Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality

Discussing the common(s) in neoliberal Capitalism: from Ontology to Politics

This article intends to think the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and the common(s). First, it ties to define the common both in ontological and political terms, stressing the similarities and differences between the common, commons and common goods. Then, it characterizes their relationship with neoliberal capitalism in terms of dispossession, expropriation and configuration. Finally, it discusses if the common can be thought as an alternative form of cooperation and self-government with regards to neoliberalism and to what extent it can be posed as a complete alternative to the state

Greening Capitalism? A Marxist Critique of Carbon Markets

Climate change is increasingly being recognized as a serious threat to dominant modes of social organization, inspiring suggestions that capitalism itself needs to be transformed if we are to ‘decarbonize’ the global economy. Since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, carbon markets have emerged as the main politico-economic tools in global efforts to address climate change. Newell and Paterson (2010) have recently claimed that the embrace of carbon markets by financial and political elites constitutes a possible first step towards the transformation of current modes of capitalist organization into a new form of greener, more sustainable ‘climate capitalism.’ In this paper, we argue that the institutionalization of carbon markets does not, in fact, represent a move towards the radical transformation of capitalism, but is better understood as the most recent expression of ongoing trends of ecological commodification and expropriation, driving familiar processes of uneven and crisis-prone development. In this paper, we review four critical Marxist concepts: metabolic rift (Foster, 1999), capitalism as world ecology (Moore, 2011a), uneven development and accumulation through dispossession (Harvey, 2003, 2006), and sub-imperialism (Marini, 1972, 1977), developing a framework for a Marxist analysis of carbon markets. Our analysis shows that carbon markets form part of a longer historical development of global capitalism and its relation to nature. Carbon markets, we argue, serve as creative new modes of accumulation, but are unlikely to transform capitalist dynamics in ways that might foster a more sustainable global economy. Our analysis also elucidates, in particular, the role that carbon markets play in exacerbating uneven development within the Global South, as elites in emerging economies leverage carbon market financing to pursue new strategies of sub-imperial expansion. </jats:p

Making the city of commons: popular economies between urban conflicts and capitalistic accumulation

A partire da una ricerca etnografica, in questo articolo analizzo i processi di produzione dell'urbano attraverso pratiche di commoning e processi di autorganizzazione in due differenti esperienze cooperative nell'area metropolitana di Buenos Aires. Analizzando le relazioni tra accumulazione capitalistica, trasformazioni del lavoro e produzione dello spazio urbano, e sviluppando una critica della categoria di informalità, l'obiettivo è presentare le economie popolari come campo ambivalente di conflitto, soggettivazione e possibilità di trasformazione sociale. Ricostruendo i processi socio-spaziali nell'esperienza della cooperativa Juana Villca e della fabbrica recuperata "19 de Diciembre", il contributo riflette sulle ambivalenze, potenzialità e sfide delle esperienze di autogestione del lavoro in quanto infrastrutture di una emergente istituzionalità popolare dal basso.Based on an ethnographic research, this article analyzes the urban making from below through commoning and self organization social processes in two different cooperative experiences in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. By analyzing the relationships between capitalistic accumulation, labour transformation and the production of urban spaces, and developing a critique of the category of informality, the aim is presenting popular economies as an ambivalent field of conflict, subjectivation and social transformation possibilities. Delineating the socio-spatial processes in the experiences of Juana Villca cooperative and recuperated enterprise "19 de Diciembre", the contribution reflects on ambivalences, potentialities and challenges of self managed labour experiences as infrastructure of an emergent popular institutionality from below

Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl by Anahareo

Review of Anaharea\u27s Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl

Ditransitive verbs and the ditransitive construction: a diachronic perspective

This paper argues for the adoption of a construction-based perspective to the investigation of diachronic shifts in valency, which is a hitherto largely neglected topic in the framework of valency grammar. On the basis of a comparison of the set of verbs attested in the double object argument structure pattern in a corpus of 18th-century British English with the construction's present-day semantic range, I will distinguish between three kinds of valency shifts. It will be shown that the semantic ranges of schematic argument structure constructions are subject to diachronic change, and that the shifts in valency observed in individual verbs are often part of more general changes at the level of the associated argument structure constructions. The latter part of the paper explores frequency shifts in valency and constructional semantics

Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat by Margery Fee

Review of Margery Fee\u27s Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat