Stephen Resnick—author

The last time, I wrote about Stephen Resnick’s approach to teaching. Here, I want to consider his written work.

I’m not going to attempt to cover everything listed on his long curriculum vitae.  What I want to do is pick out and comment on a few pieces that, to my mind, are emblematic of his pioneering contributions to extending and reconceptualizing the Marxian critique of political economy.

Let me start with two quick observations. First, much of what Resnick wrote and published over the years, he did so with his long-time friend and comrade Richard Wolff. What I write then about Resnick’s work, especially from 1979 onward, should be understood as an appreciation of the writings of both Resnick and Wolff.

Second, there is a gap of about four years in his curriculum vitae, from 1975 to 1979, which is absolutely crucial—and admirable. That’s the period during which Resnick stopped publishing, in order to focus on two other projects: the building of the new Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and a rethinking of Marxian theory. The first project took up a great deal of time and energy, and Resnick dedicated himself to working with others (not only Wolff but also Sam Bowles, Herb Gintis, Jim Crotty, and Donald Katzner, among others) to create a department where Marxian economics would, after a long hiatus, have a home in the United States.* The second project was born out of a frustration with the received tradition of Marxian economics, and the only way to move beyond it was to sit down with the texts of that tradition, both classic and new, and to initiate a project of rethinking Marxian theory. That involved identifying the distinguishing characteristics of Marxism (what made it different not only from mainstream economics but also from other radical traditions) and then pushing it in new directions (of which more below).

But before I get to that work, I want to go back in time a bit and focus on two articles that, in my view, represent the most interesting dimensions of Resnick’s work before UMass. They are:

“A Model of an Agrarian Economy with Non-Agricultural Activities” (with Stephen Hymer), American Economic Review (September 1969): 493-506

“The State of Development Economics,” American Economic Review, Proceedings (May 1975): 317-22

In the first, Resnick and Stephen Hymer went beyond the usual neoclassical labor-leisure tradeoff model by incorporating, for an agrarian economy, a third possibility: “Z activities.” These were meant to represent a wide variety of nonagricultural nonleisure activities such as processing, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and service activities to satisfy the needs for food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, and ceremony. This allowed them to argue against the neoclassical proposition that the course of capitalist development could simply be reduced to the replacing of leisure by work. Instead, by paying attention to the “complex mosaic of agrarian life,” they could emphasize the effects of the growth of markets and increased exchange between town and country—not only with increased specialization and production (of both food and manufactured goods, at the expense of Z goods) but also the economic and social costs of the disruption of the economic and social structure of rural areas, including the immiseration of important parts of the population. My sense is, even though a certain language is largely absent, and the analytical tools they use are pretty standard neoclassical ones, Resnick and Hymer are drawing on many of the themes of a Marxian analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Resnick put those issues up front in his 1975 critique of bourgeois development economics. He notes, at the start, the differences between the “underlying theories of value” informing neoclassical and Marxian approaches to development and identifies, in language that would be familiar to mainstream economists, the problems inherent in their method:

Simply put, the neoclassical approach is misspecified because of the omission of production relations and thus yields biased policy conclusions and unreliable predictions. Further, although this approach has recently appended to its analysis the more obvious social and political issues, they are added as unexamined external givens never seen as the direct outgrowth of the underlying structure of production, i.e., the value relation between labor and labor power. Neoclassical development cannot analyze anything outside of a framework of market or exchange relationships because that is the theory upon which it is based; it is trapped not by inadequate data or lack of “better” models, but rather by its narrow focus on supply and demand and its total neglect of those historic forces that have produced international relations of production and technology based upon an exploitive system of one class over another.

Resnick then proceeds to tell a radically different story, albeit a pretty traditional Marxian story (replete with a falling rate of profit and the exploitation of some countries by others), of the history of capitalism and imperialism in the Third World.

And that was the last time Resnick would be permitted to publish his research in a mainstream economics journal. After that—after his publicly becoming identified as a Marxist—the doors of the mainstream wing of the profession were closed to him.

Once the new department was up and running, and considerable progress had been made in the project of rethinking Marxism (with Wolff and in discussion with some of the doctoral students at UMass), Resnick published the results in three key articles:

“The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism in Western Europe” (with Richard Wolff), Review of Radical Political Economics (Fall 1979): 3-22

“Marxist Epistemology” (with Richard Wolff), Social Text (November) 1982: 31-72**

“Classes in Marxian Theory” (with Richard Wolff), Review of Radical Political Economics (Winter 1982), 1-18**

In the theory of “Theory of Transitional Conjunctures,” Resnick and Wolff announced their new understanding of “Marxist social science” and then illustrated their approach with an intervention into the discussion of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. They rely heavily on the work of Louis Althusser to argue that Marx inaugurated a radical break from other social sciences—based on a different epistemology (an alternative to both rationalism and empiricism), a different methodology (based on overdetermination, and thus a rejection of all forms of essentialism, including theoretical humanism and economic determinism), and a specific definition of class (focused on the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor). They then use their rethinking of Marxian theory to identify various ways Marx’s “simple sketch” of the transition from feudalism to capitalism had been interpreted by other Marxists—from Paul Sweezy-Maurice Dobb through Immanuel Wallerstein—and to produce their own interpretation of that transition. Their view is that it is necessary to focus on the contradictions between the feudal class relation (specified in terms of what they refer to as fundamental and subsumed classes) and its social conditions of existence, out of which the conditions of existence of a different class relation—that of capitalism—were produced, which in turn undermined what remained of the feudal class process.

In the Social Text article, Resnick and Wolff explain in more detail what they mean by a specifically Marxist epistemology. They explain how rethinking dialectical materialism in terms of overdetermination rules out the various essentialisms that have characterized the pendulum swings within debates in the Marxist tradition (back and forth between various forms of empiricism and rationalism, and between economic and  humanist determinisms). They then trace the effects of those debates through various key theoreticians, including Marx and Engels, Lenin, Lukács, and Althusser. Their conclusion is that Marxian theory comprises a particular way of “thinking about society, history, and the process of thinking itself: dialectically materialist, anti-essentialist, and with class as its conceptual entry and goal point.”

Then, in “Classes in Marxian Theory,” Resnick and Wolff present the concepts of class they think are central to Marxian theory—concepts that are different both from the traditional Marxist “two-class model” and from more recent efforts to update that model by considering various other classes and class fractions (e.g., peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and the so-called professional-managerial class). Their solution takes the form of fundamental and subsumed classes, which is their way of bringing together the class analyses Marx carries out in volume 1 of Capital with those elaborated in volumes 2 and 3. In their view, Marxian class analysis is based on a double complexity: first, a difference between the production of surplus labor and its distribution; and second, the idea that individuals often occupy multiple, different class positions, both fundamental and subsumed. One of the results is that the “working class” is reconceptualized as a variable alliance of distinct classes, including both laborers who occupy both fundamental and subsumed class positions. Class struggles are similarly rethought: Resnick and Wolff shift the focus from the subject to the object of such conflicts. Thus, class struggles are redefined as collective efforts to change, either quantitatively or qualitatively, the extraction or distribution of surplus labor.

Five years later, Resnick and Wolff published two extraordinary books:

 Economics: Marxism vs. Neoclassical (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)

 Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

The first was a product of and a testament to their commitment and skill as teachers. In it, Resnick and Wolff not only compared neoclassical and Marxian economic theories; they set forth a nondeterministic way of comparing the two theories, based on their entry points and logics, and their different consequences for analyzing economic events and institutions.***

The second has to be counted among the most significant books of twentieth-century Marxian theory. Resnick and Wolff accomplish nothing less than a wholesale rethinking of the basic concepts of the Marxian tradition, from the theory of knowledge through its methodological orientation to class analysis. They start with the basic proposition that “Marxian theory has a distinctive concept of what theory is” and then proceed to elaborate that distinctiveness in terms of both contemporary philosophy (through the work of such figures as Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty) and the Marxian tradition itself (from Marx and Engels through Althusser to Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst). Next, they discuss how Marxists can “construct a knowledge of an ever-changing overdetermined social totality.” During the remainder of the book, they present their rethinking of the concepts of Marxian class analysis, apply those concepts to some of the major arguments in Marx’s Capital, and produce specifically Marxian theories of capitalist enterprises and the state.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance for contemporary Marxism of Knowledge and Class. There is simply no major topic in our understanding and use of Marxian theory today that is not affected by the theoretical self-consciousness and thorough-going antiessentialism demonstrated in Resnick and Wolff’s reinterpretation of Marxian theory.

The tremendous impact of Resnick’s written work can be seen in his own later work as well as in the articles and books published by his former students and colleagues and in the pages of the journal Rethinking Marxism. I know that I could not have made my own modest contributions to the rethinking of Marxian theory without the theoretical inspiration and comradely encouragement provided by Resnick over the years.

 

*The story of those early years at UMass has been told by Donald W. Katzner in At the Edge of Camelot: Debating Economics in Turbulent Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). My review of Katzner’s book can be found here.

**These articles were reprinted in New Departures in Marxian Theory, ed. S. A. Resnick and R. D. Wolff (New York: Routledge, 2008).

***A new edition of that book, Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, with additional chapters on Keynesian theory and recent developments in neoclassical theory (coauthored with Yahya Madra), has been published by MIT Press.

Confessions of an economic hit woman

 

Have you read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man? My students find it to be a real eye-opener.

The latest in a long line of economic hit men—and women—is Condoleeza Rice [ht: sm]:

Khosla Ventures, a venture assistance firm that focuses on sustainability and information technology startups, today announced a strategic relationship with RiceHadleyGates LLC. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her business partners will bring global and domestic insight to Khosla’s portfolio companies, helping them achieve their strategic goals in industries such as technology, energy, security and healthcare.

“RiceHadleyGates shares Khosla Ventures’ vision and passion for helping the next generation of entrepreneurs change the world for the better,” said Condoleezza Rice. “We look forward to putting our network and experience to good use by helping the Khosla companies navigate the tricky waters of political, policy, and regulatory issues around the world.”

In addition to Rice, RiceHadleyGates’ other principals include former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and former State Department official Anja Manuel. They will provide strategic and political context to help Khosla’s portfolio companies make critical business decisions around expanding to markets like China, India and Brazil.

OK, not quite a confession. Rather, just an announcement of business as usual. . .

“Will the New David Livingstone Please Stand Up?”

 

I hadn’t seen this, from 2000, until it was posted yesterday. . .

Videos of the other two talks in the same plenary session, by David Harvey and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, are available here.

Imperial economics

Someday, I’ll turn my various papers on imperial economies into a book. In the meantime, I’ll continue to collect examples of how imperial economics has worked in a country that, for most of its history, has not had a formal empire.

One key feature of the formation of imperial economics in the United States is, as Daniel Immerwahr explains (in his review of Inderjeet Parmar’s book, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power), the role of private philanthropy, such as the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations.

Unelected, unaccountable, and for the most part unchecked, these foundations channeled billions of dollars into positioning the United States as a world power. Immune to the vicissitudes of democratic politics, they functioned as a shadow government, implementing the goals of what C. Wright Mills called the “power elite,” the men of affairs who moved easily from corporate boardrooms to high-ranking government office, often in or around the State Department.

These men had money, often more of it than they knew how to spend. The endowments of the big three foundations—Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford—were drawn from the immense profits of the oil, steel, and auto industries. In part, the founding of these philanthropic institutions was a public relations strategy. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, still the first and second wealthiest men in history, had both been targeted by the press after turning armed strikebreakers on their employees. Henry Ford, the seventh richest, at first was hailed as a new kind of industrialist, deriving his profits from technical and sociological innovation rather than from naked power grabs. But after his men opened fire on a march of laid-off workers at River Rouge in 1932, killing five and seriously injuring nineteen, Ford, too, found himself the object of public scorn. (The “despot of Dearborn” is what Edmund Wilson called him, and that same year Aldous Huxley envisioned a dystopian society run on Fordist principles in Brave New World). Four years later, Ford established his own foundation, to which he and his son, Edsel, bequeathed 90 percent of the Ford Motor Company’s stock. After Ford’s death in 1947, nearly all of the profits of his firm, one of the world’s largest, went to the Ford Foundation. The result was a form of public expenditure for which there was no public oversight.

Two episodes are particularly important: the overthrow of President Sukarno in Indonesia and of President Allende in Chile.

In the 1960s, while Ford’s leaders were laying the groundwork for the War on Poverty in the United States and funding the development of Sesame Street, they were also bankrolling a network of social scientists and economists around the University of Indonesia who would, with Ford’s approval, participate in the campaign to oust Indonesia’s elected but left-leaning President Sukarno. Concerned that Sukarno was too accommodating of Communism, Ford’s experts came to the aid of his rival, General Suharto, who gradually took control of the government over the course of three years, starting in 1965. Suharto would go on to rule the country in a corrupt, autocratic manner for over three decades, but the greatest tragedy of his rule came in the period of his ascent, when his supporters slaughtered some half a million alleged communists.

Students at the University of Indonesia, Ford’s main recipient, played a leading role in the bloodshed and used the university’s campus as their base. Top Ford officials were aware of the massacre, but they reopened their Indonesia office (it had closed briefly  during Sukarno’s presidency, in the face of Communist “agitation”) and sent more funds,  even as many of their experts entered the ranks of the Suharto regime. In one exchange of letters, the foundation’s representative in Indonesia reported both the scale of the massacre and the role played by University of Indonesia students in it to Ford’s president, but celebrated the country’s “atmosphere of sustained holiday-spirit and exhilaration” and opined that Indonesia had never known such freedom. “I’m enjoying the trip. Hope all’s well in New York,” the representative signed off. Ford’s president at the time was McGeorge Bundy, who had come to the post directly after serving as National Security Adviser to Johnson and Kennedy and had been a chief architect of the Vietnam War. There is no evidence that he or any of the other officials at Ford were troubled by the reports from Indonesia. . .

The large foundations also established pockets of sympathetic experts abroad by creating partnerships with universities in the developing world. Here again, money that might have slightly tilted the playing field in the United States had an overpowering effect in poorer nations. The full consequences of this policy could be seen in Chile, where Ford and Rockefeller, along with the US State Department, invested heavily in funding economists starting in the 1950s. Economics was a contested field in Chile due to the popularity of a strain of economic thought known as “dependency theory,” which asserted that the chief cause of Latin America’s underdevelopment was its exploitation by the United States and other prosperous nations. At their mildest, dependency theorists favored blocking the United States out of the region with tariff barriers; at their most extreme they favored Marxist revolution. In the hopes of crowding out dependency theorists, the major foundations began funding centrist and right-wing economists, many of whom pursued doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago, then as now a bastion of free-market thought. In Chile, they were known as the Chicago Boys.

The Chicago Boys’ moment came in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in a right-wing military coup. Ford and Rockefeller–funded economists moved rapidly into the halls of government, taking up posts in the ministry of the economy and in the central bank. Attracted by the prospect of an authoritarian ruler who accepted their policies, faculty members of the University of Chicago, including free-market thinkers Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, sped to Santiago to aid their former students. Hayek was made honorary president of Chile’s Center for Public Studies and Friedman appeared on the government’s television channel to give a lecture on economics. Under the Chicago Boys’ guidance, Pinochet privatized public assets, opened up natural resources to unregulated private exploitation, removed trade barriers, made war on inflation, and dismantled the country’s social security system. The Chilean economy’s initial success under the new policies legitimized the general economic and political approach that within ten years would return to the United States, in the form of the Reagan revolution.

Immerwahr explains that there are deep continuities between the old foundations and the new ones, which continue to be bankrolled by the richest donors.

Many of those donors, such as Bill Gates, number among the richest people on the planet, and the world they seek to bring about is defined by their common values. Whereas the elites who ran Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller in the midcentury  saw themselves as exemplars of scientific, state-centered modernity and designed their projects accordingly, the trustees of the new generation of foundations place a notable emphasis on “entrepreneurship”— the characteristic that defines the super-rich’s sense of themselves today. And so foundations seek to save the public school system with for-profit charter schools and to alleviate global poverty with microfinance loans, even though the benefits of such approaches have been elusive.

Last September, the most powerful direct challenge to domestic inequality in decades came not from the world of philanthropy but from a handful of unfunded activists living in tents in a park in Lower Manhattan. The Occupy Wall Street movement initially commanded surprising public support and appeared as if it might break through a political logjam on such crucial issues as financial regulation, tax equity, and campaign finance reform. And yet, as the occupations continued, some foundation employees—men and women who had spent their entire careers confronting the effects of inequality—found that they were unable to publicly endorse or participate in the movement, for the simple reason that the banks being targeted were among their donors.

Funding, to the degree that it has been offered, has tended to flow in the other direction. The NYPD is able to draw on funds not only from the city but also from the New York City Police Foundation, a nonprofit that purchases special equipment and supplies counterterrorism training to the police. Its board is a collection of heavyweights in real estate, advertising, finance, publishing, health care, and energy that includes both a former homeland security advisor to George W. Bush and Ivanka Trump. Among its top donors are Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, the last of which gave the New York City Police Foundation $4.6 million in money, patrol car laptops, and monitoring software just months before the protests began. “You have a police department that is beholden to a private entity and you end up with a situation where there is absolutely no oversight and no transparency about the funding of government operations,” the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union observed. Money, as Parmar argues, has its own trajectory.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cartoon of the day

 

Special mention

Carl Oglesby RIP

Carl Oglesby was the a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960s. Here’s his obituary.

His speech at a 1965 March on Washington to protest the Vietnam War, “Let Us Shape the Future,” resonates even today, as liberals debate the decade of war since 9/11:

Let’s stare our situation coldly in the face. All of us are born to the colossus of history, our American corporate system – in many ways an awesome organism. There is one fact that describes it: With about five per cent of the world’s people, we consume about half the world’s goods. We take a richness that is in good part not our own, and we put it in our pockets, our garages, our split-levels, our bellies, and our futures.

On the face of it, it is a crime that so few should have so much at the expense of so many. Where is the moral imagination so abused as to call this just? Perhaps many of us feel a bit uneasy in our sleep. We are not, after all, a cruel people. And perhaps we don’t really need this super-dominance that deforms others. But what can we do? The investments are made. The financial ties are established. The plants abroad are built. Our system exists. One is swept up into it. How intolerable – to be born moral, but addicted to a stolen and maybe surplus luxury. Our goodness threatens to become counterfeit before our eyes – unless we change. But change threatens us with uncertainty – at least.

Our problem, then, is to justify this system and give its theft another name – to make kind and moral what is neither, to perform some alchemy with language that will make this injustice seem a most magnanimous gift.

A hard problem. But the Western democracies, in the heyday of their colonial expansionism, produced a hero worthy of the task.

Its name was free enterprise, and its partner was an illiberal liberalism that said to the poor and the dispossessed: What we acquire of your resources we repay in civilization: the white man’s burden. But this was too poetic. So a much more hardheaded theory was produced. This theory said that colonial status is in fact a boon to the colonized. We give them technology and bring them into modem times.

But this deceived no one but ourselves. We were delighted with this new theory. The poor saw in it merely an admission that their claims were irrefutable. They stood up to us, without gratitude. We were shocked – but also confused, for the poor seemed again to be right. How long is it going to be the case, we wondered, that the poor will be right and the rich will be wrong? . . .

We are dealing now with a colossus that does not want to be changed. It will not change itself. It will not cooperate with those who want to change it. Those allies of ours in the Government – are they really our allies? If they are, then they don’t need advice, they need constituencies; they don’t need study groups, they need a movement. And it they are not, then all the more reason for building that movement with the most relentless conviction.

There are people in this country today who are trying to build that movement, who aim at nothing less than a humanist reformation. And the humanist liberals must understand that it is this movement with which their own best hopes are most in tune. We radicals know the same history that you liberals know, and we can understand your occasional cynicism, exasperation, and even distrust. But we ask you to put these aside and help us risk a leap. Help us find enough time for the enormous work that needs doing here. Help us build. Help us shape the future in the name of plain human hope.

Economist of the day

Hobson combines the issues of domestic inequality, lack of domestic aggregate demand (because of insufficient ‘trickle down’ among middle and lower classes) and shows how an aggressive external policy develops to respond to these financial needs.

It’s interesting today because we do seem to have a similar constellation of forces to those that existed in 1902 when Hobson’s book was published. You need control over raw materials, oil and other things – so in that sense aggression is internally driven. External decisions are made in response to internal need. The similarities between these two periods are uncanny. We have a huge concentration of financial assets in the hands of relatively few people. As we know, few people dominate politics because they fund the politicians. The system is driven by the people with money because you cannot do politics unless somebody pays for you to do it. These people contribute millions to the campaigns of both parties and they aren’t doing it out of charity. They want something. When we look at the aggressive policies in Afghanistan or Iraq we must remember that there are people who are benefiting from them – the most obvious are the arms contractors who have made billions of dollars. Hopefully the sequel which Hobson foreshadowed – the struggle of various imperial powers for world dominance – will not lead the world to a repeat of 1914-18.

Isn’t this what it’s been like throughout history?

Yes. The people who go and fight wars, if you look at the US, are often not even US citizens but are trying to get citizenship or good pay, and you have taxpayers funding the war and the rich are benefiting. So the burdens are interestingly distributed. One group of people dies, another group funds it and a third group makes money.

A discussion of J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism, during the course of an interview with Branko Milanovic on “Economic Inequality Between Nations and Peoples”

Chalmers Johnson RIP

Chalmers Johnson, his scholarship, and his role as a public intellectual will be sorely missed. He stood tall, first, as an analyst of state capitalism in Japan and China (e.g., in MITI and the Japanese Miracle and How Asia Got Rich: Japan and the Asian Miracle) and, second, as a persistent critic of U.S. militarism and imperialism, especially in terms of the threats they pose to democracy at home (in the so-called blowback trilogy: Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, The Sorrows of Empire: The Last Days of the American Republic, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic).

Here are some obituaries: Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the Washington Note.

This is from the last essay he published on Tomdispatch:

Thirty-five years from now, America’s official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run, as we come face-to-face with, if not necessarily to terms with, our aging infrastructure, declining international clout, and sagging economy. It may, for all we know, still be Hollywood’s century decades from now, and so we may still make waves on the cultural scene, just as Britain did in the 1960s with the Beatles and Twiggy. Tourists will undoubtedly still visit some of our natural wonders and perhaps a few of our less scruffy cities, partly because the dollar-exchange rate is likely to be in their favor.

If, however, we were to dismantle our empire of military bases and redirect our economy toward productive, instead of destructive, industries; if we maintained our volunteer armed forces primarily to defend our own shores (and perhaps to be used at the behest of the United Nations); if we began to invest in our infrastructure, education, health care, and savings, then we might have a chance to reinvent ourselves as a productive, normal nation. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening. Peering into that foggy future, I simply can’t imagine the U.S. dismantling its empire voluntarily, which doesn’t mean that, like all sets of imperial garrisons, our bases won’t go someday.

Instead, I foresee the U.S. drifting along, much as the Obama administration seems to be drifting along in the war in Afghanistan. The common talk among economists today is that high unemployment may linger for another decade.  Add in low investment and depressed spending (except perhaps by the government) and I fear T.S. Eliot had it right when he wrote: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

Agro-imperialism

The NY Times reports on the current global land grab: the buying up of farm land in impoverished nations by wealthy corporations and governments at discount prices. The article correctly focuses on the politics of land and hunger. The problem is, all the examples are of Arab private investors’ and governments’ purchasing land (with the promise of higher-yield technologies and more jobs) in Africa. The only reference to Brazil is contained in the outrageous statements by Paul Collier:

Last fall, Paul Collier of Oxford University, an influential voice on issues of world poverty, published a provocative article in Foreign Affairs in which he argued that a “middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture” has clouded the African development debate with “romanticism.” Approvingly citing the example of Brazil — where masses of indigenous landholders were displaced in favor of large-scale farms — Collier concluded that “to ignore commercial agriculture as a force for rural development and enhanced food supply is surely ideological.”

Equally outrageous are the views expressed by Susan Payne, the chief executive of Emergent Asset Management:

“Africa is the final frontier,” Payne told me after the conference. “It’s the one continent that remains relatively unexploited.” Emergent’s African Agricultural Land Fund, started last year, is investing several hundred million dollars into commercial farms around the continent. Africa may be known for decrepit infrastructure and corrupt governments — problems that are being steadily alleviated, Payne argues — but land and labor come so cheaply there that she calculates the risks are worthwhile.

So, here we have 2 so-called experts, one arguing that the land grab in Brazil has been a positive force for rural development, the other arguing that Africa has not yet been exploited. There’s no mention of the local communities and small landholding peasants that are being expropriated, with the only prospect for displaced peoples to either migrate to cities or stay on as cheap proletarian labor for agroindustrial enterprises. And no mention that this is the second “scramble for Africa,” that colonialism and postcolonialism have had the effect of creating  cheap land and labor.

Last year, Jacques Diouf, the head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, warned

that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of “neo-colonialism”, with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.

Websites tracking these land deals include the international land coalition and GRAIN. A good background report, “The Great Land Grab: Rush for World’s Farmland Threatens Food Security for the Poor,” is available from the Oakland Institute.