social theory

Neoliberal capitalism has established a seemingly unchallenged ideological and political dominance in the current period. It has left many people believing that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. Rodney would have rejected this defeatist tendency that has induced many progressives to abandon their radical politics or commitment to socialism and accept liberal capitalist democracy as the only political game in town. Some former radicals have gone over to social democracy, which is essentially capitalism with a human face.

His mother, Pauline Rodney, was a seamstress and carried out full-time unpaid domestic work in the Rodney household. Rodney’s father, Percival Rodney, was a tailor, an independent operator, but he was forced by economic necessity, on occasions, to engage in wage labour with a big capitalist tailoring firm.[5] Percival Rodney was an active member of the Marxist, multiracial mass-based People’s Progressive Party (PPP).

Rodney did not pander to the use of race or class to explain all social phenomena that occurred in the public and private spheres. The hostility of certain households and even the church to the message and work of the PPP engendered an awareness of class or social differences and their influence on how members of the public responded to his offer of the PPP’s literature and other products. Walter did not frame this alertness as class consciousness but the experience as his “first real introduction to the class question.”[9]

Rodney co-authored the article The Negro Slave with a fellow student C. Augustus and was published in UWI’s flagship journal Caribbean Quarterly in 1964. Jamaica’s secret police or the Special Branch opened a file on Rodney and his activism in June 1961 and claimed that he had a radical leftist outlook.[12]

Rodney’s book highlights the class interests of the African rulers that informed their participation in the Atlantic slave trade, the nature of political rule with the governed and the negative impact of the alliance between African rulers and European capitalists-cum-slavers on the region’s development.[14]

Rodney was not into the business of being an apologist for the ruling groups in African societies that aided and abetted the dehumanizing and exploitative sale of the people to the capitalist enslavers. Unfortunately, there are still people who would like to absolve African leaders for their role in the capture and sale of Africans.

The urban poor, Rastafari, the progressive intelligentsia could be receptive to what Rodney was offering and the regime knew that it had nothing of substance to serve as an inoculant against the message of empowerment, dignity and justice.

The Jamaica Labour Party had an uneasy relationship and even hostile relationship with the academics at the University of the West Indies because they were not acting as mouthpieces and sanctifiers of the government’s policies and programmes.

It had already used the coercive power of the state to attack and destroy working-class squatter communities in West Kingston, which also had a strong Rastafari presence.[22] The neocolonial state had no reservation about using the power of the law to discipline and neutralize the impact of Rodney’s political education and mobilization. Rodney had the potential to unify the different political groupings with Jamaica’s Black Power Movement and even Jamaica’s secret police or Special Branch feared this real possibility. The government finally made its move against Rodney. On Rodney’s return from the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal on 15 October 1968, he was declared persona non grata and prevented from leaving the plane. On 16 October 1968, the Student Guild organized a protest march against Rodney’s expulsion from Jamaica. However, the ranks of the students were increased by residents from working-class communities in downtown Kingston and they initiated the Rodney Rebellion (aka the Rodney Riots or Rodney Affair).

The African-Caribbean petite bourgeois elements who captured state power after independence were mortally afraid of this revolutionary intellectual who unreservedly fraternized with the working-class and brought a materialist analysis to their experience of anti-African racism, social domination and capitalist exploitation. Racism and capitalism are major targets for Rodney because of the way they impact African lives.

Rodney was fortunate in resuming his academic career at the rank of a Senior Lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1969. He was an active participant and significant contributor to the theoretical activism at the university, which took place in the context of the Julius Nyerere regime’s Arusha Declaration. This policy document and the Ujamaa developmental programme were attempts at pursuing a path to socialism that the Tanzanian regime claimed was rooted in the values, history and sensibilities of Tanzanian society.

Rodney did not mince words on the solution to African and Caribbean development, which was grounded in the need to get rid of capitalism and embrace socialism.[29] Rodney saw the university as a site from which to explore and develop ideas that would advance revolutionary developments in Tanzania. He shares his experience at the university: “That was the situation in Tanzania. Briefly, it meant that we were able to teach and develop scientific socialist ideas, bearing in mind when I say “we,” I mean comrades like myself, people of like mind, because we  were part of a community and that was very important.

His status as a non-citizen was a political limitation on the level of involvement that he could effect in Tanzanian politics and his Jamaican experience likely influenced his sensibilities on this matter. However, the cultural challenges of not being fully conversant with the language, customs and habits of the masses were the decisive factors. According to Rodney, ‘‘… it’s virtually a lifetime task to master that language and then to master the higher level perception which normally goes into a culture.’’[32] He left Tanzania in 1974 with the expectation to continue his academic career and activism in the land of his birth – Guyana.

He said that, “It is now well-known that my appointment was approved through the regular academic channels and it was disallowed for supposedly political reasons.”[33] The university’s Board of Governors under the influence of the Burnham regime rejected the committee’s decision to offer Rodney the vacant professorial position as well as headship of the Department of History.[34]

The enemies of social transformation do not shy away from imposing economic sanctions such as the denial of jobs as a way to punish social malcontents or revolutionaries. Rodney did not have a stable or reliable source of income from the time of his return in August 1974 and his assassination on 13 June 1980.

The regime used political repression against WPA activists and leaders, including assassinations, economic victimization and trumped up arson charges.

Rodney called on the intelligentsia to use their knowledge and skills to challenge and undermine the lies and prejudices of imperialism and racism that are peddled about the people, extend themselves beyond the disciplinary boundaries and liquidate the ‘social myths’ that officialdom offers on society, and become immersed in the struggle of the people for liberation.[41]

If liberation is conceived, directed and executed by the usurpers-cum-vanguards of the people and their struggle, the people will end up with new masters on the morning after the “successful” revolution.

Highlighting the premise that no sound society can be built on natural sciences and technology alone were Dr Winfred Avogo, associate professor of sociology at Illinois State University in the US, and Clifford Odimegwu, professor of population studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.Outlining a proposed project on labour migration, social networks and HIV-Aids risk in South Africa, the researchers pointed out the importance of highly trained demographers if policy-makers are to understand the real causes of African migrations to Europe, environmental challenges imposed by climate change and causes of population increases.

“It is commonplace to find literature suggesting that African countries are now more unequal, and ethnically, religiously and economically more divided than they were in the context of colonialism,” noted a CODESRIA concept paper that formed the basis of the Nairobi forum.The crux of the matter is that social problems like insecurity, intolerance, environmental pollution and food insecurity are becoming more and more widespread, even as societies in Africa invest more in science and technology to try and alleviate these problems.The concept paper highlighted the fact that while African governments were putting trust in natural sciences and technology to curb labour migration and brain drain, as well as improve social cohesion, trade and gender relations, other countries – such as Brazil, China and India – had seen the importance of increasing the number of social scientists to address such issues.

CODESRIA has raised the red flag of neglect and discrimination against social sciences and humanities within Africa’s development agenda. There is sufficient testimony to suggest that the skewed emphasis on natural sciences and technology needs to be balanced by inputs from other areas of human interest.

Peden has written an internalist book, more concerned with understanding the technical details of his protagonists’ work than in contextualizing it by reference to their political, social, and cultural surroundings. This works stepwise: sometimes the culture that mattered most to these thinkers, Peden reminds us, was the internal culture of the Sorbonne, but sometimes explanation via academic subcultures is still too contextual for Peden. As he puts it, glossing Spinoza’s own ahistoricist desire to see things “under the aspect of eternity,” “philosophical arguments have an integrity and transmissibility that are irreducible to their context, biographical motives, or strategic purposes.” But ahistoricism is a two-way street, a point that becomes part of Peden’s argument. Against those who would derive a political message from Spinoza’s thought, whether a liberal or a radically emancipatory one — and perhaps against Spinoza’s own claim that his politics were grounded by his metaphysics — Peden insists that Spinozist rationalism cannot provide metaphysical license for any politics at all: “Spinoza’s philosophy can be used to undermine the pretensions of any mode of political thought that seeks a metaphysical foundation — even if that metaphysics is Spinoza’s.”

pinoza for Our Time briefly mentions one historical reason for this conjunction of 17th-century philosophy and early-21st-century politics: in the 1970s the rediscovery of Spinoza offered new tools for radical critique at a “moment of farewell to traditional Marxism.” The question, of course, is what “radical critique” here means, and why Spinoza seemed available as a replacement for a traditional reading of Marx. Negri is hardly the only Marxist thinker to have turned toward Spinoza; Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Pierre Macherey are often mentioned in this regard, too.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of Nairn’s review was not his critique of Negri and Hardt’s political-theoretical claims, but rather his suggestion that behind those claims lurked a surprising meta-project, namely, to secure a continuing role for intellectuals, like Hardt and Negri themselves, who are capable of linking the politics of the multitude to overarching or even totalizing philosophies. This is of course a classic picture of the task of the political intellectual, made enduring by the intellectual history of France from the Dreyfus Affair through the time of Cavaillès and up through the arc of Sartre’s prominence. But, as Peden’s work makes clear, the search for direct translations between rationalist philosophy and political practice often produces more noise than signal.

The amazing thing about science is not its prestige, but how little people believe in it, despite the tremendous amount of time and money spent trying to get them to believe in it. To the extent that STEM gets traction in the broader public, it is because people believe (for reasons that may not be good) that somehow getting a degree in chemistry will lead to job security. As the credential arms race grows more intense, the natural sciences have become the new plumbing.

In my research on indigenous North American experiences with and responses to disproportionate incidences of adult onset diabetes, I encounter another set of critical takes on health. Native counter-discourses are pushing back against disempowering and ahistorical explanations for modern health crises in their communities, and generating comprehensive prevention and treatment strategies aimed at community, culture, relationships with land, sovereignty struggles, public policy, and food economies.

Creating accountability for health disparities at the level of government and economy—and nurturing a society that defends disease prevention for all—means interrogating modern dualisms as they have been inherited by academic disciplinarity and dominant cultural narratives about health.

nthropologists and other social scientists have been critical of reified genetic explanations for group health profiles, for whom it vaguely (or clearly) smacks of scientific racism (Sheper-Hughes 2004; Krieger 2001).

When genes and biopathology research monopolize funding and public understanding of elevated incidences of diabetes and its complications in Native North Americans absent social or environmental context, it produces a narrow, racialized, and naturalized narrative that obscures accountabilities outside of the bodies of victims. Yet, genes are decidedly not what have changed since the 1930’s when diabetes was virtually non-existent in indigenous societies in North America.

Biomedical experts are not asking what, environmentally or socio-historically, has produced chronically sedentary bodies and created a limited menu in Indian Country of canned meat, packaged, processed and sugary foods, white flour, and lard. They are not asking what has produced extreme poverty, or what structural constraints poverty sets up to restrict healthy diets, bodily movement, and access to healthcare. Their unit of analysis is, primarily, individual bodies deracinated from society, environment, history and their integrations.

As a crisis of hunger ensued subsequent to reservation confinement, government commodity food schemes began to dump unhealthy foods onto reservations in order to minimally and cheaply fill bodies that could no longer be fed by traditional food economies.

Food as a commodity is itself a novel human-nature configuration that entails many social, environmental, cultural, bodily, and spiritual losses. For many tribes, food is conceived as a web of relations entailing many obligations to human and nonhuman life, not just matter to be consumed.

Political ecology is from the beginning a critique of the dualisms upon which (capitalist) modernity hoists itself: human/environment, individual/society, mind(spirit)/matter, human/nonhuman, nature/culture, modern/primitive. Discrete human bodies become embedded in and shaped by environmental and social histories. Bodies, environments, and socio-political structures are not distinct entities to occasionally consider in conjunction, but already co-constitutive.

In order to avoid the problems inherent in both actor-network and Marxian political ecologies, I will argue that a more careful reading of assemblage theory will allow for the creation of a political ecology that is both responsive to various types of agency and considers the relationship between local and non-local processes.

While this is one meaning of the French term, agencement also implies that these things do not come together in a static arrangement (or network), but have the ability to participate in processes by virtue of assembling, not least of which is disassembling and coming together with different things to create new assemblages and new processes (Phillips 2006). This is perhaps a key difference from apolitical network ecologies, as a focus on the agency of assembled objects provides a point for a theoretical marriage with more traditional Marxist political economy without sacrificing relationality or fetishizing the global (indeed, many tend to forget that Deleuze & Guattari drew heavily on Marx).

Indeed, framing local energy production as an assemblage allowed me to relate discussion surrounding agricultural subsidies in Vermont to seemingly disparate topics such as climate change in Africa and the relationship between oil consumption and national security, an important step that allows a paper to speak to audiences beyond its purported subject.

Indeed, perhaps because assemblages are human theoretical creations, I found it difficult to create a truly distributed agency that actually gave the same weight to non-human and non-living things; i.e. while it was easy to say what roles dairy farmers and politicians played in shaping energy production, it was difficult to imagine a purpose for cows and electric generators beyond their crude material functions.

There is the blizzard of implications which tumble out from that and, also, everybody knows how when the walnut trees grow tall they will shade out the corn, which has its own consequences upon food security. So how do you deconstruct, in a useful way, a whole world unto itself?

They were the old variety, slower to mature with a harder shell, but decidedly better tasting and with a higher price than the new kind which the project introduced more recently. Unsure myself of how to get at the meat, I watched her take one and crack it between her teeth. I tried. If you are not rigorous enough in your bite, you simply puncture one side of the shell and are obliged to pick at the nut through a narrow window, extracting tiny, unsatisfying fragments of the meat. But with enough pressure from multiple angles, the shell breaks away, leaving you with the inside whole, the individual sections of the nut still distinct yet connected.

The reading list included foundational texts in political economy, cultural ecology, and natural hazards research, which allowed us to draw on and share our own diverse backgrounds. While we represented only three fields of PhD study, students had previously studied in programs as diverse as: biology, planning, environmental studies, religious studies, Latin American studies, and business administration. Drawing on our assorted expertise and a familiarity with common foundational readings, Dr. Robertson then guided us in discussions of review essays and research articles covering persistent and emerging themes in political ecology.

Walker, Peter A. 2005. Political ecology: where is the ecology.? Progress in Human Geography 29 (1):73-82. -----2006. Political ecology: where is the policy? Progress in Human Geography 30 (3):382-395. -----2007. Political ecology: where is the politics? Progress in Human Geography 31 (3):363-369.

For me, at least, it’s a tool that has been forged, refined, and employed by various craftspeople that have come before us—from Wolf and the late Alexander Cockburn to more recent smiths such as Lisa Gezon and Paul Robbins.

labels for height–short, medium, tall–are cultural constructions imposed on continuous variation (Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation). However, the implications of racial assignment are quite different from height assignment.

there is more than enough to explain one standard deviation, regression to population mean, and all the rest of the fancy statistical observations used to justify the notion of irremediable gap. Given how much we are starting to know about the links between sleep and performance, especially on mental agility, the new findings of Sleep, Race, Socioeconomics may even be enough to explain the gap.

Moreover, of course, the explanation is that it’s the smart people who make money. No mention of intergenerational inheritance, the scrapping of the inheritance tax, the decline on taxes for upper-income brackets with rates far lower than the Eisenhower 1950s. No mention of one of the prime movers for average wealth, differences in residential housing prices, and the bank loan and insurance redlining that was standard practice through the 1990s.

But the main problem is the naïve assumption that since race is a social construction, with the end of de jure and legal policies, everything should just even out. That it obviously has not leads to hand-wringing, to questioning the social construction of race, but none of this would be necessary if there had been less naïveté and more concrete political action from the beginning.

I have not seen any evidence for Diamond being uncomfortable with the determinism he previously embraced. On the contrary, Diamond claimed Guns, Germs, and Steel was not environmental determinism. I also do not see Collapse as investigating agency–it is rather, for most cases, depicting how people “choose” to fail. So when Europeans “succeed” at colonialism, that was not their doing, nor their fault; when other societies falter, that was a choice to fail: “Taken together, the two books struck Frederick K. Errington, an anthropologist . . . as a ‘one-two punch.’ The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their control, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise” (A Question of Blame When Societies Fall, Johnson 2007). Or, “note the subtle shift (or less charitably the contradiction) between the ‘accident’ of conquest in Guns and the ‘choice’ of success or failure among Diamond’s Anasazi in Collapse” (Wilcox 2009:124).

Mitt Romney may not have read Jared Diamond’s books. Maybe he just saw the movie. But Romney delivers the essence–that root success is accidental and then “culture” provides the rest. Diamond recapitulates this view in his broadside at Romney, describing that “institutions promoting wealth today arose first in Eurasia, the area with the oldest and most productive agriculture.” They may be on different sides of the political fence, but both Jared Diamond and Mitt Romney–in Diamond’s words–”fail to understand history and the modern world.” And that’s scary.