Correspondence

‘Textual Corruption’     

Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus?

Abstract: Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and “free” (unpaid) work on the other. A product of three decades of decomposition of the working class, nowtopians are different from “drop‐outs” in general, or surplus populations that constitute the necessary “outside” to capital, in their conscious withdrawal from capitalist culture and concerted rejection of the value form. In emergent convivial “nowtopian” communities, largely grounded in unpaid practical work which creatively meets needs such as transportation (the bicycling subculture), food (urban gardening/agriculture), and communication (open‐source communities), we see a gradual reversal of the extreme atomization of modern life. While facing the threat of corruption via re‐integration into the system, this constellation of practices, if taken together, is an elaborate, decentralized, uncoordinated collective research and development effort exploring a potentially post‐capitalist, post‐petroleum future.     

家族主义经营——对日本战前企业雇佣制度的考察

20世纪上半叶,日本企业为了缓和劳资矛盾和强化企业内部秩序,纷纷推行以构建家族主义式的劳资关系、劳资沟通协调制度、企业内部培训制度、企业内福利制度、年功主义工资制等为基本内容的家族主义经营模式。这一新型雇佣制度在一定程度上稳定了劳资关系,提高了企业生产效率。     

Knowing “Good Food”: Immigrant Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Farmworker Food Insecurity

Abstract: This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers' inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy eating, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color don't know “good” food. I argue that in contrast to food banks and low‐income nutrition programs, home and community gardens provide spaces for retaining and highlighting agricultural, cultural, and dietary practices and knowledge. This paper investigates the linkages between workers' place in the food system as both producers and consumers, simultaneously exploited for their labor, and creating coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge. I argue that food security and healthy eating, rather than being a matter of consumers making healthy “choices”, is a matter of class‐based and racial differences in the food system.     

The “Corona Warriors”? Community health workers in the governance of India's COVID-19 response

India's nearly 1-million strong band of quasi-volunteer accredited social health activists (ASHAs) have been key actors in government efforts to control COVID-19. Utilizing a nationalist rhetoric of war, ASHAs were swiftly mobilized by the government in March 2020 as ‘COVID warriors’ engaged in tracking illness, disseminating information, and caring for quarantined individuals. The speed at which ASHAs were mobilized into mentally and physically grueling labor was all the more stunning given these minimally paid community health workers have long been seen to have low morale given their precarious, informalized work arrangements. Building on work examining the spatialities of global health governance alongside literature on geographic contingency, this paper explores the ways that nationalist COVID-19 war rhetoric promulgated from Delhi worked as a technology of health governance to propel ASHAs into certain forms of action, yet also opened up spaces of potentiality for them to reimagine their relationship to both the state and the communities they serve. In particular, in our analysis of in-depth telephone interviews with ASHA workers in the state of Himachal Pradesh, we find that their hailing as COVID warriors inspired patriotic calls to duty and legitimized their (long over-looked) roles as critical governance actors, yet also was subject to resistance and reworking due to a combination of institutional histories, local politics, as well as happenstantial everyday encounters of ASHA work. The precarious employment of ASHAs – in terms of basic remuneration as well as the great on-the-job risks that they have faced – underscores both the fragile nature of India's health governance system as well as possible political movements for its renewal. We conclude by calling for geographers to give greater attention to community health care workers as a key window into understanding the uneven ways in which health systems are made manifest on the ground, and their ability to respond to citizens' healthcare needs – both in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.     

SALINIZATION IN UZBEKISTAN

As the amount of agricultural lands has increased over the years in Uzbekistan, problems associated with the impacts of irrigation water use have occurred. The most serious and widespread of the effects may be the secondary salinization of soils. Serious salinization problems along the lower courses of the Syr Dar'ya and Amu Dar'ya basins are a contrast to milder problems along their upper courses. This paper illustrates the extent of the soil salinization problem in Uzbekistan, identifies key problem areas, and demonstrates the need for an adequate response.     

The May 2004 Enlargement of the European Union: View from Two Years Out

A prominent American geographer and observer of political currents shaping modern Europe provides an introduction and background for three following papers on the nature and impacts of European Union's 2004 enlargement in different macroregions along the EU's eastern frontier. He outlines three major dimensions (economic, social-political, and institutional) that may be used to evaluate claims supporting and opposing enlargement, surveying the evidence to date for each. Concluding sections highlight the importance of scale in assessing the impacts of enlargement, the persistence of state nationalism as a curb to EU "deepening," and changes in the nature of the EU itself over time. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F02, F20, F40, O19. 2 figures, 20 references.     

Solidarity™: Student Activism,Affective Labor,and the Fair Trade Campaign in the United States

Abstract: Ethical labeling campaigns have become a central means for diffusing and negotiating conflicts between social movements and market actors. Fair Trade was a pioneering ethical label and, by many accounts, a success. For nearly a decade, United Students for Fair Trade (USFT) activists worked to build the reputation of the Fair Trade Certified (FTC) label, but in Fall 2011 they withdrew their support and urged ethical consumers to do the same. This paper is an urgent reflection on USFT's trajectory from guerrilla marketing to boycotting FTC products. While their actions may appear shortsighted and contradictory, their decision to withdraw support from the FTC label has roots in a long struggle for control of Fair Trade. We argue that their actions signal a new stage in consumer action, as activists lose faith in the legitimacy of ethical labels and instead target the agencies that own the ethical brandscape.     

EDITORS' FOREWORD

Canadian federal energy policy since the early 1970s has run counter to the interests of the producing provinces. Federal policy has always been predicated upon two points: sufficient domestic supply and acceptable domestic prices. Until the early 1970s, federal policy had been complementary to that of both the producer and consumer provinces. Natural gas shortages in 1970 and 1971, the OPEC embargo, and the quadrupling of prices radically changed federal policy. Exports were no longer promoted, and the federal government undertook to protect Canada from the inflationary pressures of rising world energy costs. These policies have run counter to those of the energy producing provinces, particularly to those of Alberta.

While it would appear that producer-provinces would have sufficient leverage to insist upon their interests, the federal government has made good use of its direct and indirect powers to set the agenda. This suggests that the Trudeau government has begun a recentralization of federal prerogative in an area historically the preserve of the provinces. Because the government has largely been successful, a difference between federal governments and supranational organizations is suggested. In supranational organizations the power to veto is vested in the governments of the states-members; in an integrated federal state, that power resides in the central government.     

Land and languor: ethical imaginations of work and forest in northeast Madagascar

Since the early twentieth century, the practice of slash‐and‐burn agriculture by Betsimisaraka subsistence farmers of eastern Madagascar, and their reluctance to engage in wage labor processes, have been interpreted by French and other Malagasy people as symptoms Betsimisaraka laziness. Colonial officials’ idea of remedying Betsimisaraka laziness justified the imposition of wage work and forest conservation. The paper argues that colonial settlers, by conflating their vision of lazy labor and a victimized landscape, did not apprehend the co‐existence of an alternative work ethic which entailed a different time‐space orientation and social relationship to land. While scholars have analyzed the “laziness” of colonial subjects as a form of subaltern resistance to colonial domination, resistance alone does not account for the fact that under certain conditions Betsimisaraka people have also willingly partaken in wage labor. This article reveals how the labor and land ethics of Betsimisaraka farmers have actively contributed to the social and natural environments of capitalism.