Value chains: the new economic imperialism

Abstract

Missourri, as a form of resistance to ‘logistical capitalism’. Not only did this act in combination with all of the recent murders of African Americans by police in the US galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement, it also underscores the extent to which ‘racial ordering has become integral to forms of production that are increasingly inseparable from the making of social relations and forms of life’ and thus they work to blur the difference between the structural and the incidental (p. 174). Furthermore, understanding contemporary workers’ struggles that unsettle old political forms and well-established working-class politics requires a reconsideration of the relationship between living labour and social cooperation. Workers and other subordinated populations are generating creative and collective ways to resist and survive, but usually not in ways that enable them to escape predatory capitalism or repressive states. In their consideration of Indigenous struggles against extractivism, the authors use the term ‘boundary struggles’, which underscores not only the different identity axes along which political struggles against extractivism unfold, but also the proliferation of meanings that emerge out of such struggles. Drawing on the TIPNIS case in Bolivia, they emphasize how struggles against extractivism are always about much more than opposition to the resource industries themselves and produce quite complex political subjectivities. The book concludes with some cautious optimism. It asks what kind of politics we need to enact to confront the operations of capital in a conjuncture in which neoliberalism has becomemore punitive and repressive, but inwhich socialmovements have becomemore autonomous and self-organizing. While the state will continue to be an important actor, the authors note that ‘a politics of radical transformation cannot be centeredon the state’butmust insteadbe forged both in the spaces of everyday life and in transnational spaces beyond the nation-state. Political change will emerge from what they call ‘dual power’, a politics that involves the contestation of state-capital arrangements of powers along with political actions outside and beyond the state. We need to use the state while establishing a collective power that exceeds it. While its theoretical eclecticism and geographical promiscuity make the book challenging to read, it also means that in a way that it offers something for everyone. I found myself moving from theoretical debates and illustrative case studies with which I was very familiar to others that were completely new to me. I’m sure that many readers will read the book in the same way, and the way these different debates have been brought into dialogue is a key strength of the book.