The informal empire of London

A defence of the main tenets of dependency theory. That colonialism is the root of underdevelopment that has continued through mechanisms of transfer of wealth, in Marxist terms, of surplus value, from the Global South to the Global North. That, as Marini argued, the working class in Latin America is super-exploited. Britain is 'over-developed', London is the international centre of big mining, so there is this new geometry of imperialism emerging

Sobre Dialética da Dependência, o Capital e o Impulso Imperialista do Capitalismo

Este trabalho busca desenvolver e sistematizar os avanços que Ruy Mauro Marini apresentou em relação as análises de Karl Marx de O Capital sobre as formas de exploração que o Capital emprega para obter a mais-valia. O conceito de superexploração do trabalho articula no plano teórico os aspectos históricos que Marx não vinculou aos aspectos mais gerais de sua teoria da mais-valia. O texto defende que o conceito formulado por Marini deve dar lugar a uma nova forma de mais-valia, e propõe a categoria de mais-valia relacional para adequar os aspectos abstratos da teoria de mais-valia de Marx aos processos históricos do capitalismo que ele mesmo apontou e reconheceu

Anti-apartheid, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism : liberation in South Africa?

South Africa is poised at a moment of reflection and evaluation. In contrast to the conventional liberal narrative that separates and isolates apartheid as a specific aberration, this essay argues that the regime of separate development inaugurated in 1948 was a particular intensification of systemic racism whose main contours were established by British imperialism fifty years earlier. The bedrock of what became apartheid is the highly exploitative mining industry that pre-dates and post-dates it. The essay examines the relation between movement strategy and theory over the long durée of modern imperialism and racial capitalism in South Africa. The interaction has been in both directions, how South Africa figured in the classical theories of imperialism, and how theories of imperialism affected (or not) particular theories of how to end apartheid. Was the movement to be just anti-apartheid, or anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist as well? There were major but inconclusive debates between the ANC/South African Communist Party and more radical anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist currents, with the ANC nonetheless repeatedly emerging as the best organised, most recognised anti-apartheid protagonist. Yet this narrow political focus conditioned the transition that took place in the 1990s In the contemporary context, liberalism focuses on political corruption and the failings of Mbeki and Zuma, but these are outcomes of the deal, servicing the capitalist economic model that Mandela’s ANC accepted in 1994. There is a deeper anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist social critique of the continuing exploitation of African working class which is finding new modes of grass roots resistance. Theory needs to catch up with these developments, specifically we need an integrated analysis of capitalist imperialism in which the concept of super-exploitation is fundamental

Enslaved African labour in the Americas : from primitive accumulation to manufacture with racial violence

The paper addresses the gap between two conventional Marxist readings of the relation between capitalism and the enslavement of Africans. The first reading sees slavery as part of the process of primitive accumulation of capital, the ‘original sin’ of dispossession. The second reading sees capitalism as such as exclusively based on the exploitation of ‘free’ wage labour as its general condition. The paper provides a third interpretation that sees enslavement as a racialised mode of exploitation with a division of labour similar to manufacture. This paper reconceptualises Marx’s value theory in an analysis of the enslavement of African Americans as a part of the capitalist mode of production with its own special characteristics. The violent working to death of enslaved Africans on the sugar plantation was a matter of calculation by the slave owner, weighing value produced against the costs of purchase and maintenance. Moreover the cost of slave purchase relied on the supply of Africans seized from their home continent. This approach demonstrates continuities as well as changes from sugar plantation slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean on to cotton slavery in the US South

Alternatives to the face-to-face consultation in general practice: Focused ethnographic case study

© British Journal of General Practice. Background NHS policy encourages general practices to introduce alternatives to the face-to-face consultation, such as telephone, email, e-consultation systems, or internet video. Most have been slow to adopt these, citing concerns about workload. This project builds on previous research by focusing on the experiences of patients and practitioners who have used one or more of these alternatives. Aim To understand how, under what conditions, for which patients, and in what ways, alternatives to face-to-face consultations present benefits and challenges to patients and practitioners in general practice. Design and setting Focused ethnographic case studies took place in eight UK general practices between June 2015 and March 2016. Method Non-participant observation, informal conversations with staff, and semi-structured interviews with staff and patients were conducted. Practice documents and protocols were reviewed. Data were analysed through charting and the 'one sheet of paper' mind-map method to identify the line of argument in each thematic report. Results Case study practices had different rationales for offering alternatives to the face-to-face consultation. Beliefs varied about which patients and health issues were suitable. Co-workers were often unaware of each other's practice; for example, practice policies for use of e-consultations systems with patients were not known about or followed. Patients reported benefits including convenience and access. Staff and some patients regarded the face-toface consultation as the ideal. Conclusion Experience of implementing alternatives to the face-to-face consultation suggests that changes in patient access and staff workload may be both modest and gradual. Practices planning to implement them should consider carefully their reasons for doing so and involve the whole practice team

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

El Genocidio de los Tamiles ha llegado a America Latina = The genocide of Tamils has arrived in Latin America

The article is published in its Spanish language version. The Genocide of the Tamils has arrived in Latin America The slaughter of some seventy thousand Tamils in 2009 is not well known. Through United Nations Human Rights Council, the United States and the United Kingdom have converged with Sri Lanka to cover up the scale of the atrocity. Faced with the situation of international impunity, the Tamil Diaspora presented its case to the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal. The Bremen tribunal ruled that a genocide has been perpetrated against the Tamil people, with the complicity of the US and the UK. The genocide has special characteristics with its background in the collective struggle for national popular sovereignty, the right to be recognized as the Tamil Eelam homeland. Beyond its particular important ruling, the Bremen tribunal has raised some elements of understanding of genocide within an anti-imperialist framework. The article ends with the concrete case of the appointment as Sri Lankan ambassador to six South American countries of a general responsible for torture and bombings against the Tamil population