Capitalist Exploitation Research Articles

It's not about building houses; it's about building people's power: Conversation with Carmen and Andrea from the Movimiento territorial de Liberación (MTL) Buenos Aires

This conversation offers a look into the practices of the Movimiento Territorial de Liberación (MTL), a political and social organization in Argentina. It highlights the organization’s history, values, and significant projects, such as housing developments and community initiatives. Founded in 1999 after a break from the Argentine Communist Party over ideological differences, the MTL has its roots in Marxist-Leninist thought. Their work include building neighborhoods and developing collective housing for those displaced by neoliberal policies. The MTL’s projects go beyond merely providing shelter; they aim to foster a way of life that embodies their values of self-management, solidarity, and resistance against capitalist exploitation. Carmen, a leader within MTL, shares their journey, the challenges faced, and the ideological foundations of their work. Andrea, another key figure, manages finances and emphasizes the importance of transparency and accountability in their operations. The conversation also touches on the broader Latin American and global context, situating MTL's struggle within a larger framework of resistance against neoliberalism and imperialism.

Sacred Water: Neo-Spiritual Consumerism in Catherine Chanter’s The Well

ABSTRACT Catherine Chanter’s The Well depicts a water-scarce Britain where the fertile farm of the Ardingly couple becomes a site of exploitation by a spiritual community called the Sisters of the Rose. By setting her novel on a farm named The Well, Chanter constructs a spatial map that not only exposes the cult’s manipulative power but also serves as a symbolic microcosm of their capitalist exploitation, highlighting the rise of a phenomenon I term “neo-spiritual consumerism.” Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s concept of “late capitalism” (1991) and his theory of “cognitive mapping” (1992), this study examines how Chanter uses The Well as a spatial narrative instrument to re-mythologize religious narratives as a form of cultural consumption. Through a literary analysis of Chanter’s novel, the study examines her ironic use of religious symbols to delve into the social, psychological, and political implications of associating environmental crises with divine retribution, deflecting attention from the socio-economic systems perpetuating environmental degradation. Chanter’s subversive use of religious symbolism highlights how capitalist frameworks exacerbate ecological vulnerabilities. This research prompts critical assessment of modern spiritual movements and emphasizes capitalism’s pervasive influence in sacred domains, compelling readers to consider alternative worldviews and ethical frameworks for navigating a changing world.

Diverse Attitudes of French Pacifists and Socialists Towards the ‘Yellow Peril’ in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

This essay examines the various ways in which pacificists and socialists in France responded to the ‘yellow peril’ from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) to the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). I identify and examine four different attitudes they developed towards the ‘yellow peril’. On the one hand, some pacificists and socialists perceived it as a reality and used it as a means of exposing the problems of expansionism but differed on their views of what Asia would become for the West: whereas pacifists like Paul d’Estournelles de Constant invoked Asia as a potential existential threat, certain socialists welcomed ‘yellow’ workers as future comrades. On the other hand, there were people who viewed the ‘yellow peril’ as a myth or some sort of ideological smokescreen. Roughly speaking, they fell into two groups: socialists who treated it as a set of false ideas created to justify Tsarist imperialism, which practically led them to embrace Japanese imperialism, and revolutionary syndicalists who, opposing capitalist exploitation and expansionism in general, dismissed it as part of bourgeois ideology. Thus, I ultimately argue that the ‘yellow peril’ was less of an imperialist ideology consisting of negative racial stereotypes about East Asians than a versatile concept that was used against as well as for racial stereotyping and expansionism.

The Political Economy of Disability and the Nursing Home Industry in the United States

While the mass of Covid-19 related deaths in nursing homes has begun to draw attention to the corruption of the industry, the existing literature focuses primarily on the post-productive population (the elderly), or on the unpaid and underpaid care workers, while the discussion of the young and disabled, making up over 15% of residents in U. S. nursing homes, is largely absent. What can a Marxist analysis of disability tell us about both the nature of disability oppression and of the nursing home industry in the United States? Why are 16.9% of nursing home residents young disabled people? How are nursing homes in the U. S. funded? What political conclusions can we draw from this analysis? Building on the work of the late disabled socialist activist Marta Russell, I argue that the trapping of young disabled people in nursing homes is a result of their absorption by the nursing home industry due to capitalism's “compulsory unemployment” of the disabled and the segregation of those who cannot produce surplus value (Russell, 2019). Furthermore, private nursing homes do not “extract” from the disabled, as some have argued, as surplus value can only be extracted from the living labor of nursing-home and other workers. The incorporation of the non-working, institutionalized disabled into class struggle, then, is the only path to ending capitalist exploitation of the entire working class.

Archaeology of Ruderal Futurism

Language used to describe plant life and their environments is shaped by how plants are perceived. In turn this language reproduces how plants continue to be perceived and contributes to the further shaping of attitudes toward them. This essay presents the ruderal as a framework for understanding and envisioning being-with more-than-human others in a world altered by colonial and capitalist exploitation, extraction and expansion. Enacting an archaeological tracing of language and cultural thought towards ruderal plant species, consideration is given to: vernacular language applied to vegetal beings; identities of belonging applied to the movement of vegetation at a planetary scale; and decolonial modes of thinking-with and being-with vegetal others in the aftermath of colonialism and capitalism. Particular consideration here is given to the classification systems of botanist Albert Thellung, the thought of gardener and landscape architect Gilles Clément and the work of artist Andrea Callar. This paper extends an ongoing area of research I have previously examined in the curatorial research project Ruderal Futures (2022) for SixtyEight Art Institute and the essay ‘A brief constellation towards a ruderal futurism’ (2020).

Reclaiming My Womb

In Children of Blood and Bone and The Hunted, Tomi Adeyemi and L.A. Banks reclaim the isolated Black womb and reattach it to the human to which it belongs, thus humanizing Black women. This humanization of Black women combats the dominant narrative that seeks to reduce Black female identities to what their bodies can produce for the Western patriarchy world founded on capitalist exploitation. Their wombs are a counternarrative to the tired trope of the almighty phallus that disfigures phallic power into a deadly weapon, only suitable for destruction. Banks’ and Adeyemi’s placement of symbolic wombs highlights the power of wombs as a space where spirit and body meet to upend oppressive world orders rooted in spiritual darkness. Here, even the phallus achieves greater power. The womb exposes the phallus’s ability to invest life and further incubates that life to create revolution. Together the phallus and womb work to display the necessary fetation of rebellion, resistance, and liberation. Banks and Adeyemi join the scores of Black feminist writers who insist on the unity of Black masculinities and Black feminism to ensure the futurity of Black liberation.

The Appropriation of Fixed Capital: A Metaphor?

In the debate on the impact of digital technology on society, considering that digital technologies have profoundly changed the way we learn and communicate, and especially the “mode of production”, and remembering that this transformation takes place in an era of capitalist economic hegemony – the hypothesis often arises that the producer is transformed by the use of this machine. There is speculation that the user incorporates the instrumentality of the digital machine. Furthermore, when one recognizes that capitalist production develops its process of value creation by using cognitive labour power (and that this form of value production becomes more and more prominent) the technological incorporation of the cognitive cooperation of workers, seems to become ever more central to capitalist exploitation. Consequently, in the Marxist debate, people have started talking of an “appropriation of fixed capital” by the digitized worker and by the cognitive producer. This article asks: Are these simply metaphors? It discusses the relationship of living labour and digital machines. It stresses that digital machines do not determine society and human fate but can be appropriated by social struggles for the commons. It grounds the analysis of the digital in Karl Marx’s works on technology and fixed capital. It concludes that autonomous spheres of digital self-valorisation can be established through social struggles that aim at advancing social co-operation and the commons. Acknowledgement: This article was translated from Italian to English by Michele Ledda with editorial support by Christian Fuchs, David Chandler, and Sara Raimondi. The paper is based on a talk that Antonio Negri gave at the 7th ICTs and Society Conference “Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Activism, Research & Critique in the Age of Big Data Capitalism” on May 20, 2017, at the University of Westminster in London. The video of this talk is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htm5xwAl-kE The video of the commenting and Q&A session that followed can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-smmdOz9gIU The manuscript of Negri’s talk was published as part of a conference volume. It is reprinted based on a Creative Commons licence. Acknowledgement: Negri, Antonio. 2019. The Appropriation of Fixed Capital: A Metaphor? In Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data, edited by David Chandler and Christian Fuchs, 205-214. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book29.r. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0. The original article was published in Italian in the journal EuroNomade and translated into English with permission: https://www.euronomade.info/appropriazione-di-capitale-fisso-una-metafora/

Nature, ideology, and the ecocritical enterprise: Wangari Maathai’s The Green Belt Movement and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life

The dominant knowledge about African environments informed by Western literature—scientific reports, travelogues, memoirs, journalism, and fiction—has constructed an image of Africa as a pristine wilderness of exotic biodiversity on the verge of destruction due to Africa’s ignorance-based environmental culture. Contrary to this, Wangari Maathai’s and Nadine Gordimer’s environmental discourse, in The Green Belt Movement (2003) and Get a Life (2005), respectively, reveal Africa’s environmental decline as the direct consequence of the long history of colonial and capitalist exploitation of its natural resources, and the transformation of its environment into a resource base for industrial production. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of post-colonial ecocriticism, this article argues that environmental representations are mediated by the ideological configurations that generate them. Consequently, Maathai’s and Gordimer’s environmental discourse repudiates the dominant knowledge of African environments, offering alternative ways of engaging with its ecological issues while highlighting the dangers of capitalist resource exploitation on Africans’ environments, lives, and livelihoods. The image of the environment, in their works, ties politics and ecology together, providing an understanding of how the environment enables a rethinking of socio-political justice in dealing with Africa’s ecological crisis. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘African ecologies: literary, cultural and religious perspectives’, edited by Adriaan von Klinken, Simon Manda, Damaris Parsitau and Abel Ugba.)

Colonial erasures in gender and climate change solutions

AbstractDespite deliberate moves to integrate gender with climate change solutions, efforts do not go far enough to account for coloniality, thus falling short of achieving feminist, just and transformative ends. Coloniality is a political blind spot and a systematic amnesia in climate policies and actions, despite being a key driver of climate change manifested through various forms of extractivism, economic growth, and hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge production. As a corrective and a pathway toward realizing a post/decolonial feminist climate praxis, I will disclose the colonial underpinnings in (i) a persistent gender binary and women‐centered approaches; (ii) white feminist epistemic privileging; and (iii) acquiescing to masculine Enlightenment‐inspired techno‐managerialism. Furthermore, disclosures of colonial erasures entail a foundational re‐evaluation of the climate change narrative from an isolated form of natural crisis to a phenomenon embedded in complex histories of colonialism, extractivism, and capitalist exploitation that threatens the intrinsic interdependence of nature and society and planetary survival. As a result, a post/decolonial feminist climate praxis then asks that we foster and restore this interdependence by institutionalizing an ethics of socioecological care, acknowledging epistemic diversity through embodied knowledge, and carrying out intersectional justice.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice Climate and Development > Sustainability and Human Well‐Being Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development

Book Review: Value and Unequal Exchange in International Trade: The Geography of Global Capitalist Exploitation

Book Review: <i>Value and Unequal Exchange in International Trade: The Geography of Global Capitalist Exploitation</i>

Labour segmentation in NCR Delhi’s automobile sector: a political response of capital to labour struggles

This paper aims to understand the changing dynamics of internal labour market segmentation intertwined with the history of working-class struggle in an industrial belt in India’s National Capital Region (NCR). Nuances of workers’ class struggle in the automobile sector in Delhi-NCR over the last 15 years have shown that unity between permanent and contract workers was key to several successful struggles against worsening work conditions and management control within the global value chains of automobile production. Our fieldwork findings, along with direct and indirect political engagement in the region, reveal that increasing salaries and allotment of supervisory roles to small sections of permanent workers, coupled with the simultaneous fragmentation a lower strata of workers into multiple categories with very low salaries, benefits and heavy workloads, have been significant attempts by capital to break class solidarity among different sections of workers. Relatively pro-labour legislation and trade unions tend to concentrate in high-wage zones, while low-wage and precarious employment remains unprotected by such institutional mechanisms. Labour segmentation is inherent to capitalist exploitation, guarded by institutional mechanisms. Advanced mechanisation reduces distinction of skill requirements between highly paid permanent and lowly paid contract workers. In this context, labour segmentation is a political response to trade unionism from the side of capitalist management.

Eve

The arts have had a historical relationship with holding technology accountable through artists’ speculation on its harmful and redemptive characteristics. As young futurists born into an age where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related processes have become increasingly integrated into society, we wished to utilise this tradition to engage with contemporary anxieties concerning AI’s role in the potential automation of the creative industries. Using the comic book medium, we speculate on how this automation may prove to be an extension of capitalist exploitation through the story of Eve. Simultaneously, we embrace the more redemptive aspects of this technology’s use. We celebrate non-exploitative ‘machine’ art and the potential modes of expression that it may herald. This is as we do not wish to entirely foreclose the involvement of AI in art but simply question the effects such art may have under capitalism.

Социализм преткновения, или Проблемы левого популизма

The first quarter of the 21st century became a time of revival of the idea of socialism. However, the working class is no longer the assumed main subject of the progressive change. The rise of left-wing populism is replacing workers’ movements and corresponding parties. The key feature of such populism is its desire to unite all the oppressed and exploited in the struggle against capitalist “hegemony”. This attitude is reflected, in particular, in the idea of intersectionality, according to which different “systems” of oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) and capitalist exploitation are intertwined and can reinforce each other. This idea leads to constant allusions to the general, so to say, “people’s” struggle against capitalism and various forms of oppression. Moreover, some leftist theorists directly insist on the necessity to turn to populism and build strategies for leftist “counterhegemony”. The author thoroughly analyzes modern left-wing populist concepts and reveals serious flaws. The desire for justice and equality often disguises a thirst for privilege and radical hostility towards those who are viewed — often unfairly — as oppressors. Moreover, the struggle for socialism often means emphasizing freedom from labor for some, while ignoring economic hardships of others. The author classifies the contradictions of left-wing populism as insurmountable due to the impossibility of disentangling between the struggle for equality and for the private interests of individual groups. According to his conclusion, under the conditions when zero-sum games are inevitable, for the poor and socially vulnerable strategies for defending their own interests will become increasingly profitable and attractive in contrast to both populist projects and the idea of socialism per se, which increasingly implies the abandonment of these interests without guarantees of any returns in the future.

Capitalist development and land struggles in Africa: the role of engaged scholarship

The expansion of capitalism into Africa induced significant transformations of African societies which have continued to influence what people on the continent do today. Africa’s encounter with capital, though still limited in scope, has always been ruthless, coercive and violent, as displayed in the slave trade, colonial occupation and current neocolonial incursions. Although some political economy analysts have suggested that capitalism in Africa has not exploited Africans enough, this article shows that the encounter with capitalism on the continent has been, and continues to be, vicious, with its brutality often obscured by its stunted nature. The article draws on Lungisile Ntsebeza’s work on land to show that engaged scholarship can play a critical role in unveiling the mechanisms and nature of capitalist exploitation and brutality in Africa, often masked by weak capitalist penetration. Using examples of current land struggles, it shows that capitalist exploitation in Africa is not only limited to those engaged in capitalist relations of production (wage labour) but extends to people outside these relations.

Lifestyle Migration and Native Speakerism in Japan: The Case of NOVA Eikaiwa

In this article, the author illustrates how lifestyle migration to Japan is tied to organizational norms of native speakerism and capitalist exploitation. Drawing on 32 interviews and nine months of fieldwork in Tokyo, the author describes how one of the largest foreign conversation schools in Japan (NOVA) has invested in broadcasting whiteness and English skill as traits of authentic native speakers. This process depends on who is viewed as a valuable teacher, but it also depends on migrants who pursue life in Japan through language teaching. Work at NOVA is highly exploitative. Yet because most of the workforce has ulterior motivations, they are willing to exchange substandard work for the privilege of mobility. This case highlights the overlaps between lifestyle migration and native speakerism at the organizational level and how supposedly “win-win” arrangements with labor create an enduring, material setting for the reproduction of ideology.

Natasha Kellem's Minoritarian Liberalism

Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights – usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois – at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ people, and slum dwellers. In this ethnographic analysis of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I explore what happens when liberalism is challenged by people whose lives are impaired by normative understandings of liberty. I call such marginalized visions of freedom “minoritarian liberalism,” a concept that stands in for overlapping, alternative modes of freedom. In this piece, I introduce Natasha Kellem, a charismatic self-declared travesti (a term used in Latin America to indicate a specific form of female gender construction opposite to the sex assigned at birth). Through interconnected experiences, I offer ethnographic evidence of non-normative routes to freedom for those seeking liberties against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation, transphobia, racism, and other patterns of domination.

Deconstructing the University: Contemporary DEI, Neoliberal Rationalities, and the Abolition of the Administrative Apparatus

The following chapters attempt to develop some working theories to combat capitalist exploitation and racist and gendered oppression in the university, culminating in a call for the abolition of the university’s administrative apparatus. The project is divided broadly into two parts, which are referential to each other, but maintain slightly different areas of focus. Part 1 details a preliminary critique of the political-economy of the contemporary neoliberal university, drawing influence from Marxian economics and structuralist theories of ideology, critiquing contemporary discourses of diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI). Part 2 focuses more directly on issues pertaining to oppression and difference, maintaining a predominantly Marxist critique which situates racism and patriarchy as co-constitutive of capitalist social relations. The project’s conclusion, seeks to join the theoretical developments of Parts 1 and 2 into a singular political mission: abolition.

Relocating exploitation

Abstract In light of recent trends toward “jobless growth” and increased wagelessness, a debate has arisen concerning whether there is an “outside” of capitalism. Surplus populations that are superfluous to the needs of the capitalist class can, it has been argued, constitute this “outside,” with some among them sustaining a living unscathed by capitalist exploitation. However, in my case study of tenant shopkeepers in South Korea, I demonstrate how supposedly superfluous livelihood activities are subsumed in exploitative capitalist relations when the urban commercial properties in which tenants make their livelihoods become high- return, speculative commodities. By identifying how and when exploitation can be activated well beyond the employment relationship, or even the “disguised” employment relationship, I call for extending the concept of exploitation to include these frontiers of capitalist extraction.

Rethinking Extractivism and Masculinity: Aesthetics of the Environment in There Will Be Blood (2007) and First Cow (2019)

As today we face the urgency of thinking film history through the implications of the ecological emergency, the aesthetics of oil extraction in cinema can be linked to representations of petro-masculinity and to discourses of capitalist exploitation of nature. Considering the ecocritical trend in film studies, this paper analyzes the subgenre of the oil film, which is inextricably related to the genre of the western historical tradition and its revisions, and presents There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) as a key case. The comparative analysis discovers that the critical and aesthetic representational strategies of landscape and character of the US founding myth in First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2019) manifest a proposal that deconstructs the genre with the intention of filming the relationships between the human and more-than-human from a viewpoint that approaches environmental consciousness.&#x0D; Keywords: &#x0D; oil, masculinity, western, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kelly Reichard, nature aesthetic, ecological emergency, film history

Intersectional Politics of the International Women’s Strike

ABSTRACT Increasingly, progressive organizing faces pressures to adopt intersectional forms of solidarity. Intersectional solidarity consists of an ongoing process of creating ties and coalitions across social group differences by negotiating power asymmetries. This approach to organizing is not a static outcome that movements achieve and preserve. Movements that seek to enact intersectional solidarity must engage in ongoing struggles to sustain it. This article focuses on the case of the International Women’s Strike (IWS) of 2017 and 2018 in Spain. We use this case to identify circumstances that can lead to failures to sustain intersectional solidarity and the consequences of the ruptures that follow. In the case of the International Women’s Strike, initial calls to organize around the subject of women and women’s labor mobilized broad support in 2017. Black women in Spain affiliated with a group known as Afroféminas called on expanding the subject of local IWS mobilization to center the experiences of Black subjects. In a broadly circulated announcement, Afroféminas called out this experience and announced that they would not participate in the International Women’s Strike. The case of the International Women’s Strike in Spain showcases an instance under which the search for intersectional solidarity can generate broad intersectional consciousness even when it leads to separate organizing tracks. The development of autonomous Black activist spaces informed the continuity and deepening of intersectional consciousness but limited the magnitude of the praxis (e.g. Afroféminas did not participate in the broader praxis that generated disruptive tactics and mobilized larger masses). In choosing to consider racism as a form of violence within one system of capitalist exploitation, limited notions of subjectivity dominated IWS. On the other hand, Afroféminas’ withdrawal of participation limited the scope of praxis and raised questions about the representativeness and inclusiveness of the broader movement. Thus, intersectional and oppositional consciousness can emerge from the withdrawal of intersectionally marginalized groups from coalition work while challenging the enactment of mass intersectional praxis.