The road from serfdom: economic storytelling and narratives of India in the rise of neoliberalism

Abstract

Studies of neoliberalism’s rise in the second half of the twentieth century have focused on influential US and European thinkers and global economic institutions. They rarely mention India. This article argues that, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Nehru’s India served as both a central laboratory and a discursive field for international economists debating the proper role of the state in economic development. US economists like John Kenneth Galbraith held up India planning as a proxy for the ‘American way’ of capitalism in Asia; neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman and B.R. Shenoy excoriated Nehru’s ‘road to socialism.’ As India’s economy stumbled in the late 1960s, neoliberal economists used Indian foundations to build an empirical and rhetorical case against scientific planning. Their cautionary tales about India’s ‘Permit-License-Raj’ helped to construct and sustain the project of delegitimizing state action and celebrating markets.     

Have tropical Africa's nationalisms continued imperialism's world revolution by other means?

Many scholars argue that European imperialism shaped today's tropical Africa, for better or worse. Some imperial historians see the British empire as a fertile capitalist pioneer, kindling class‐conscious, national, politics overseas. Economists of differing persuasions can see it, to the contrary, as the engineer of an underdevelopment that strangles popular sovereignty. Together with most Africanist historians, this article doubts that Europe had such creative or destructive power; British rule, among others, had to respond as much to African history as to metropolitan will. Anti‐colonial nationalisms, in turn, were neither class not ideological vanguards but regional coalitions. Nation‐building thereafter was an elusive aim, steered by minority visions imperfectly seen and widely disputed, from capitalism to socialism. All these complexities rest, it is widely argued, on the historic difficulty of exercising power in what was until recently an underpopulated continent with openly available resources.     

Toward a Collective Historical Archaeology

In this paper, I begin with ideas of difference and try to weave together aspects of our disciplinary structure, contemporary theoretical critique, and research agendas to show how our emphasis on difference, multiplicity, and individual identity makes it difficult to comprehend all that we share and constrains our political action to only local concerns. Instead, the kind of archaeological research that I envision focuses on commonalities through questions of labor, class and capitalism geared toward developing an understanding of all that we as people share.     

全球资本主义:三次重大转型——对于经济—社会关系的社会—哲学解读

从19世纪起,资本主义社会向工业时代过渡,经济、文化与价值观等各方面都发生了转变,这些转变为经济与社会的关系问题提供了研究基础。19世纪至今的资本主义可以划分为三个发展阶段,即自由资本主义阶段、有组织的资本主义阶段和非西方式的民主经济阶段。可将一个阶段向另一个阶段的过渡称为大转型。每一次转型都是资本主义现代性类型出现危机的结果,而新的现代性类型是通过寻找新的社会价值和社会组织关系来形成的。分析资本主义三次大转型的经济、社会根源,可以清晰地洞察资本主义的过去、现在和未来。同时,三次大转型的新理论框架为预测全球资本主义的未来发展方向提供了理论基础。     

The Countersovereignty of Critical Infrastructure Security: Settler-State Anxiety versus the Pipeline Blockade

Scholars argue that blockades of infrastructure pose an economic threat to capital circulation. This explains how activists can gain power through strategic spatial occupations and why states seek to protect “critical infrastructure” from disruption. However, Indigenous-led blockades of pipelines gain power not (only) by disrupting economic flows alone, but by eliciting state anxieties about the racialised political, psychic and economic project of settler colonialism. Analysing public discourse surrounding the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, including legislative measures introduced to criminalise protest since the blockade at Standing Rock, we reframe critical infrastructure security as a component operation of settler countersovereignty. The criminalisation of Indigenous dissent through the state’s escalation of protest legislation is an investment in maintaining settler political authority, leading us to conclude that blockades must be understood not only as a form of anti-capitalist resistance, but also as a locus of anti-colonial struggle.     

Greening the Cage: Exploitation and Resistance in the (Un)Sustainable Prison Garden

The current popularity of prison greening coincides with a reformist project in carceral administration centring the “rehabilitation” and “transformation” of incarcerated people, finding a natural home in the prison garden. In contrast to mainstream literatures that celebrate reform and foreground recidivism, I argue that the prison garden is exploited institutionally for the symbolic power of “green” to help resolve a crisis of legitimacy in prisons, and thereby capitalism, depoliticising the violence of incarceration while reproducing the symbolic conditions of racial capitalism through two different socioecological (prison) fixes. This proceeds in strikingly similar ways to urban sustainable development, which regularly depoliticises and extends racial and spatial injustice across the city. Yet, in its tensions and contradictions, the (un)sustainable prison garden remains a space where radical possibilities can emerge through moments of resistance, constituting various tenets of a precarious carceral food justice praxis.     

Networks of Speculation: Making Land Markets on Myanmar Facebook

Digital platforms have changed how property is sold and valued in the Global North, yet little is known about digital tools in emerging land markets. Drawing on in situ and digital ethnography, we argue that Facebook plays a key role in making a new kind of market in Myanmar, one in which land is transformed into a speculative asset, exchanged across ever-expanding networks. While commodification is familiar within longer histories of capitalism, this case highlights the significance of digital platforms to the contemporary remaking of property relations. Unlike classic cases of market-making enabled by active state regulation, Myanmar’s digital land markets were forged in the context of state absence by brokers who harnessed the technological affordances of social media to increase the scale, scope and speed of transactions. This creative re-appropriation of the platform forged new, unregulated digital markets that ultimately accumulated corporate profits and intensified participant risk.     

The Romantic Anti-Capitalisms of Short-Term Rental Hosting

This article focuses on how Airbnb hosts in the Boston metro, San Francisco, and Washington, DC respond to legislative short-term rental (STR) regulations. I trace how hosts justify their multiple STR practices by way of the civic good all while foreclosing a debate about the potential negative effects of their monetisation. I show how hosts displace the displeasing aspects of STRs onto the abstracted category of the “Investor Host”, a stand-in for foreign investment capital and indifferent corporations. I argue that STR owners replicate what Iyko Day calls “romantic anti-capitalism”, a mode of critiquing capitalism that valorises the local and concrete uses of capital while displacing capital's destructive effects onto an abstracted and racialised other. I build on Day's theorisation by demonstrating how there are multiple genres of romantic anti-capitalism that function differently based on a person's structural position within settler-colonialism.     

浅谈3D打印技术在陶瓷类文物修复和复制中的应用

3D打印技术已在多领域证明其高效性以及便捷性,成为社会热点。由于3D打印带有非接触式扫描的特点,这对于文物修复工作者而言,是在复制和修复过程中,为保护材质脆弱、价值珍贵的陶瓷类文物的可引进的新手段。在简单介绍3D打印技术复制陶器的主要过程之后,通过实例细致地了解每一个具体步骤,分析液化打印、粉末打印等不同打印技术的优缺点,如何在不同需求下进行选择;并且介绍在得到3D打印复制件后,通过复制件表面上色、纹饰加工处理等步骤完成整个复制品。3D打印技术不仅可被运用于文物复制,而且能以其与传统修复手法相比之下的无损、快速、精确等特点,在文物修复中发挥作用。     

Archaeology in Antarctica: Nineteenth-Century Capitalism Expansion Strategies

Antarctica was the last continent to be discovered in the early nineteenth century. In order to become acquainted with the process of incorporation of Antarctica to the scope of the capitalist system we have focused on particularity: i.e., specific economic and technological and ideological aspects of everyday life in sealer camps spread along the coastline of the South Shetland Islands. Archaeological research in Byers Peninsula–Livingston Island provides an approach to the mechanisms implemented to organize the first resource exploitation in these lands.