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Dark PR: How corporate disinformation harms our health and the environment
USD $ 32.00“Think global, act local!” “Be the change you want to see in the world!” “Every little bit counts!” We can all get on board with such sentiments, right? That, of course, is exactly what corporate spin-masters across the world are banking on. By weaponizing such seemingly innocuous yet powerful narratives, change becomes a matter of personal choice, something each of us must slave away at day by day: switching off lightbulbs to save the environment or exercising to shed the weight we’ve gained from consuming junk food. All the while, the corporate welfare tap continues to flow, with over $6 trillion worth of annual subsidies dished out to industries that directly contribute to the deaths of over 5.5 million people each year through diabetes, road deaths, global warming, and other crises. But such framing is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corporate disinformation playbook. This playbook is the dark matter of activist work: the unseeable element shaping harmful spin across all issues. It has never been reverse engineered – until now.
In Dark PR, Grant Ennis – drawing on his decades of experience working in the environmental, philanthropy, and public health sectors – reveals exactly how multinationals go about hoodwinking and manipulating us. In doing so, he lifts the lid on the nine devious frames contained within the cross-industry corporate disinformation playbook: through denialism, normalization, victim-blaming, multifactorialism, and a variety of other tried-and-tested tactics, corporations divert citizens’ attention away from the real causes of global problems, leading them into counter-productive blind-alley “solutions” like ethical consumerism and divestment. Sadly, though, buying Fair Trade chocolate has not and never will save the world. Only by collectively organizing to lobby our governments can we break this destructive cycle of lies and deadly incentives, and reclaim control of our lives.
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The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse
USD $ 32.00The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse: Inspired by the revolutionary legacy of Herbert Marcuse’s social and political philosophy, this volume appeals to the energies of those engaged in a wide range of contemporary social justice struggles: ecosocialism, antiracism, the women’s movement, LGBTQ rights, and antiwar forces.
Marcuse argued that U.S.-led globalized capitalism represented the irrational perfection of waste and the degradation of the earth, resurgent sexism, racism, bigoted nationalism, and warlike patriotism. The intensification of these regressive political tendencies today must be countered, and this can be best accomplished through radical collaboration around an agenda recognizing the basic economic and political needs of diverse subaltern communities. From Marcuse’s perspective, the world needs a strategy to go on the offensive for the real changes that can extend race and gender equality, labor freedom, economic abundance, leisure, communal well-being and peace. Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” captured the Sixties’ spirit of rebelliousness which expressed a visceral repugnance at the totality of the efficiently functioning social order of advanced industrial society. “The whole thing is outdated, crooked, humiliating. . . it does not have to be: one can live differently . . . as the ‘leap’ into a qualitatively different stage of history, of civilization, where human beings, in solidarity, develop their own needs and faculties.”
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Agroecología Abolicionista, Soberanía Alimentaria y Prevención de Pandemias
Un sistema alimentario agroecológico no consiste más acerca de alimentos orgánicos que la abolición se refiere a abrir la puerta de una prisión. En este ensayo vital, Maywa Montenegro de Wit entrelaza ideas provenientes de las literaturas políticas y ecológicas más importantes de finales del siglo XX y comienzos del XXI. La pandemia proporciona un foco para estas dos fuentes de iluminación, pero la luz brillante que proviene de unir estas disciplinas brillará mucho después de que pase la sombra de la Covid-19. —Raj Patel, autor de Stuffed and Starved [Relleno y famélico].
El folleto resuena con la pregunta: ¿reforma o transformación? Pregunta: ¿mitigaremos y adaptaremos o revisaremos y cambiaremos nuestros imaginarios? Se nos ha dado un andamio para abordar el bastión del colonialismo y la colonialidad y para reconstruir los sistemas que ya han empujado su rodilla sobre los sistemas alimentarios y socioeconómicos que ya se estaban sofocando. Es hora de librarse de una pesadilla construida deliberadamente. – Nnimmo Bassey, autor de To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa [El cocinar un Continente: Extracción Destructiva y Crisis Climática en África] y fundador de Health of Mother Earth Foundation [Fundación Salud de la Madre Tierra].
La COVID-19 y otros brotes zoonóticos como el ébola son ilustrativos de las complejas interacciones entre la deforestación, la pérdida de biodiversidad, la destrucción del ecosistema y la salud y seguridad humanas. Estos cambios son impulsados principalmente por la agricultura industrial y el sistema alimentario globalizados, respaldados por el ilógico y destructivo capitalismo racial. … Montenegro de Wit presenta argumentos convincentes a favor de cambios hacia sistemas agroecológicos diversificados que reconozcan las complejas interconexiones entre la salud humana y animal, entre las plantas y nuestro medio ambiente y futuro compartidos. De hecho, abordar las pandemias de manera sistémica no puede desvincularse de la construcción de economías y sistemas alimentarios que se basan en las necesidades de las personas, en particular de los pequeños agricultores, y de los ecosistemas prósperos. Para lograrlo, debemos rechazar y prohibir rotundamente la ecocida ilógica de la mercantilización, la financialización y el extractivismo, como fuerzas impulsoras de las fortunas y los destinos humanos y ecológicos. … El fortalecimiento de los movimientos sociales a nivel local es indispensable para forzar la ruta de África hacia un liderazgo político eficaz y democrático. Se necesita una clara ruptura, dejando atrás intervenciones a favor de un desarrollo ahistórico y tecnicista, donde la tecnología y la productividad se plantean como problemas y soluciones, hacia un replanteamiento urgente y drástico para hacer frente a las crisis sistémicas convergentes que enfrentamos hoy.
– Mariam Mayet, directora ejecutiva del African Centre for Biodiversity [Centro Africano para la Biodiversidad]
COVID-19 ha expuesto la naturaleza racializada de los sistemas alimentarios, pero también potencialmente otorga oportunidades para construir de nuevo. Maywa Montenegro explora una serie de averías, desde cadenas de suministro fracturadas hasta infecciones incontroladas entre trabajadores de alimentos esenciales, entre comunidades negras, marrones e indígenas atravesadas por el virus a lo largo de viejos surcos de opresión racial y de clase.
Ella rastrea los orígenes probables de COVID-19 a los sitios de derrame forjados por la expansión agroindustrial en regiones boscosas donde los patógenos brotan libres e infectan a los humanos. La agricultura animal industrial impulsa estos cambios ecológicos que incuban futuros brotes. Las pandemias tienen sus raíces en la separación violenta de las comunidades de sus territorios, semillas, conocimiento y riqueza. El racismo permite tal robo como fundamental para la expansión capitalista.
Para hacer frente a las pandemias y las injusticias alimentarias, Montenegro pide una agroecología abolicionista. Ninguna alternativa anticapitalista puede ignorar el racismo que es central para el sistema alimentario transnacional. Académicos como Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore y Mariame Kaba han argumentado que aunque la abolición se ve con frecuencia como una estrategia de oposición, para erradicar, por ejemplo, las prisiones y la policía, la abolición es igualmente proposicional. Una agroecología abolicionista abre múltiples posibilidades que responden a las exigencias de un planeta pandémico: no hay una “normalidad” a la que podamos regresar con seguridad.
Esta es una traducción al español de Abolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty and Pandemic Prevention
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Racism, Capitalism, and COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the deep structural problems affecting nonwhite racialized workers in the core and periphery. Yet, many social scientific analyses of the global political economy, at least in the pre-COVID era, are race neutral or willfully indifferent to the persistent racial pattern of global inequalities. This piece seeks to understand how the unremitting super-exploitation of Black and other nonwhite racialized labor in the core and the periphery persisted throughout the COVID-19 crisis through the lens of Black radical scholarship on racism and capitalism. It historicizes the pandemic within the long arc of racist capitalist labor super-exploitation at the birth of capitalism and in its subsequent unfolding. It also shows the mechanisms by which COVID-19 has exacerbated the already existing, structural racial and colonial inequalities that undergird the global economy. White capital and European and North American states have deemed Black and other nonwhite racialized labor “essential” to maintaining profits and called upon these workers both within North America and Europe and in the global periphery to ensure continued production and profits in almost every realm. These workers were seen as essential but expendable; compelling them to continue laboring during the deadly pandemic increased the precarity and danger they faced and exacerbated racial and economic inequalities both within and between countries. At the same time, neoliberal racist states are further marginalizing these very workers by excluding them from much needed social protections to cope with the impacts of COVID-19 on their health, income, and overall well-being. The piece also illuminates why, despite the dire social and economic conditions threatening the lives and livelihoods of workers writ large, white workers continue to refuse to join a multiracial antiracist movement for liberation from imperial and racial capitalist exploitation. The author ends by reflecting on what it means to “return to normal” within the architecture of racial capitalism and the pursuit of a different path to justice and freedom.
See also our interview with Zophia Edwards and David Austin.
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Moving Beyond Capitalist Agriculture: Could Agroecology Prevent Further Pandemics?
Moving Beyond Capitalist Agriculture is born out of the coordination between scholars and community organizers and it should be shared widely. The group behind it, the Pandemic Research for the People, is an expression of collective wisdom and necessary unease. In fact, organization and solidarity are two values to be cherished in this moment of multiple crises. COVID-19 is a neoliberal disease and agroecology that frees the land and people of greed and towards food sovereignty is the pathway out of this mess. — Saulo Araujo, US Friends of the Landless Workers Movement
If you want to know more about the connections between racial capitalism, industrial agriculture, environmental destruction, and epidemics and pandemics, then this is a great place to start. But this pamphlet is more than just an analysis of the immense problems generated by capitalism. More importantly, this pamphlet represents an attempt to overcome this system and to develop revolutionary alternatives to it. Rather than falling into the tempting illusion of reform, the authors of these texts give invaluable insights into how we might support and develop revolutionary forms of agro-ecology that can sustain and reproduce life outside of the racial capitalist machine that is destroying it.” — Arturo Castillon, co-author, The Revolutionary Meaning of the George Floyd Uprising
Increasingly threatening climate disaster coinciding with a pandemic has tragically illustrated that the world doesn’t have the luxury of dealing with one crisis at a time – and capitalist agriculture is at the root of both. The authors show convincingly that there is a better way: one that’s based on self-determination and building on human cooperation, not competition. This publication makes a strong case for agroecology as a crucial part of a future that puts people above profit; a future that assures people`s health by allowing planetary health to flourish. It will bring clarity to everyone trying to understand how the next pandemic could be averted whilst building a more just world — Vijoleta Gordeljević, Health economist and environmental health policy expert, People’s Health Movement.
Pathogens repeatedly are emerging from a global agrifood system rooted in inequality, labor exploitation, and unfettered extractivism by which communities are robbed of their natural and social resources. A crisis-prone economic system that prioritizes production for profit over meeting human needs and ecological preservation is organized around intense monocultural production that, along the way, allows the deadliest of diseases to emerge. The Pandemic Research for the People (PReP) focuses on how agriculture might be reimagined as the kind of community-wide intervention that could stop coronaviruses and other pathogens from emerging in the first place. We address how mainstream science supports the same political and economic systems that helped produce the pandemic. Then we introduce agroecology, an environmentalism of the peasantry, the poor, and indigenous, long in practice, that treats agriculture as a part of the ecology out of which humanity grows its food. Agroecology—a science, movement, and practice—combines ecological science, indigenous and peasant knowledges, and social movements for food and territorial sovereignty to achieve environmentally just food systems.
Peasant- and indigenous-led agroecology is uniquely positioned to limit the spread of zoonotic viruses: Post-capitalist agroecology champions the indigenous and smallholders who protect agricultural biodiversity. A diverse agroecological matrix of farm plots, agroforestry, and grazing lands all embedded within a forest can conserve animal biodiversity in the landscape. Agricultural biodiversity can make it more difficult for zoonotic diseases to prevail. Such a mode of conservation also takes into account the economic and social conditions of people currently tending the land, rather than a conservation that uproots people to foster the private accumulation of capital.
Contents: Introductory note / Globalized food systems, structural inequality, and COVID-19 / What is mutual aid? A COVID-19 Primer / Can agroecology stop COVID-21, -22, and -23? / Moving Beyond Capitalist Agriculture
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Abolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty and Pandemic Prevention
COVID-19 has exposed the racialized nature of food systems, but also potentially grants opportunities to build anew. Maywa Montenegro explores a series of breakdowns, from fractured supply chains to uncontrolled infection among essential food workers, among Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities scythed through by the virus along old grooves of race and class oppression.
She traces the likely origins of COVID-19 to spillover sites forged by agroindustrial expansion into forested regions where pathogens spring free and infect humans. Industrial animal agriculture drives these ecological changes that incubate future outbreaks. Pandemics have their roots in the violent separation of communities from their territories, seeds, knowledge and wealth. Racism enables such theft as fundamental to capitalist expansion.
To tackle pandemics and food injustices, Montenegro calls for an abolitionist agroecology. No anti-capitalist alternative can ignore the racism that is central to transnational food system. Scholars including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba have argued that although abolition is frequently seen as an oppositional strategy — to eradicate, for example, prisons and police — abolition is equally propositional. An abolitionist agroecology cracks open multiple possibilities that respond to the exigencies of a pandemic planet — there is no ‘normal’ to which we can safely return.
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We Rise for Our Land: Land Struggles and Repression in Southern Africa
By chronicling rural people’s struggles across diverse contexts, this collection gives us some signposts of emancipatory politics in the African countryside. Accessible and theoretically grounded, this exciting collection by leading African scholar-activists chronicles rural people’s struggles, from resistance to alternatives. Activists and scholars engaged with rural struggles need to read this book. —Ruth Hall, professor, Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
A remarkable, well-argued and theoretically diverse collection of essays on the land question in Southern Africa, a topic as old as colonialism and as new as the newest impositions of global capitalism. Land struggles and resistance in a new and powerful light.
— Boaventura de Sousa Santos, author of The End of the Cognitive Empire, 2018This book makes a powerful contribution to the existing and growing literature on land and agrarian questions in southern Africa. Empirically rich… the book is essential reading for scholars, intellectuals, students and activists involved in the everyday struggles and responses of those communities who are directly affected by neoliberal policies. Highly recommended. —Lungisile Ntsebeza, Emeritus Professor in African Studies and Sociology in the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town.
Co-publisher: Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies
In recent years southern Africa has aroused the interest of domestic and foreign investors targeting several sectors. The agrarian and extractive capital has been the most penetrating in the countryside, causing land conflicts, displacement of local peasant communities and in worse cases, deaths. Being mostly neoliberally oriented, SADC states have positioned themselves in favour of capital. This collusion results in State measures that are hostile to the peasantry of their countries. The measures taken by the States, both in policies and in repressive actions, are endorsed by of high-level government officials, Ministers, Presidents, Kings and traditional Chiefs. As far as traditional chiefs are concerned, even in situations where the presence of capital is dangerous, ‘feudal’-type power relations prevail, oppressing mainly young people and women.
The peasantry and rural people in general have not, however, been passive in this process. Alone or in alliance with non-governmental organizations and activists, they have positioned themselves strongly against such dynamics and have raised their voices questioning developmentalist logics that are imposed on them, but that take away their means of production and violate their rights. In fact, resistance movements to capital are taking place throughout the region, even if the response to this has been repression by the states.
This book, which takes a scholar-activist stance, is written by authors, men and women, who critically study the dynamics of agrarian and extractive capital in southern Africa. In their academic and activist work, they seek to bring useful theoretical, conceptual and practical contributions to the struggles of agrarian and rural movements that represent the ‘subalternised’ rural and urban people. The book brings contributions in forms of chapters from DRC, Namibia, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, eSwatini (Swaziland), Mozambique, and Madagascar.
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Revolución Rinky-Dink: Yendo Más Allá del Capitalismo Negando Consentimiento, y Promoviendo Construcciones Creativas y Destrucciones Creativas
Suggested Price: USD $ 4.99Este panfleto aborda la pregunta: ¿cómo podemos pasar de A a B, del capitalismo al poscapitalismo? La revolución de Rinky-dink involucra acciones e inacciones que son fáciles, seguras, mundanas, sin glamour y factibles dentro de la vida de cada persona.
Howard Waitzkin presenta una intervención clara y directa para el cambio revolucionario en el sistema económico capitalista global. Cubre mucho terreno, con sofisticación, mientras mantiene la discusión en tierra. Su enfoque en las formas de facilitar un desafío al capital y construir una mayor transformación revolucionaria es crucial en esta coyuntura histórica. Esta discusión sobre construcciones creativas y destrucciones creativas es particularmente útil.
— Brett Clark, profesor de sociología de la Universidad de Utah y autor De El Robo De La Naturaleza: Capitalismo Y Grieta Ecológica, The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and Ecological Rift en inglés.
El fin del capitalismo es posible. Waitzkin nos lleva un paso más allá en el proceso creativo para esta transformación. A través de ejemplos específicos de grupos organizados dentro de los Estados Unidos y en el extranjero, este trabajo constituye una guía práctica para todos. Waitzkin alienta nuestra creatividad para actos organizados y seguros además de omisiones para trascender el capitalismo.
— Nylca J. Munoz Sosa, abogada, líder de salud pública y activista centrada en la justicia sanitaria y la descolonización en Puerto Rico.
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The great climate robbery: How the food system drives climate change and what we can do about it
USD $ 25.99The industrial food system is a major driver of climate change. Food sovereignty is critical to any lasting and just solution. The Great Climate Robbery shows readers how the industrial food system causes climate change, how food and agribusiness corporations are getting away with it and what can be done to turn things around.
