corporate violence

A young black student from the North West has related how she grew up not knowing anyone who spoke English as a first language and had never shared a meal or a classroom with a white person. She came top of her class at school, and entered university a confident student.Early in her first semester at UCT she put up her hand and asked a question. The lecturer misunderstood the question and people chuckled. The lecturer asked her to repeat the question but could not get what she was asking and requested that she see him after class. She never asked a question again. The lecturer was not racist but the student felt deeply humiliated. She knew she wasn’t stupid, so it must be the institution that was making her – and other black students – look inarticulate and second rate.

When UCT removed the statute of Rhodes this was not a one-off concession to the pressure of student anger. The university made a significant declaration that we wanted to make a decisive break with the colonialist past and we are well aware that this demands that we tackle the elusive but extremely powerful creature of institutional racism.

Loosely put, ISDS gives foreign investors an enclave legal status based on their power to invoke rights, and access to public money through a process that is open only to them. Foreign investor rights are Exhibit A, as The Economist put it, in demonstrating that “international trade agreements are a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people” (The Economist 2014).

The simplest approach to fixing these foreign investor rights is to leave them out of trade and investment agreements. That option was not taken in proposed agreements such as the Canada-EU CETA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. For the first time since NAFTA, these agreements would apply ISDS to relations among developed countries that have court systems superior to ISDS, thus entrenching ISDS as a global institution. Such is the priority given by major governments to entrenching special rights for foreign investors and shifting judicial sovereignty to ISDS arbitrators.

In ISDS at present, foreign investors have elaborate rights, with corresponding responsibilities for countries. Yet ISDS lacks actionable responsibilities for foreign investors.

emarkably, in ISDS, foreign investors are not required to seek a resolution in a country’s courts before bringing an international claim. They are not even asked to supply evidence that domestic courts cannot ensure effective protection before resorting to ISDS. In effect, it is assumed in ISDS that courts fail systematically to offer justice in all countries subject to ISDS, and that ISDS is independent and fair in the manner of a court which, as noted above, it is not.

At a multilateral investment court, this lack of respect for domestic courts must be remedied by incorporating the duty to exhaust reasonably available local remedies into the court’s constituting document.

Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of Left melancholy. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium for those beholden more to certain long-held sentiments and objects than to the possibilities of political transformation in the present. Benjamin is particularly attuned to the melancholic's investment in “things.” In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he argues that “melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge,” here suggesting that the loyalty of the melancholic converts its truth (“every loyal vow or memory”) about its beloved into a thing, indeed, imbues knowledge itself with a thinglike quality.

Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin's name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen in the heart of the putative Leftist. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms “Left,” “socialism,” “Marx,” or “movement.”

The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and of the legitimacy of Marxism may well be the least of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labour and class as inviolable predicates of political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political economy of capitalism.

But in the hollow core of all these losses, perhaps in the place of our political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss — the promise that Left analysis and Left commitment would supply its adherents with a clear and certain path towards the good, the right, and the true? Is it not this promise that formed the basis for much of our pleasure in being on the Left, indeed, for our self-love as Leftists and for our fellow feeling towards other Leftists?

But if read through the prism of Left melancholy, the element of displacement in both sets of charges may appear more starkly since we would be forced to ask: what aspects of Left analysis or orthodoxy have wilted on the vine for its adherents, but are safeguarded from this recognition through the scornful attention heaped on identity politics and poststructuralism?

this failure results as well from a particular intellectual straitjacket — an insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the subject and the subjective, the question of style, the problematic of language. And it is the combination of these two causes of failure that is deadly: “Our sectarianism,” he argues in the conclusion of The Hard Road to Renewal, “consists not only of a defensiveness towards the agendas fixed by now-anachronistic political-economic formations (those of the 1930s and 1945), but is also due to a certain notion of politics, inhabited not so much as a theory, more as a habit of mind.”

Certainly the course of capital shapes the conditions of possibility in politics, but politics itself “is either conducted ideologically or not at all.”11 Or, in another of Hall's pithy formulas, “politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.”12

It is important to be clear here. Hall never claims that ideology determines the course of globalization, but that it harnesses it for one political purpose or another, and when it is successful, the political and economic strategies represented by a particular ideology will also themselves bring into being certain political-economic formations within global capitalist developments.

Walter Benjamin sketches this phenomenon in his attack on Erich Kästner, the popular Left-wing poet in the Weimar Republic who is the subject of his "Left melancholy” essay: “This poet is dissatisfied, indeed heavy-hearted. But this heaviness of heart derives from routine. For to be in a routine means to have sacrificed one's idiosyncracies, to have forfeited the gift of distaste. And that makes one heavy-hearted.”14

What is entailed in throwing off the melancholic and conservative habits of the Left to invigorate it with a radical (from the Latin radix, meaning “root”), critical and visionary spirit again? This would be a spirit that embraces the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society rather than recoiling at this prospect, even as we must be wisened to the fact that neither total revolution nor the automatic progress of history would carry us towards whatever reformulated vision we might develop. What political hope can we nurture that does not falsely ground itself in the notion that “history is on our side” or that there is some inevitability of popular attachment to whatever values we might develop as those of a new Left vision?

Cotton production can involve large-scale pesticide and water use, and human rights abuses such as the use of child labour. Production of the textile fibre rayon can cause deforestation.