The Penn Effect and Marx\u27s International Law of Value: A Review of Value and Unequal Exchange by Andrea Ricci

Placing itself in the revival of interest in unequal exchange, Ricci\u27s book claims the need to give the theory a new conceptual foundation to justify recent proposals to estimate unequal exchange on the basis of the so-called Penn effect. In order to do that, Ricci identifies Marx\u27s international law of value as a fitting theoretical framework and hence develops a radically innovative theory of global capitalist exploitation through international trade. Finally, he assesses the magnitude of unequal exchange over the past three decades by producing estimates based on the proposed approach

Pre-disciplinary and Post-disciplinary Perspectives.

Contributors to this forum are invited to write from their own disciplinary perspective on exciting intellectual developments in their field and to assess their implications for contemporary political economy. They should also address how far political economy is (or should become) an interdisciplinary venture. We find it hard to answer these questions, however, because neither co-author identifies with a single discipline. Indeed, we reject the discursive and organisational construction (and, worse, the fetishisation) of disciplinary boundaries. This means in turn that we cannot describe our approach as inter- or multi-disciplinary in its aspiration�even though, faute de mieux, we draw on concepts,theoretical arguments and empirical studies written from existing disciplinary perspectives. Instead, we describe our shared approach as pre-disciplinary in its historical inspiration and as post-disciplinar y in its current intellectual implications. We are not alone in refusing disciplinary boundaries and decrying some of their effects. Indeed, among the most exciting recent intellectual developments in the social sciences is the increasing commitment to transcending these boundaries to understand better the complex interconnections within and across the natural and social worlds. Thus our own contribution to this forum seeks to bring out some implications of pre- and post-disciplinary analyses of political economy. We advocate the idea of a �cultural political economy� and suggest how it might transform understandings of recent developments in political economy

Highgate Cemetery heterotopia: A Creative Counterpublic Space

Highgate Cemetery is nominally presented as a heterotopia, constructed, and theorized through the articulation of three “spaces.” First, it is configured as a public space which organizes the individual and the social, where the management of death creates a relationship between external space and its internal conceptualization. This reveals, enables, and disturbs the sociocultural and political imagination which helps order and disrupt thinking. Second, it is conceived as a creative space where cemetery texts emplace and materialize memory that mirrors the cultural capital of those interred, part of an urban aesthetic which articulates the distinction of the metropolitan elite. Last, it is a celebritized counterpublic space that expresses dissent, testimony to those who have actively imagined a better world, which is epitomized by the Marx Memorial. Representation of the cemetery is ambiguous as it is recuperated and framed by the living with the three different “spaces” offering heterotopic alliances

The World is Already Without Us

This article revisits the problematic of the cognitive mapping of capital by probing the affinity between two representational predicaments: the depopulated nature of images of human-altered landscapes in the “new topographics” photography and its epigones, and the current debate over the definition of the Anthropocene. It looks in Fredric Jameson’s treatment of the time of capital, and of the place therein of dead labor, for a clue to critically rethink both these phenomena, revealing their profound affinity in the aporia besetting our thinking of historical agency under capitalist conditions. The article concludes with a brief reflection on what it might mean to define communism in this light as the “resurrection of dead labor.

The Labor Between Farm And Table: Cultivating An Urban Political Ecology Of Agrifood For The 21st Century

The variegated landscape of food production and consumption reveals a great deal about socionatural relations and processes of urbanization and globalization under capitalism. Food production has changed dramatically over time, shifting away (but never fully divorced) from the rural agrarian landscape to spaces that are characterized as industrial and/or urban. Workers transform nature at each stage in the food production process, not only on farms but also in processing plants, grocery stores, restaurants, and other spaces. This paper draws on urban political ecology (UPE) to position labor as central to understanding the socioecological relations embodied in food systems. It puts UPE in conversation with agrarian political economy, a decidedly un‐urban body of literature that nevertheless offers critical insight into the obstacles (and opportunities) that nature and labor pose to food systems development in an urbanizing world. Employing UPE\u27s dialectic conception of humans and nature, this paper highlights the role that non‐agricultural and urban‐based food labor plays in an increasingly complex global political economy of agrifood. Seeing both the “labor” and “nature” of food from the farm all the way to the table can reveal the myriad transformations, exchanges, and socioecological relations operating within the food system

On Pre- and Post-Disciplinarity in (Cultural) Political Economy

For some time now we have been working both individually and together on a new approach to political economy that does not fit neatly into the standard ways of thinking about political economy as a discipline. Instead, we describe our shared approach as pre-disciplinary in its historical inspiration and post-disciplinary in its current intellectual implications. Of course, we are not alone in refusing disciplinary boundaries and decrying some of their effects. Indeed, there are many signs of increasing commitment among social scientists to transcending such boundaries to better understand the complex interconnections within and across the natural and social worlds. We advocate the idea of a 'cultural political economy' and suggest how it might transform understandings of recent developments in political economy. Before doing so, however, we will situate our proposals for cultural political economy in the broader context of exciting recent developments in political economy

J18: movements towards an ethico-aesthetic paradigm

This thesis offers a materialist account of political action from the perspective of the aesthetic, focusing on a global day of action, protest and carnival staged to coincide with the G8 Summit on June 18th 1999. An event known as J18. Part One begins with a review of contemporary literature concerning the sociologies of contemporary political movements, theories of space and locality provided by geography, analyses of public interventions by art practice as well as the tactical deployment of media and writing related specifically to the cultural politics of anti-capitalism. The theory and methods chapter surveys historic shifts in thinking about political action, through an attendant Marxist epistemology, through three key events: the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and May 1968. The search for a materialist understanding of political action feeds the act of drawing together empirical material from J18 by way of the data gathering process and the reciprocal development of a critical framework used as a method of interpretation. In Part Two a multi-centred account of the event is narrated by way of micro-examples that are each affectively attuned to, and constitutive of the events happening

Activist Research Practice: Exploring Research and Knowledge Production for Social Action

Research is a major aspect and fundamental component of many social struggles and movements for change. Understanding social movement networks as significant sites of knowledge production, this article situates and discusses processes and practice of activist research produced outside of academia in these milieus in the broader context of the ‘knowledge-practice’ of social movements. In dialogue with scholarly literature on activist research, it draws from the author’s work as an activist researcher, and a current study of small activist research non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with examples from movement research on transnational corporate power and resistance to capitalist globalization.. It explicates research processes arising from, and embedded in, relationships and dialogue with other activists and organizations that develop through collaboration in formal and informal networks; it contends that building relationships is central to effective activist research practice. In addition to examining how activist researchers practice, understand and validate their research, this paper also shows how this knowledge is constructed, disseminated and mobilized as a tool for effective social action/organizing

From Race to Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory

The misconstrual of class as a theoretical and analytic concept for defining group or individual identity has led, especially during the Cold War period, to its confusion with status, life-style, and other ideological contingencies. This has vitiated the innovative attempt of CRT to link racism and class oppression. We need to reinstate the Marxist category of class derived from the social division of labor that generates antagonistic class relations. Class conflict becomes the key to grasping the totality of social relations of production, as well as the metabolic process of social reproduction in which racism finds its effectivity. This will help us clarify the changing modes of racist practices, especially in global market operations where immigrant female labor plays a decisive role. This Essay uses the example of Filipina domestics as a global social class actualized in its specific historical particularity as gendered, neocolonized subjects of capital accumulation. CRT can be renewed by adopting class struggle as the means of resolving racial injustice through radical structural transformation