Freedom ossified or economic crisis? A comment on Holger Henke

This article contends with the view that the political crisis in some Anglophone Caribbean countries—primarily Jamaica—can be understood as arising from the black middle‐class leadership's use of race and nationalism to obscure class issues. It argues that the race and national issues were and are legitimate class issues and that it is theoretically and practically a mistake to counterpose the two. The black middle class achieved important victories against colonialism and racism but now is faced with global economic and political forces for which it is ill‐equipped to address. The political crisis that it faces is more a result of these global forces than it is of the internal weakness of this class.     

“Coloniality of power” and racial dynamics: Notes toward a reinterpretation of Latino Caribbeans in New York City 1

The category of “Latino” collapses the differences among populations with diverse historical experiences of oppression. We establish in this article a distinction within the Latino Caribbean diaspora among “immigrants/’ “colonial immigrants,” and “colonial/racial subjects” of the U.S. empire. Using the notion of “coloniality of power” developed by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, we argue that the social position and racialization of several different populations in the U.S. today has its roots in the racial hierarchies produced by centuries of European colonial expansion and that this essentially colonial set of relationships continues. We use this notion of coloniality to reconceptualize three social processes: (1) the construction of Puerto Ricans as colonial racialized subjects in the Euro‐American imaginary; (2) the transformation of Dominicans into colonial immigrants in the New York Metropolitan Area, that is, the way Dominicans became “Puerto Ricanized” and (3) the disassociation of pre‐1980s Cuban migrants from the “Puerto Ricanization” experienced by the Dominicans.     

The multiplicity of citizenship: transnational and local practices and identifications of middle‐class migrants

In this article we focus on local and transnational forms of active citizenship, understood as the sum of all political practices and processes of identification. Our study, conducted among middle‐class immigrants in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, indicates that the importance of active transnational citizenship should not be overstated. Among these immigrants, political practices are primarily focused on the local level; political practices directed to the home country appear to be quite rare. However, although transnational activities in the public sphere are rather exceptional, many immigrants do participate in homeland‐directed activities in the private sphere. If we look at processes of identification, we see that a majority of the middle‐class immigrants have a strong local identity. Many of them combine this local identification with feelings of belonging to people in their home country.     

Organizational Political Economy and Environmental Pollution

Environmental scholars have made important progress explaining the social forces associated with pollution. Although important exceptions exist, insufficient attention has been given to organizations, which is where most environmental pollution is produced. Even less attentions has been given to parent companies, which have ultimate decision‐making authority over their polluting facilities. To file this gap in the literature, this paper develops an organizational political economy perspective to advance our understanding of how organizational and political‐legal arrangements affect parent companies' capacity to externalize their pollution costs to society. Organizational political economy maintains that corporations' organizational complexity, financial characteristics, management operating systems, political embeddedness in subnational states, and the degree of compliance with national and subnational environmental policies affect their capacity to externalize pollution costs. This perspective also shows how the exercise of organizational power to externalize pollution costs subsidizes the managerial and investor classes by the middle and working classes, whose taxes pay for a large share of environmental clean‐up costs, thereby contributing to economic inequality that goes beyond standard inequality measurements.     

Middle classes,democratization, and class formation

Conclusions This analysis of the South Korean case demonstrates the importance of the historical context for understanding the political role of the middle classes. In late industrialization, as occurred in South Korea and other East Asian countries, the new middle class has emerged as a significant social class, before the capitalist class established its ideological hegemony and before industrial workers developed into an organized class. Neither of these two major classes was able to offer an ideological or organizational leadership to the middle classes. In this context, the middle class can act as more than merely a dependent variable. In South Korea, the minjung movement led by an intellectual segment of the middle class played a critical role in the formation of the working class, by providing an opposition ideology, new politicized languages, organizational networks, and other resources.The Korean experience also highlights the significant role of the state in class formation. The predominant role of the state in economic and social development puts it at the center of major social conflicts. Social tensions and conflicts that emerge in rapid industrialization are directly and indirectly related to the character of the state and the economic policies it implements. A high level of politicization among Korean middle-class members, not only among intellectuals but also among a large number of white-collar workers, is the product of the authoritarian regimes of Park and Chun and their repressive control of civil society. Both the nature of Korean middle-class politics and its relationship with the working-class formation have been shaped by the nature of state politics.The role of the middle class in the South Korean democratization process has been complex and variable, in part because of its internal heterogeneity and in part because of shifting political conjunctures in the transition to democracy. It would not make much sense, therefore, to characterize the Korean middle class as progressive or conservative, because different segments of it were inserted into the shifting conjunctures of political transition differently. At the same time, it would be also unsatisfactory to characterize middle-class politics as simply inconsistent or incoherent, because there exists some definite pattern in their behaviors.This analysis suggests that political behaviors of different segments of the middle class can be explained in terms of their locations within the broad spectrum of middle-class positions between capital and labor and by the changing balance of power between the two major classes. This is to acknowledge the fact that capital-labor relations constitute the primary axis of conflict and that middle-class politics must be understood ultimately in terms of this principal mechanism of class struggle. This is, however, not to assume that middle-class politics is simply a terrain of struggle between the capitalist and the working classes, as many Marxist theorists do. To repeat, in certain historical contexts middle-class politics can have an independent effect on the formation of the two major classes and the outcomes of struggles between the two.     

Reconsidering identity: the ethnic and political dimensions of hybridity among majority and Turkish youth in Germany and England1

Sociological research has hitherto largely focused on majority ² and minority ethnic identities or citizenship identities. However, the social connections between youth are not simply ethnic dynamics but also political dynamics involving citizenship categories. This article argues that in postmodern societies, it is important to reconsider the ways we think about youth identities. Drawing upon qualitative data from a study into the political identities of majority (German and British) youth and Turkish youth, educated in two Stuttgart and two London secondary schools, the research found that fifteen‐year‐olds had no singular identity but hybrid ethno‐national, ethno‐local and national‐European identities as a result of governmental policies, their schooling and community experience, social class positioning, ethnicity and migration history. In working‐class educational contexts, many majority and Turkish youth privileged the ethnic dimension of hybridity whereas majority and Turkish youth in the two middle‐class dominated schools emphasized the political dimension of hybridity. The article demonstrates that social class and schooling (e.g. ethos and peer cultures) have a considerable role to play in who can afford to take on the more hybridized cosmopolitan identities on offer.     

The geography of the Afrikaner Broederbond in Namibia

The power and influence of the Afrikaner Broederbond in the Southern African political sphere has been analysed and assessed in a non‐spatial context. However, it is only when the spatial distribution of the organisation is revealed that the full dimension of its power may be interpreted in the unfolding political struggles within the subcontinent. This paper furnishes a ‘synoptic’ examination of the geography of the Afrikaner Broederbond in Namibia.     

Threat of a Bondman: Political Self-Fashioning and Christian Empowerment in the Memoir of Quamino Buccau,A Pious Methodist

This article analyses the permeable boundaries between slavery and freedom which developed in the context of illicit inter-imperial trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Caribbean, focusing on ties between the Dutch island of Curaçao and the neighbouring northern coast of Spanish South America. As smuggling opened opportunities for enslaved people to cross political borders, it spurred authorities to develop flexible legal frameworks to meet the challenge of conducting free trade in colonial slave societies. The evidence indicates that, even in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, slavery sometimes existed along a legal continuum, rather than as an immutable, absolute category.     

Rituals of complicity,the ‘humanities’ rhetoric,and the closing of the South African mind

A mail survey undertaken in 1977 showed that a clear majority (64%) of final year students polled at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, answered in the affirmative to a question asking them whether they would permanently settle in a country other than South Africa. Almost all the respondents in the survey were desirous of change to the socio‐political structure of this country; in particular the Apartheid, pass laws, job reservation, educational and residential policies; although students expressing attitudes favourable to emigrating seemed to be slightly more concerned in this regard. Thus it appears that South Africa may lose many of those of its citizens who, if they remained, would be most likely to contribute to peaceful change.     

The people of California are suffering': The ideology of white injury in discourses of immigration

Abstract

This article examines how the ideology of white injury both conceals and sustains inequitable social relations in turn‐of‐the‐millenium California. Understanding the political and economic context of California in the early 1990s in relation to media, law, and culture helps explain why Californian citizens passed the unconstitutional initiative, Proposition 187, in 1994. Targeting undocumented Mexican immigrants, this ‘color‐blind’ Proposition functioned to conflate economic insecurities with racial anxieties. An analysis of culture, law, and media discloses how racial anxieties limit our understandings of exploitative capitalist relations, serving to artificially augment the white middle‐class ‘ wealth, opportunities, and power, while making vulnerable populations in the United States even more open to exploitation.     

Law and Older People—The Rise and Fall of Israel's Senior Citizens' Act

Within the broad and complex framework of those Israeli laws that relate to the social welfare of the older population, this article uses a case study approach to focus on Israel's Senior Citizens' Act of 1989. During its hitherto brief life, this law has undergone numerous transformations, additions, and deletions as well as successes and failures. At the time of its enactment, many hoped that this law would considerably bolster the rights of older people. Echoing legal and political theories of the 1980s, it seemed to reflect the fact that politicians were sensitive to the potential power of the pensioner vote, while echoing the approach to social engineering that advocated the use of the law both as a means for social change and a symbol of power. As of today, however, this article argues that the law has failed to realize what were declared to be its objectives. Instead of promoting social change and providing older people with political power, the Senior Citizens' Act has become an empty symbol that hides the fact that the older generation in Israel still lacks the real political power it needs in order to use the law to improve society's treatment of older people.     

The permaculture movement in India: a social movement with Southern characteristics

ABSTRACT

Permaculture is an attempt to design and develop sustainable communities in harmony with natural ecosystems. It embraces solution-oriented approaches to contemporary social and environmental problems. Originating in Australia, permaculture was initially considered a design system but it has become a global social movement and it is practiced in different countries in various forms and at multiple scales. It is manifested in numerous networks of local practitioners, teachers, promoters, demonstration sites, organisations and magazines where various ideas and practices converge. Despite its popularization scant attention has been given to analysis of permaculture as a social movement. Moreover, the few academic writings which analyse permaculture as a social movement do not systematically engage with its manifestation and adaptation in the global South. The latter is the main contribution of this article. Based on original research this paper narrates the origins of the permaculture movement in India, and it pays close attention to its contextual adaptation by a diverse group of practitioners. It demonstrates that these diverse actors and their strategies have clear linkages to the independence movement; they are influenced by the incomplete project of Indian liberal democracy; they operate on the sphere of civil and political society; and they engage middle and lower classes in a formal and informal political nexus.     

Ethnic identities and national identities: Some examples from Malaysia

Using examples from Malaysia, this paper emphasizes the importance of relating ethnicity to the power of the state and political processes involving different ethnic groups. Ethnic group formation involves processes that make people identify as an imagined community in a nation‐state. Indeed, the processes that create ethnic and national identities are part and parcel of the same historical processes. It is also necessary to relate national identity to ethnicity, as national identity is imagined differently by different ethnic groups in a nation‐state. The paper describes Malay and Chinese ethnicity as well as the complex ethnic identification and ethnogenesis of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak.     

Interpretative Freedom and New Combination: The Way in Which the “Middle Class” Has Been Narrated

The English words “middle class” have experienced much more connotations and denotations—typically “bourgeoisie,” “white‐collar,” and professional—than any other class‐referring word since the latter half of the 18th century. On the one hand, in response to such diverse narrations during about two and a half centuries, I partially agree with some of the nominalistic theories of class, in that the middle classes were not created until they were named by contemporaries. On the other hand, my view diverges from those theories, in my asserting that the contemporaries have had an interpretative freedom to recognize “middle classes” only within the bounds of plausibility on the side of the realistic social world. The typical middle class in each period has emerged in such a way that Schumpeter's new combination is performed in a stage of recession by new entrepreneurs, who will move into the “middle” strata and hold some cultural leadership but still obtain inconsistent statuses, to be recognized as “middle class”ex post facto in a boom time. Two Kondratieff's cycles have had one recognition of the typical “middle class.” The new combination is one of the pressures bringing middle classes into a modern society, contrary to the so‐called class decomposition into the two poles.     

Middle Class Identity in the Modern World: How Politics and Economics Matter

It is widely accepted that people tend to identify with the middle classes regardless of their social class position. Nevertheless, this “middle class identity bias” is not equally prominent in all western democracies. The goal of this article is to assess the role of political and economic conditions in shaping this phenomenon. By exploring the relationship between class identity and national context in 15 modern societies, I address two main questions: (1) how individual‐level income affects where people place themselves in the class system, and (2) how national political and economic context affects this relationship. In doing so, I offer several important findings. First, although there is a positive relationship between income and class identification in all 15 societies, middle class identification is weakest when income inequality is high. Consistent with previous findings, the results suggest that economic development has a positive impact on class identity. The results also uncover a role for political ideology by suggesting a lingering affect of Communist rule. Even after controlling for economic development and income inequality, respondents in former Communist countries are more likely than others to identify as belonging to a low social class.     

Decentralist vanguards: women’s autonomous power and left convergence in Rojava

ABSTRACT

Since 2012, the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria has attracted the attention of the global Left. Although this project has been subjected to many analyses from different political perspectives, there has not been a systematic analysis of the way it brings together anarchism and Marxism. By focusing on the question of how a revolutionary movement should be organized, we arrive at the argument that Rojava features a specific hybrid of anarchist and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary methods in the form of ‘decentralist vanguardism’. The most advanced form of this hybrid method in Rojava is represented by women. By virtue of being theorized as a revolutionary agent, having autonomous organizations, and carrying a leading role in educating the general public, women in Rojava become what we call ‘a revolutionary middle stratum’: a distinct revolutionary group with autonomous power that can push forward the revolutionary process while dispersing the authority of the vanguard movement.     

The power of discourse: Michel Foucault and critical theory

Abstract

The debate that contrasts Marxism and the work of Michel Foucault often overlooks that both projects share a political and ethical commitment. Both have moreover engaged that commitment by challenging what Marx called ‘traditional ideas’, viewing them as historically compilcit with the exercise of power. This ‘radical rupture’ with traditional ideas has been the hallmark of the critical theory project since The Communist Manifesto. By challenging traditional notions of power and language, however, Michel Foucault went further than the Marxist tradition in carrying out the critical theory project. Foucault's alternative ideas of discourse/practice and of power as ‘positive’ are moreover intricately linked in a way that has not been sufficiently appreciated. This is evident in a genealogy of Foucault's early work, where neither notion is able to take hold in the absence of the other. It only after The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Foucault rethought the relationship of language to reality, that he was able to formulate the notion of power as positive in works to come. This link should cause us to rethink our relationship to Foucault's work, of it to Marxism, and of the critical theory project to the power.