma perene desqualificação do Negro e o coloca às margens do mundo ocidental, transformando-o, no mundo globalizado contemporâneo, em sujeito de conflitos ecológicos distributivos, na luta por seus direitos. A partir disso e na perspectiva do direito, propõe-se refletir sobre a condição histórica do Negro como agente central e sujeito da luta e da resistência na conformação do capitalismo, para ressignificar o papel desses sujeitos de direito e de suas lutas nos conflitos originários do desenvolvimentismo globalizado. Faz-se uma abordagem analítica na literatura especializada sobre escravidão. Os conflitos ecológicos foram pensados a partir da ecologia política e o racismo foi abordado a partir da filosofia e da história críticas. Dos resultados, têm-se que o regime escravocrata foi central na construção do sistema mundo capitalista e que o direito estatal moderno serviu a instituição desse regime, negando a condição de sujeitos de direito aos escravizados.  O direito moderno legitimou a hegemonia dos senhores de escravos e a inexistência de direitos aos cativos, mas criou as condições necessárias para a insurgência e o devir de resistência do ser escravizado, no âmbito de sua humanidade prorrogada.  Essa resistência é perene diante do avanço das fronteiras do progresso, que invadem os territórios tradicionais ocupados pelos excluídos do direito no sistema capitalista, sobretudo os Negros. Instalam-se conflitos ecológicos distributivos e no âmbito deles as gentes resistem e os massacres acontecem. O racismo, como processo histórico continua. Abstract: The colonial slavery, as a vector of a process of capital organization and the construction of a world system, engenders a perennial disqualification of the Black people and places it on the margins of the Western world, transforming it into a subject of ecological conflicts in the contemporary globalized world distributive, in the fight for their rights. From this and from the perspective of law, it is proposed to reflect on the historical condition of the Negro as a central agent and subject of struggle and resistance in the conformation of capitalism, to re-signify the role of these subjects of law and their struggles in the conflicts originated in the development. An analytical approach is made in the specialized literature on slavery. The ecological conflicts were thought from the political ecology and the racism was approached from the critical philosophy and history. From the results, it is shown that the slave system was central to the construction of the capitalist world system and that modern state law served the institution of this regime, denying the condition of subjects of law to the enslaved. Modern law legitimized the hegemony of the slave owners and the lack of rights to the captives but created the necessary conditions for the insurgency and the becoming of resistance of the enslaved, within the scope of his extended humanity. This resistance is perennial in the face of the advance of the frontiers of progress, which invade the traditional territories occupied by those excluded from law in the capitalist system, especially the Blacks. Distributive ecological conflicts are set up and within them people resist and massacres happen. Racism as a historical process continues.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110242
Author(s):  
Terrell Carver

The bicentenary of Engels’s birth in 1820 is an occasion for assessing his works as received by geographers. This Afterword to the special issue draws on Terrell Carver’s recent researches into Engels’s political activities and associations, beginning with his schooldays in Wuppertal, focusing on his Anglo-German journalism, continuing through his political partnership with Marx, and extending after the latter’s death into later life in London. The article demonstrates the value of close contextual attention to the precise character of the political regimes which Engels struggled to change. This approach also reveals the Marx-centric terms through which Engels has been understood, thus undervaluing many of his achievements. Concluding speculatively, it is possible to glimpse in Engels’s thought a geography of space-time, where capitalism is an Einsteinian warp.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document