In defence of the household : Marx, gender and the utilitarian impasse

Marxism;feminism;household;social research;terminology

Contingent identity and socialist democracy in the port of Maputo

activism;Mozambique;revolution;national liberation movements;socialism

Proletarianisation, agency and changing rural livelihoods : forced labour and resistance in colonial Mozambique

Mozambique;Marxian analysis;Southern Africa;colonialism;rural workers;sustainable livelihoods

AIDS, freedom and the moral community of citizens in Southern Africa

AIDS; public health; health policy; liberalism; politics; Southern Africa;

Contingent identity and socialist democracy in the port of Maputo

Failures of socialist revolutions in Africa are sometimes dismissed as alien to the history of socialism - attempts to gloss developmentalist nationalist projects in the discourse of socialism. This paper argues that the problematic relationship between party, state and broad-based political activism in African revolutions are not part of an incommensurate ethnicised history; they are like those that have repeatedly recurred and been debated in the history of socialism. It looks at one particular moment in the history of Frelimo's Mozambican revolution - the confrontation between the party and Mozambican port workers over the restructuring of work and pay in 1980. It argues that the ways that Frelimo envisioned its options at this moment illustrated two recurring tensions in Marxist-Leninist political practice - reluctance to confront the contingency of structure and the materiality of ideology

Proletarianisation, agency and changing rural livelihoods : forced labour and resistance in colonial Mozambique

In current analytical approaches to rural poverty in southern Africa, the concept of changing livelihoods stands in an inverse relation to the concept of proletarianisation. The more we see the term livelihoods, the less we see proletarianisation. This shift reflects criticism of Marxist work on proletarianisation for its teleology - confusing irreversibility with inevitability - and for its functionalism - not recognising the agency of the poor, including the struggles of people not to be proletarianised. It also reflects, however, the current ascendancy of methodological individualism in development studies. This paper argues that much is lost when the description of livelihoods becomes an alternative to class analysis rather than its complement, and when agency is reduced to individual strategising. It argues that the multiplicity and variation of rural lives in Mozambique today are the outcome of a historical process of proletarianisation grounded in recourse to forced labour by capitalist enterprises and the colonial state. It shows how both forced labour and resistance to it shaped the ways labour and agricultural commodity markets worked and developed. The concept of changing livelihoods helps us to us to document the processes of commoditisation that underlie both the contingency of proletarianisation and its irreversibility. It thus also helps us to understand why the struggles of rural people against forced labour and forced cropping often brought them more tightly into a world where wagelabour was done or hired. If we become so enmeshed in documenting the complexity of multiple livelihoods and individual creativity that we can no longer see broad patterns of class struggle in historical change, then the concept of livelihoods becomes an ideological mask rather than a useful working tool

For richer, for poorer: marriage and casualized sex in East African artisanal mining settlements

Migrants to Tanzania's artisanal gold mining sites seek mineral wealth, which is accompanied by high risks of occupational hazards, economic failure, AIDS and social censure from their home communities. Male miners in these settlements compete to attract newly arrived young women who are perceived to be diverting male material support from older women and children's economic survival. This article explores the dynamics of monogamy, polygamy and promiscuity in the context of rapid occupational change. It shows how a wide spectrum of productive and welfare outcomes is generated through sexual experimentation, which calls into question conventional concepts of prostitution, marriage and gender power relations

Indigenous knowledges and development: a postcolonial caution

As a result of the failure of formal top-down development, there has recently been increased interest in the possibilities of drawing upon the indigenous knowledges of those in the communities involved, in an attempt to produce more effective development strategies. The concept of indigenous knowledge calls for the inclusion of local voices and priorities, and promises empowerment through ownership of the process. However, there has been little critical examination of the ways in which indigenous knowledges have been included in the development process. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, this article suggests that indigenous knowledges are often drawn into development by both theorists and development institutions in a very limited way, failing to engage with other ways of perceiving development, and thus missing the possibility of devising more challenging alternatives

Dasatinib preferentially induces apoptosis by inhibiting Lyn kinase in nilotinib-resistant chronic myeloid leukemia cell line

Nilotinib is approved for treatment of newly diagnosed chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and it is shown superiority over imatinib in first-line treatment for patients of CML. In this study, we established a nilotinib-resistant cell line, K562NR, and evaluated the resistance to nilotinib and efficacy of dasatinib. We found activation of Lyn plays a dominant role in survival of the nilotinib-resistant cell line. We found dasatinib induces the apoptosis of nilotinib-resistant cells and inhibits Lyn kinase activity. This novel nilotinib-resistant CML cell line may help to explore novel therapy for CML