MANAGING THE COVID-19 NIGERIAN ECONOMY: POLICY RETROSPECTION

Covid-19 pandemic reached Nigeria in February 2020 with its debilitating characteristics of lockdown and social distance. The Nigerian economy responded with all socio-economic indices turning negative between February and August 2020.With deteriorating socio-economic indicators, the Nigerian government reacted with Covid-19 containment policies which yielded positive results in limiting the spread of the pandemic. On the other hand, the other policies aim at stimulating economic revival has yielded little anticipated results. The government embarked of conflicting policies of expansion and contraction simultaneously thus frustrating the attainment of set goals of reviving the economy. A central sub-sector of the economy with potentials for reviving the economy - peasant farming is altogether ignored. Structured on the theoretical framework of new classical school of economic thought, the paper employed retrospective methodology for analysis. The way forward is to embark on short run expansionary policies. All contraction policies like increase taxation should be reversed. Specific short run policies should be directed at the surplus labour and land in the rural peasant agricultural sector using the channels of traditional rulers and community based organizations. The short term policies should be in line with the lifespan of staple crops like rice hence surplus food produced will stifle the galloping inflation and the resources injected in the rural areas will reduce the worsening unemployment. These positive short run outcomes would expunge the economy out of the economic morass occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic and guarantee sustainable economic growth.

‘Googleplex Cultures’

This paper takes a Marxist approach to analyze Silicon Valley workplace cultures and how they exploit and alienate their workers. Unlike traditional corporate offices, Silicon Valley workplace cultures offer a range of perks and benefits that attract every office worker; however, it makes them feel a sense of appreciation, known throughout the paper as ‘Googleplex culture’. This culture presents a “decentralized workforce explicitly with integrated units working together to find solutions to problems or failure” (Tran, 2017) while providing employees with a range of unconventional, yet useful amenities. Throughout this paper, it is clear Googleplex culture’s onsite benefits, such as kitchens, free meals, snacks, cafés, private rooms, designated sleep areas, workout facilities, and many more perks the average workers could only wish for, obscure both the absolute and relative surplus labour which lead to exploitation. Googleplex cultures claim to be centred around the worker; however, the concept of crunch depicted in these companies is mainly focused on profits rather than employee health, further providing evidence that these workplace cultures initiate Marx's four forms of alienation.

A Critical Analysis of Capitalism, Capital Accumulation and Crisis Theory in David Harvey

This article is a critical review of David Harvey’s essentialist theorisation of a capitalist economy and its crisis from a class focused Marxist perspective. The first part examines Harvey’s immense contribution to the understanding of space and spatiality of capitalism within the Marxist tradition. Capital accumulation in his theorisation serves as the impresario of space and spatiality and the harbinger of capitalist crisis in general. Expanding on a class focused approach, the second part provides a critique of Harvey’s methodology and crisis theory in which the law of capital accumulation reigns supreme. Specifically, using an anti-essentialist methodology of overdetermination with class process of surplus labour as the theoretical entry point, as developed by Resnick and Wolff, I argue that no correspondence of the rate of capital accumulation with those of rate of profit and rate of class distribution can be drawn. This unpredictability renders capitalism inherently unstable, prone to business cycles whose cause cannot be reduced to any chosen causal factor such as the one reducible to capital accumulation.

‘Of Pride and Joy No Common Rate’: From the Surplus Women Problem to Surplus Jouissance in Margaret Oliphant’s Hester

This article analyses Margaret Oliphant’s novel Hester (1883), arguing that it dramatizes a complex interplay of surplus labour, surplus capital, the figure of the surplus woman, and surplus jouissance. The central character, Hester, is read as a figure who embodies the surplus jouissance which is both necessary to and disruptive of modern capitalism, and which in the novel stands in opposition to the steady state of the respectable country bank, taken here to align with the Freudian pleasure principle. In support of this reading, the article traces a line from Hester back to the ‘surplus women debate’ of the 1850s and 60s, including Oliphant’s contribution to this debate in her 1858 article ‘The Condition of Women’. The novel itself is analysed through its epigraph, taken from a Charles Lamb poem of 1803, and through the multiple meanings of the concept of ‘chance’ which the text presents. My analysis proceeds by way of Freud, J. S. Mill, Marx and Lacan, finding that Lacan’s rereading of surplus labour as surplus jouissance ultimately provides the most productive way to read the text’s rearticulation of the surplus women problem.

A Study of Production and Marketing of Potato in Kurukshetra District of Haryana

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is the most important food crop of the world which has always been the poor mans’ crop. Potato is cultivated in the country for the last more than 300 years. The present study was conducted in Kurukshetra district of Haryana. The results revealed that the estimated total cost, gross return, net return, and B:C ratio of potato cultivation was `179449, 274944, 95495 and 1:1.53 per hectare, respectively. The value of the B: C ratio was found to be more than one which indicated that the cultivation of potato crops was economically profitable. The cultivation of potato crops also provided opportunities for employment of family and surplus labour in rural areas. State Government initiated a scheme Bhavantar Bharpayee Yojana (BBY) to protect vegetable growers for the sustainability of vegetable cultivation. There was seasonal variation in potato prices dut to its semi-perishable nature and post-harvest sales. The direct marketing channel of potato (Channel-IV)was found to be most profitable among all other marketing channels due to the non-existence of intermediaries between the producer and the ultimate consumer. Channel-IV was found to be most efficient among all the channels. Due to perishable nature of potato, there is a need for adequate storage facilities so that farmers get remunerative prices as well as meet the consumers’ demand through the year.

Productivity, public capital, and socialism with Chinese characteristics – A critique of the doctrine of incompatibility between capital and public ownership

PurposeThis paper is a response to the doctrine that capital is incompatible with public ownership. The fundamental characteristics of modern productivity determine the co-existence of the market economy and capital relations.Design/methodology/approachSocialism can neither bypass the market economy nor “go beyond capital”; capital appears in two historical forms, including the private capital and the public capital. Public capital is the inevitable outcome of the inherent contradictions of public ownership in a socialist market economy.FindingsIt represents an economic relationship that compels individual labourers to provide surplus labour for the society. The combination of the strong accumulation function of public capital and the improvement of people's welfare is the main cause of China's development miracle.Originality/valueThe innovation impetus of the public capital and its “immunity” to the capitalist crisis highlight the tremendous power of socialism with Chinese characteristics in breaking free of the shackles of capitalism and continuously developing productive forces. Public capital demonstrates and will continue to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of socialism.

INFANCY WITHIN ADVERTISING PLATFORM: YOUNG CHILDREN EXPERIENCES ON A VIDEO-SHARING WEBSITE.

This paper investigates how young children experience digital advertising platforms. Specifically, it focuses on young children's participation in the YouTube app as part of an advertising mechanism that captures and profits from their views and attention. An innovative trans-disciplinary bridge between digital labour studies, biopolitics theory and qualitative research on children online has been developed to achieve this aim. The fact that children are going online progressively earlier raises critical questions around what they are experiencing in the virtual world. Data has become a way to profit and digital technology has become the infrastructure for capitalism permanence. This process of making a profit on user’s information leads to issues around trust and the confluence of surveillance and profit. It also raises questions around the persistence of Marxist concepts such as surplus labour, surplus value, and labour exploitation within the platform economy. Furthermore, in this environment one cannot disregard the relationship of power and the government of life; biopolitics should not be dissociable from capitalism. Thus, considering the early stage of young children’s cognitive development and their consequent vulnerability is urgent to understand how young children contribute to the political economy of the digital platform. The extent to which parents/caregivers and teachers are knowledgeable about the models of data mining, statistical profiling and corporate profit-generation that occur within this digital environment is also being investigated.

Dispossessing academics: The shift to ‘appropriation’ in the governing of academic life

This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the transformation of academic life that is currently taking place under the sign of ‘neoliberalization’. The main aim is to differentiate appropriation from exploitation as strategies of surplus labour dispossession, to identify the growth of appropriative techniques in academic life, and to situate the proliferation of such techniques in the broader transformations of global political economy. Alloyed with poststructuralist social theory, the historical materialist thrust of the article demonstrates how, in the technologically articulate ‘social factory’ of advanced capitalism, the spatial operations of these techniques of dispossession have a particularly ‘aesthetic’ character that is immanent to their appropriative operation, and which renders their workings both more discreet and effective. The article aims: (1) to problematize the neoliberal concepts of efficiency, transparency, and autonomy, in terms of practical outcomes; (2) to stimulate reflexive consideration of the ‘positioning’ of academics themselves in the reproduction of these techniques; and (3) to ask how these techniques might generate new ‘historical subjects’ of struggle and organization in academic life.