Petrodollars and Profit: Rethinking Political Economy through the Middle East (Review of Bichler & Nitzan's "The Scientist and the Church")

FROM THE REVIEW: What if oil prices are not received, but made? What if cartels raise prices by constricting supply, and use war, legal chicanery, and international property deeds to do so? Such questions led Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, two political economists, to examine the production, distribution, and political structure of the oil business. They derived from these patterns a theory of prices and power distinct from orthodox and heterodox worldviews alike. They see prices as the result of social processes, “a symbolic quantification of power.” One of them is sabotage, or the strategic disruption of production. Power, then, is the ability to create and order the world to ensure just the right mix of sabotage and supply in order to ensure profit rates beat out those of your competitors. It is this novel, fascinating, brash, and contested theory of capitalism which they lay out in a new book, The Scientist and the Church

Eco-socialism will be anti-eugenic or it will be nothing: toward equal exchange and the end of population.

In this article, we draw attention to similarities and synergies between eco-fascist and liberal forms of populationism which encourage reproductive injustices against Indigenous women and women of colour globally, increasingly in the name of climate change mitigation. Calls to intervene in the bodily and social autonomy of racialised women, at best, distract from ecological crisis and, at worst, encourage violent forms of reproductive injustice. We urge instead for an honest reckoning with the root problem of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the system of global extraction, which enacts environmental harm and reproductive injustice. Finally, we call for an anti-imperialist eco-socialist move towards equal exchange on a world scale to end the flow of undervalued resources from the South and to limit the contaminating activities these enable. We also stress that an anti-imperialist eco-socialism needs to be attuned to the teachings of reproductive justice movements and resistant to creeping liberal eugenicism, as much as to the overt eco-fascism which has proved so deadly in recent years

The Green Revolution and transversal countermovements: recovering alternative agronomic imaginaries in Tunisia and India

This article outlines the visions of Tunisian and Indian dissident political thinkers and agronomists, 1950s–1980s, for decentralised food and farming systems using just technologies. Amidst ascendent US imperialism, these marginalised proposals opposed the Green Revolution model of agrarian development, illustrating broader postcolonial politics of defending political sovereignty and advancing to economic/technological sovereignty. Erasing these dissident voices enabled the legitimisation of the Green Revolution as an ‘inevitable’ way to ensure food security. We argue that recovering this intellectual history is critical to displace the techno-centric Green Revolution narrative, and to inform and support struggles for ecologically attuned alternatives that foreground agroecology. RÉSUMÉ Dans cet article, nous étudions les projets de systèmes de décentralisation alimentaire et agraire fondés exclusivement sur la technologie, conçus par les penseurs politiques et agronomes Tunisiens et Indiens dissidents des années 1950-1980. Dans un contexte d’impérialisme américain grandissant, ces modèles marginaux s’opposent au modèle de développement agraire de la Révolution Verte, illustrant des politiques postcoloniales plus générales de défense de la souveraineté politique et d’avancement de la souveraineté économique et technologique. La censure de ces voix dissidentes a facilité la légitimation de la Révolution Verte comme l’unique d’assurer la sécurité alimentaire. Nous affirmons la nécessité absolue de rendre sa place à cette histoire intellectuelle pour remettre en cause la représentation techno-centrée de la Révolution Verte, et pour informer et soutenir la recherche d’alternatives plus axées sur l’écologie et recentrant l’agroécologie

Villages and Urbanization

In this article comments by politician Boris Johnson and economist Edward Glaeser exemplify narratives of global urbanization that portray rural villages as redundant and perpetuate outdated notions of urban–rural division. Simultaneously, traditional urban–rural dialectics are distorted by divisive new urban projects like gated communities styled as villages. This paper argues for development models that acknowledge the vital environmental and economic roles played by rural villages, and opposes artificially created “villages” in cities. In so doing, alternative readings of rurality and villages by Rem Koolhaas, Brazilian land reformers, Mahatma Gandhi, and critics of contemporary Indian literature and urbanism are considered

Greening anti-imperialism and the national question

This chapter considers and criticises ‘green’ transformation proposals going under the name of the ‘Green New Deal’, paying particular attention to the version proposed by US politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey. It also considers and criticises a range of far-right proposals relating to border control, population management, and the enclosure of non-human natures, including those currently used by primary producers, in order to bolster a new round of sustainable accumulation. The chapter then points to elements of a radical People’s Green New Deal, which it argues is necessary for a just and egalitarian transition to clean energy. The chapter also discusses climate debt, demilitarisation in the imperial core, and decolonisation in the periphery and core alike. It focuses on land, highlighting the enduring ‘national question’ and demonstrating that sovereignty in the periphery is essential for a just worldwide transition, and examines the role of Indigenous peoples in biodiversity management

A People’s Green New Deal : Obstacles and Prospects

Within the past years, the Green New Deal (GND) became the common language for Northern climate politics, offering a seeming exit path from Northern social and ecological crises while erasing an older Northern climate discourse tied to Southern demands for climate reparations and rights to development. This Eurocentric GND has become the environmental program for an equally Eurocentric social democratic renewal. This article situates the GND in world-systemic shifts, and Northern reactions to such shifts. It situates the GND as one of three possible Eurocentric solutions to the climate crisis: a great elite transformation from above; a left-liberal “reformist” resolution; a social democratic resolution. It then elaborates a possible “People’s Green New Deal,” a revolutionary transformation focused on state sovereignty, climate debt, auto-centered development, and agriculture. Within each proposed resolution, it traces the role of the land, agriculture, and peasants

Petrodollars and Profit: Rethinking Political Economy through the Middle East (Review of Bichler & Nitzan's "The Scientist and the Church")

FROM THE REVIEW: What if oil prices are not received, but made? What if cartels raise prices by constricting supply, and use war, legal chicanery, and international property deeds to do so? Such questions led Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, two political economists, to examine the production, distribution, and political structure of the oil business. They derived from these patterns a theory of prices and power distinct from orthodox and heterodox worldviews alike. They see prices as the result of social processes, “a symbolic quantification of power.” One of them is sabotage, or the strategic disruption of production. Power, then, is the ability to create and order the world to ensure just the right mix of sabotage and supply in order to ensure profit rates beat out those of your competitors. It is this novel, fascinating, brash, and contested theory of capitalism which they lay out in a new book, The Scientist and the Church

El Nuevo Pacto Verde de los Pueblos: Obstáculos y perspectivas

El Green New Deal es ahora algo así como un objeto celestial que ejerce una fuerza sobre el discurso y la política en torno al cambio climático global, incitando al miedo, la investigación, la inquietud o la oportunidad. En algunos casos, los académicos del Norte intentan ahora establecer la agenda para el Sur. En otros, mecanismos similares pasan por instituciones multilaterales y tradicionalmente del Sur, como la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre Comercio y Desarrollo, o surgen como "pactos"; de académicos generalmente orientados al Norte decorados de palabras de moda como "autonomía", que convierten la deuda climática en acuerdos de cancelación de la deuda más baratos y agradables y repiten los anteriores intentos, fatalmente fallidos, de proponer la integración Norte-Sur al tiempo que rechazan la cuestión nacional. Y en otros, el GND está siendo apropiado de forma creativa, revisado y reajustado para reflejar las prioridades del Sur

O Novo Acordo Verde do Povo: Obstáculos e Perspectivas

El Green New Deal es ahora algo así como un objeto celestial que ejerce una fuerza sobre el discurso y la política en torno al cambio climático global, incitando al miedo, la investigación, la inquietud o la oportunidad. En algunos casos, los académicos del Norte intentan ahora establecer la agenda para el Sur. En otros, mecanismos similares pasan por instituciones multilaterales y tradicionalmente del Sur, como la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre Comercio y Desarrollo, o surgen como "pactos"; de académicos generalmente orientados al Norte decorados de palabras de moda como "autonomía", que convierten la deuda climática en acuerdos de cancelación de la deuda más baratos y agradables y repiten los anteriores intentos, fatalmente fallidos, de proponer la integración Norte-Sur al tiempo que rechazan la cuestión nacional. Y en otros, el GND está siendo apropiado de forma creativa, revisado y reajustado para reflejar las prioridades del Sur