Resisting workers’ disalienation: The making and survival of capitalist conservation in Niombato, Senegal

The making and survival of capitalist conservation depends upon the creation and maintenance of contradictory class relations based on alienated labour. The literature has, however, often ignored this aspect. Looking at capital as a contradictory class relation and through the study of a tourism-oriented protected area and three reforestation payment for ecosystem service projects in Senegal, this article shows how capital’s instrumentalisation of conservation requires a constant adaption to workers’ struggles against alienation. In the case here analysed, this adaptation manifests in the avoidance, silencing and appropriation of workers’ mobilisations against forest privatisation and labour exploitation. This resistance to workers’ disalienation reinforces not only capitalist class relations but also state, neo-colonial and white people’s power.

What Could It Mean to Say, “Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?”

Marxism is a materialist theory that centers economic life in its analysis of the human social world. This materialist orientation manifests in explanations that take economic class to play a fundamental causal role in determining the emergence, character, and development of race-and sex-based oppression—indeed, of all forms of identity-based oppression within class societies. To say that labor is mediated by class in a class-based society is to say that, in such societies, the class-based division of that activity which produces and reproduces the human species is the definite form in which labor appears, and that the human life which is the product of that self-making activity bears its stamp. Marxism’s emphasis on economic factors as central in the constitution and development of human life has been seized upon as evidence of its alleged “class reductionism”—its supposed tendency to think of all aspects of human life as direct and simple expressions of a class relation. No such thing follows; quite the opposite, a correct understanding of the relationships among capitalism, racism, and sexism only further highlights how central the struggle against each is to the struggles against any of the others.

David Harvey’s theory of uneven geographical development: A Marxist critique

The Marxist geographer, David Harvey, has written extensively and influentially about the production of space under capitalism and, in particular, uneven geographical development. This article is a Marxist critique of Harvey’s theory of uneven geographical development. It presents his theory around six interconnected theses: spatial concentration thesis, spatial dispersal thesis, surplus absorption or spatial fix thesis, uneven geographical development-as-ideology thesis, the uneven geographical development and the state connection thesis, and uneven geographical development–associated political thesis. His theory has shed light on certain aspects of the internal relation between capitalist accumulation and uneven geographical development, giving due emphasis to uneven geographical development’s contradictory character. It is, however, problematic on multiple grounds. It under-stresses the class relation, including the value-relation, between capital and labour, and correlatively fetishizes the power of spatial relations. While Harvey connects uneven geographical development to capitalist crisis, his theory of crisis is deeply inadequate. His theory also fails to systematically integrate the insights of state theory into it, and to the extent that the state is present, its essential class character remains under-emphasized. Finally, Harvey draws some conclusions about anti-capitalist political practice from his theory of uneven geographical development which are problematic from a Marxist vantage point. In particular, his view of the concept of the proletariat in Marxism and his scepticism towards the role of the proletariat in the fight against capital are contestable.

Chern Classes of Splayed Intersections

We generalize the Chern class relation for the transversal intersection of two nonsingular varieties to a relation for possibly singular varieties, under a splayedness assumption. We show that the relation for the Chern–Schwartz–MacPherson classes holds for two splayed hypersurfaces in a nonsingular variety, and under a strong splayedness assumption for more general subschemes. Moreover, the relation is shown to hold for the Chern–Fulton classes of any two splayed subschemes. The main tool is a formula for Segre classes of splayed subschemes. We also discuss the Chern class relation under the assumption that one of the varieties is a general very ample divisor.

Subset-Class Relation, Common Pitches, and Common Interval Structure Guiding Estimations of Similarity

THE PRESENT STUDY EXAMINED THE importance of subsetclass relation for closeness estimations. Two experiments used set-class pairs consisting of a pentad class and a tetrad class represented by block chords, and approximately half of the pairs accomplished the subset-class relation. In the first experiment the number of common pitches was systematically varied. In the second experiment the intervals between the lowest pitch and the other pitches were either similar in both chords (except for the interval missing from the tetrachord) or dissimilar, but the chords shared no common pitches. The degree of set-class consonance was also varied. The results of the experiments indicated that the number of common pitches and the common interval structure were important factors guiding closeness estimations. The subset-class relation was important since it enabled a maximum number of common pitches, maximally similar intervals, or highly uniform voice-leading between chords.