This article analyzes how the discovery of a giant oil field in its territorial waters in 1969 transformed the historical trajectory of the Republic of Congo, nine years after it acquired its independence. It focuses on how the materiality of oil—and the materiality of the massive offshore industrial complex that needed to be assembled to extract it—catalyzed a deep spatiotemporal reconfiguration of existing power relations. The Congolese anticolonial elites thought they could turn this reconfiguration to their advantage and make petroleum the means to economic prosperity for the masses. But they soon stumbled over enormous countervailing forces, as oil multinationals imposed the legal infrastructure that insulated future hydrocarbon flows and revenue streams from ambitions of self-governance after decolonization. Since then the day-to-day reproduction of Congo’s extractive business as usual has relinquished the emancipatory futures that anticolonial elites had in mind and precipitated the triumph of undemocratic politics.
{"title":"Enclosed Futures: Oil Extraction in the Republic of Congo","authors":"Anonymous","doi":"10.1086/726776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726776","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes how the discovery of a giant oil field in its territorial waters in 1969 transformed the historical trajectory of the Republic of Congo, nine years after it acquired its independence. It focuses on how the materiality of oil—and the materiality of the massive offshore industrial complex that needed to be assembled to extract it—catalyzed a deep spatiotemporal reconfiguration of existing power relations. The Congolese anticolonial elites thought they could turn this reconfiguration to their advantage and make petroleum the means to economic prosperity for the masses. But they soon stumbled over enormous countervailing forces, as oil multinationals imposed the legal infrastructure that insulated future hydrocarbon flows and revenue streams from ambitions of self-governance after decolonization. Since then the day-to-day reproduction of Congo’s extractive business as usual has relinquished the emancipatory futures that anticolonial elites had in mind and precipitated the triumph of undemocratic politics.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The transition to neoliberal hegemony during the last quarter of the twentieth century is generally portrayed as a contest between Hayekians and Keynesians. This portrayal overlooks the brief but potent effervescence of the neo-Malthusian movement. Biologists Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and Donella Meadows led a social movement that pursued environmentalist governance wherein scarce resources and population growth were managed by command-and-control instruments, Pigouvian taxation, and coercion. The neoclassical mainstream of economics conceded to the neo-Malthusian upstarts that if a “backstop” energy source was not discovered, then there were indeed “limits to growth,” but neoliberals eventually devised alternative environmental frameworks, such as Elinor Ostrom’s “commons” and John Dales’s “cap-and-trade.” The first significant clash between neoliberals and neo-Malthusians came in the form of a bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich over commodity prices during the 1980s. This article reconstructs the broader context of their confrontation, as well as the theoretical influences on Simon’s cornucopian framework of “resourceship.”
{"title":"Hayek against Malthus: Julian Simon’s Neoliberal Critique of Environmentalism","authors":"Troy Vettese","doi":"10.1086/726753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726753","url":null,"abstract":"The transition to neoliberal hegemony during the last quarter of the twentieth century is generally portrayed as a contest between Hayekians and Keynesians. This portrayal overlooks the brief but potent effervescence of the neo-Malthusian movement. Biologists Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and Donella Meadows led a social movement that pursued environmentalist governance wherein scarce resources and population growth were managed by command-and-control instruments, Pigouvian taxation, and coercion. The neoclassical mainstream of economics conceded to the neo-Malthusian upstarts that if a “backstop” energy source was not discovered, then there were indeed “limits to growth,” but neoliberals eventually devised alternative environmental frameworks, such as Elinor Ostrom’s “commons” and John Dales’s “cap-and-trade.” The first significant clash between neoliberals and neo-Malthusians came in the form of a bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich over commodity prices during the 1980s. This article reconstructs the broader context of their confrontation, as well as the theoretical influences on Simon’s cornucopian framework of “resourceship.”","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The historiography of time in capitalism is dominated by “transition histories” that examine the shift from precapitalist time to industrial or abstract time discipline from the early modern period up through the nineteenth century. By contrast this article examines time in the history of women’s understanding of their domination and their political liberation at the key moment of economic restructuring in the 1970s. Like generations of workers before them, women’s mass entry into wage labor politicized their understanding of time. Yet unlike earlier struggles for shorter hours, women’s proletarianization occurred amid incipient economic stagnation and profound sectoral reconfiguration. Mass proletarianization amid immiseration thus both shaped the rich and vibrant thought of what “free time” could be in women’s lives, but it also set the limits on how much of it could be won.
{"title":"Temporalities of Emancipation: Women, Work, and Time in 1970s America","authors":"Joel Suarez","doi":"10.1086/726752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726752","url":null,"abstract":"The historiography of time in capitalism is dominated by “transition histories” that examine the shift from precapitalist time to industrial or abstract time discipline from the early modern period up through the nineteenth century. By contrast this article examines time in the history of women’s understanding of their domination and their political liberation at the key moment of economic restructuring in the 1970s. Like generations of workers before them, women’s mass entry into wage labor politicized their understanding of time. Yet unlike earlier struggles for shorter hours, women’s proletarianization occurred amid incipient economic stagnation and profound sectoral reconfiguration. Mass proletarianization amid immiseration thus both shaped the rich and vibrant thought of what “free time” could be in women’s lives, but it also set the limits on how much of it could be won.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139344786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The role of Latin America in the long history of capitalism has been the subject of a number of debates over the twentieth century and beyond. The present article takes the specific cases of gold extraction and coffee production in Brazil over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the potentialities offered by Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, especially when read from a perspective that puts the plurality of historical time at the center of the discussion. In this way the authors hope to contribute to outlining the heterogeneity of capitalism as a historical system and the various roles played by Brazil—the largest slave society of the early modern era—in its development.
{"title":"Gold, Coffee, and Slaves: Brazil and “the So-Called Primitive Accumulation”","authors":"Leonardo Marques, Rafael de Bivar Marquese","doi":"10.1086/726750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726750","url":null,"abstract":"The role of Latin America in the long history of capitalism has been the subject of a number of debates over the twentieth century and beyond. The present article takes the specific cases of gold extraction and coffee production in Brazil over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the potentialities offered by Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, especially when read from a perspective that puts the plurality of historical time at the center of the discussion. In this way the authors hope to contribute to outlining the heterogeneity of capitalism as a historical system and the various roles played by Brazil—the largest slave society of the early modern era—in its development.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139346920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Political philosophers have recently recovered the tradition of “rhetorical redescription”—the art of changing the world by changing the language we use to represent it. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has called this strategy worldmaking. This article elaborates worldmaking as a process of revolutionary change through a close reading of the slavery debates in the antebellum United States. Antislavery abolitionists were paradigmatic worldmakers. But their efforts to redescribe slavery prompted a counterrevolution. In the 1850s a new and final wave of southern proslavery writers, led by George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes, attempted not to refute abolitionist redescriptions but to coopt them. This reactionary strategy, which tries to preserve the material reality of the ancien régime beneath the language of revolution, I call worldsaving. Turning our attention to the worldsavers in moments of revolutionary upheaval can be instructive, for their emergence both confirms the success of worldmaking and threatens its ultimate undoing.
{"title":"Reactionaries Marching Forward: On Worldmaking and Its Enemies","authors":"Daniel Judt","doi":"10.1086/726777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726777","url":null,"abstract":"Political philosophers have recently recovered the tradition of “rhetorical redescription”—the art of changing the world by changing the language we use to represent it. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has called this strategy worldmaking. This article elaborates worldmaking as a process of revolutionary change through a close reading of the slavery debates in the antebellum United States. Antislavery abolitionists were paradigmatic worldmakers. But their efforts to redescribe slavery prompted a counterrevolution. In the 1850s a new and final wave of southern proslavery writers, led by George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes, attempted not to refute abolitionist redescriptions but to coopt them. This reactionary strategy, which tries to preserve the material reality of the ancien régime beneath the language of revolution, I call worldsaving. Turning our attention to the worldsavers in moments of revolutionary upheaval can be instructive, for their emergence both confirms the success of worldmaking and threatens its ultimate undoing.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines Karl Marx’s critique of Thomas Malthus’s theory of population and his discussion of colonization in the last chapter of Capital. For Marx, Malthus’s theory naturalizes the process of social reproduction specific to capitalism, a process that was disrupted in the colonies, where, owing to the availability of land, the superfluous population of immigrant workers were transformed into independent producers.
{"title":"Colonialism, Surplus Population, and the Marxian Critique of Political Economy","authors":"Duy Lap Nguyen","doi":"10.1086/726751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726751","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Karl Marx’s critique of Thomas Malthus’s theory of population and his discussion of colonization in the last chapter of Capital. For Marx, Malthus’s theory naturalizes the process of social reproduction specific to capitalism, a process that was disrupted in the colonies, where, owing to the availability of land, the superfluous population of immigrant workers were transformed into independent producers.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How did the “Old Left”—the socialist milieu of the 1930s and 1940s—shape the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? Focusing on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), this article examines several mechanisms of Old Left influence: personnel overlap, network ties, and organizational alliances. New findings on the Old Left backgrounds of Rev. Joseph Lowery, C. T. Vivian, and many of Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachers and friends are presented. The support that SCLC received from “red” labor unions is also highlighted. The picture that emerges is not the elaborate Communist conspiracy imagined by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI but rather a transfer of skills, money, and ideas that strengthened SCLC and influenced its strategic agenda. However, the repression and stigmatization of the Old Left during the Cold War led many SCLC activists to hide or downplay their connections to the socialist movement, which has distorted both popular and scholarly understanding of the civil rights movement.
{"title":"From the Ashes of the Old: The Old Left and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1957–1965","authors":"Matthew F. Nichter","doi":"10.1086/724275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724275","url":null,"abstract":"How did the “Old Left”—the socialist milieu of the 1930s and 1940s—shape the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? Focusing on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), this article examines several mechanisms of Old Left influence: personnel overlap, network ties, and organizational alliances. New findings on the Old Left backgrounds of Rev. Joseph Lowery, C. T. Vivian, and many of Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachers and friends are presented. The support that SCLC received from “red” labor unions is also highlighted. The picture that emerges is not the elaborate Communist conspiracy imagined by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI but rather a transfer of skills, money, and ideas that strengthened SCLC and influenced its strategic agenda. However, the repression and stigmatization of the Old Left during the Cold War led many SCLC activists to hide or downplay their connections to the socialist movement, which has distorted both popular and scholarly understanding of the civil rights movement.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47562865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article argues that theories of contradiction in capitalism should be more austere and humbler than they have been traditionally. It describes how the theory of contradiction developed in Hegel’s and Marx’s thought, then offers a typology of theories of contradiction: economic, transcendental, and immanent. Theories of economic contradiction are narrow and overly functionalist and too often make failed prophecies. Theories of transcendental contradiction are broader, but they too are sometimes functionalist or rely on unjustifiable normative foundations. Theories of immanent contradiction avoid functionalism but either rely on unjustifiable normative foundations or do not describe a contradiction. The article concludes by arguing for a theory of the contradiction of capitalism based on seeing capitalism as a space of reasons. Such a theory of contradiction would not be predictive, it would not be functionalist, and it would not rely on normative foundations.
{"title":"Contradiction, Capitalism, and Reason","authors":"Justin Evans","doi":"10.1086/724273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724273","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that theories of contradiction in capitalism should be more austere and humbler than they have been traditionally. It describes how the theory of contradiction developed in Hegel’s and Marx’s thought, then offers a typology of theories of contradiction: economic, transcendental, and immanent. Theories of economic contradiction are narrow and overly functionalist and too often make failed prophecies. Theories of transcendental contradiction are broader, but they too are sometimes functionalist or rely on unjustifiable normative foundations. Theories of immanent contradiction avoid functionalism but either rely on unjustifiable normative foundations or do not describe a contradiction. The article concludes by arguing for a theory of the contradiction of capitalism based on seeing capitalism as a space of reasons. Such a theory of contradiction would not be predictive, it would not be functionalist, and it would not rely on normative foundations.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46621405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article aims to define a new way of understanding the secularization process, especially in non-Western societies. It conceptualizes secularization as a value inversion process, in which the substantive values that underpin social practices, laws, or institutions are displaced by those that serve instrumental ends. The article defines the historical mechanisms by which value inversion takes place and demonstrates the value of the theory in the case of the Middle East and North Africa. Value-inversion theory complements the two predominant contemporary approaches to understanding secularism, the rationalization method and the genealogical method, synthesizing elements of both approaches.
{"title":"Reconceptualizing Secularization and Secularism: The Value-Inversion Theory","authors":"Omer Awass","doi":"10.1086/724272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724272","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to define a new way of understanding the secularization process, especially in non-Western societies. It conceptualizes secularization as a value inversion process, in which the substantive values that underpin social practices, laws, or institutions are displaced by those that serve instrumental ends. The article defines the historical mechanisms by which value inversion takes place and demonstrates the value of the theory in the case of the Middle East and North Africa. Value-inversion theory complements the two predominant contemporary approaches to understanding secularism, the rationalization method and the genealogical method, synthesizing elements of both approaches.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44776661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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