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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Categories: | Agriculture & Food, Agroecology, COVID-19, Development, Dialectics, Environment, Food Sovereignty, Health, Imperialism, Leftism, Pamphlets, Philosophy, Political Science, Thinking Freedom |
Book Format | Print Book, PDF |
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Dark PR: How corporate disinformation harms our health and the environment
“A real tour de force. Bringing together road safety, food, and global warming makes the nefarious patterns clear. Dark PR will help students and public health advocates recognize what they are up against as they confront the commercial determinants of health so we can make social justice real.”
– Dr. Lori Dorfman, Director, Berkeley Media Studies Group and Adjunct Professor, University of California, Berkeley“The struggle for health is a struggle against powerful vested interests – the corporations that produce harmful commodities, that damage our environment, and that trample over human rights. Yet, in so much of what we do they remain invisible, even though they have often succeeded in framing the narrative that defines and constrains our responses. Grant Ennis has shone a light on these shadowy forces and challenged us to take them on by organising and demanding change.”
– Dr. Martin McKee CBE, Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Past President, European Public Health Association, Author of Issues in Public Health: Challenges for the 21st Century“We know a lot (and are learning more all the time) about how the tobacco and fossil fuel industries engage in deception, and manipulate policymakers and the public. Dark PR takes us down many different and new byways to explore the “Devious Frames” used by many harmful industries. It makes good use of less well-known examples too, while maintaining a firm grip on the evidence. Dark PR is a highly readable, compelling, and often-alarming account of the complex corporate systems which drive disinformation and their associated harms.”
– Dr. Mark Petticrew, Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Director of the Public Health Research Consortium, Author of Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide“This book is a masterpiece of demystification. Ennis examines every given wisdom in public health and related fields as he reveals how capitalist corporations frame the problems that we perceive and the solutions that we advocate. Any efforts to change these conditions must recognize the importance of corporate framing. Now that this book illuminates our situation so clearly, the next steps focus on the revolutionary transformation of capitalism itself, and moving beyond the capitalist state that protects the corporative framing of what is and what must be done.”
– Dr. Howard Waitzkin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of New Mexico, Author of Social Medicine and the Coming Transformation“People who care about health and sustainability already know that consumerism defeats both. But the corporations that sell us consumerism also sell us all the most conspicuous “solutions” to it – responses that just keep the consumerist treadmill turning. As Grant Ennis reveals, they win both ways. Through diverse examples, Ennis shows us how the treadmill turns and how the usual responses are part of its mechanism. Ennis shows us how to spot ineffective responses so that effective, independent opposition can escape the treadmill, organize and act. Conscientious consumption, the search for corporate enemies, and atomized advocacy cannot avail, but Ennis also shows us what actually has worked. The stakes could not be higher. Dark PR is a refreshing and revealing departure from appeals to conscience, demonization of villains, misplaced optimism, and expressions of hopelessness. It is therefore a necessary and important book.”
– Dr. Peter Norton, Associate Professor, University of Virginia, Author of Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving“Ever wondered how big oil has subverted efforts to cut global warming? Or how the tobacco industry thwarted attempts to ban smoking? Grant Ennis reveals how Dark PR enables big business to rig the political debate. A thought-provoking book.”
– Mick Hamer, Founding Director of Transport2000, Author of Wheels Within Wheels: A Study of the Road Lobby“In public health, we were hoping for a better world after the COVID-19 pandemic. Corporations and their invisible hands – public relations agencies – nevertheless took the opportunity to double their efforts to sell us unhealthy commodities. So much so that disinformation and misinformation are now more than ever part of our daily lives. In his book, Grant Ennis leads us through these practices that shape our modern world. A book to put in all hands!”
– Dr. Mélissa Mialon, Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin, Author of Big Food & Company: How the pursuit of profit at all costs undermines our health“It would be an under-statement to say that this is a hugely important book. It is. It shines a very bright light into some very dark corners and exposes the culpability of corporations, governments and economic systems in promoting products that damage our health and do so to make huge profits at the expense of a global health crisis, a crisis defined by 153 million deaths every 25 years. It must be read and must be followed by citizen action and political transformation.”
– Dr. John Whitelegg, Professor, Centre for Mobility Culture, Kassel, Germany, Author of Critical Mass: Transport, Environment and Society in the Twenty-first Century“Dark PR is an enjoyable read. Importantly, it brings together a strong analytical view on many of the mechanisms critical to understanding transport and road injury.”
– Dr. Marco te Brömmelstroet, Professor, University of Amsterdam, Author of Movement: How to take back our streets and transform our lives“Grant Ennis shines a strong light on ‘dark PR‘. In the process, some truly exploitative tactics of the PR industry are exposed, which have huge implications for people’s health and wellbeing – and not before time.”
– Dr. Deborah Lupton, Professor, University of New South Wales, Centre for Social Research in Health, Author of The Face Mask In COVID Times: A Sociomaterial Analysis“The health of our communities is in no small part determined by the economic interests of multinational corporations that have a duty to their shareholders to maximise profit from sales. Governments across the world and of all shades have pursued public health policies rested on the notion of personal responsibility, this has delayed any product reform or industry regulation. The methods used have been well documented but in Dark PR Grant Ennis demonstrates how the whole narrative into which health policy is set is a construction of those very industries that harm us, and wilfuly designed to delay, denude or avoid regulation. This happens across multiple industries, we know it was invented by the tobacco industry but perfected by many others. Ennis highlights how this process works in wonderful detail setting out the strategies used, pointing us to counter strategies and an organising framework. For anyone interested in the commercial determinants of health, at any level, this is an essential read.”
– Greg Fell, Director of Public Health in Sheffield, President, Association of Directors of Public Health“Our interlacing health, environmental, and climate crises often seem overwhelming, even insurmountable. The gift Grant Ennis provides each of us is an unveiling of the corporate capitalist hegemony over our health and our biosphere. Ennis fixes his analytic powers on the insidious ways government-backed corporations shape how our culture normalizes and problematizes the pressing social and environmental challenges of our day. From his deep investigation of corporate deflection and blame tactics, to his sharp treatise on citizen activism and social movements, Ennis has written both an indictment of the corporate-strangled status quo and an invocation for everyone to transcend the vote by organizing to co-create a better society. A phenomenal and motivating book.”
– Seth LaJeunesse, Assistant Director, National Center for Safe Routes to School, UNC Highway Safety Research Center, Author of Factors and Frames That Shape Public Discourse Around Road User Safety“This book encourages readers to critically re-examine the information they have been given about key issues affecting the wellbeing of communities and their environment. Ennis provides frameworks that would be helpful in doing this in a methodical and analytical way. Whether you agree with his insights or not, they will get you thinking and reexamining your assumptions, which is always stimulating.”
– Dr. Sharon Beder, Professor, University of Wollongong, Author of Global Spin and This Little Kiddy Went to Market“Painstakingly researched and full of real-world evidence, Dark PR shines light on how seemingly innocuous and well-established messages (like “save energy” or “drive safe” or “eat healthy”) have long been systematically co-opted and weaponised by private corporations – to further their agenda, establish ‘alternative facts,’ and diffuse democratic citizen action towards a better world. By chronicling these tactics as Devious Frames, Ennis’s investigation serves as a powerful reminder to always be on guard and critically look at who exactly benefits from our governments’ subsidies, our public policies, and the taxes we pay.”
– Nikhil Chaudhary, Cities Advisor, European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s Climate Knowledge Innovation Community (EIT Climate-KIC), Co-Founder and Board Trustee, Equal Streets“This is a blockbuster of a book. Ennis uses his experience as an academic and public health programme organiser to analyse the policies exacerbating climate change and diet-related obesity, as well as road deaths. It is not just a blast at the corporations behind the problems, but a study of the structures involved in how things have become the way they are: he sets out a typology of ways in which problems are framed, showing how the cultural assumptions we share work against addressing many grave problems societies face. This book avoids conspiracy theorizing, as he says: “…most of the problems we face result not from the absence of regulation, but from political structures designed to benefit powerful actors. These structures are not held in place by a cabal of evildoers; rather, they are maintained through incentives that lead mostly indifferent stakeholders to carry out innumerable small bad acts.” Finally, Ennis puts forward strategies to actually change the issues he has outlined. Will they work? I don’t know – but I suggest that anybody seriously concerned with the major problems facing humanity that he discusses should read this book and carefully consider his arguments.”
– Dr. Robert Davis, Chair of the Road Danger Reduction Forum (UK) and author of Death on the Streets: Cars and the mythology of road safety.“Across automobile, oil and food industries, Grant Ennis itemises and adds detail to what so many people in consumer protection, public health, wellbeing and liveability have felt for some time. And that is the enormous hold corporates have over government and public thinking and the millions they are prepared to spend to get their way. He categorises the ways in which corporates both singularly and collectively condition our governments to support their aims against public benefit and he lifts the lid on the dark tactics and techniques used. This book will empower us all to see through their greed and demand better of our politicians.”
– Rod King, Founder & Campaign Director, 20’s Plenty for Us“For so many of us across communities we understand how critical it is that we prioritise the things that really matter most – the long term health and wellbeing of all our children, the ecosystems that sustain us, the care we have for each other. While we collectively know that it makes absolute sense to prioritise these things, re-lay the tracks we are on, many of us struggle to understand who has the most power, the most responsibility to make changes that would most effectively do so, and the barriers we must pull down. Books, stories and narratives like Dark PR help explain how people in some industries shape the narratives and stories in our society with the goal of undermining people’s understanding and reasoning about the causes of the collective problems we face and the solutions that will make the biggest difference. Books like Dark PR are critical to providing clarity to the public, advocates, and decision makers about how change can and does happen. The importance of rejecting the corrosive narratives spread by people in damaging and harmful industries that we are simply and only consumers. and the power in building our own more meaningful stories about how we, and our decision makers can act together in our role as citizens to prioritise what really matters most.”
– Dr. Jess Berentson-Shaw, Author of A Matter of Fact: Talking truth in a post truth world.“This could be a book that changes the world, or even ‘saves the world.’ That’s a big call, but Dark PR has convinced me that we (cities and society) must change our strategies for dealing with our challenges, especially global warming.”
– Dr. Paul Tranter, Honorary Associate Professor, UNSW Canberra, Author of Slow Cities: Conquering our Speed Addiction for Health and Sustainability“This book is excellent. I kept nodding while reading it. And saying “yes, exactly” out loud. So well-articulated. I particularly love the way Grant describes Silver Boomerangs and Magic as harmful, when they divert effort from more urgent policy shifts. This is exactly my problem with electric cars. Not evil of themselves. Pretty darned cool actually. And that’s the problem. I hear over and over that policy makers say we need a ‘balanced’ approach and that electric cars are ‘part of the solution’. There’s a reason car companies are drooling all over themselves to promote electric cars. They’re a huge (literally huge) shiny (literally shiny) excuse to keep the consumption wheels (literally) spinning. Intentionally duping humans to believe we can drive and pave and park our way out of planetary crises. Let’s not be slaves to corporate PR any more. This book is a brilliant lesson in why and how we need to un-dupe our collective selves.”
– Dr. Bridget Doran, MRCagney“Reading [Dark PR] was very instructive, I enjoyed it … Framing, counterframing, organising, individual vs structural … Well done!”
– Dr. Nason Maani, University of Edinburgh and Author of The Commercial Determinants of Health“Grant Ennis’s [Dark PR is] completely perspective-altering … A truly compelling documentation and critique of power, offering insightful analyses of the public relations tactics often used (by corporations) to undermine collective organizing and demand for meaningful responses to global and local public health, safety, environmental, and general well-being challenges. Particularly timely considering the accelerating climate and ecological crises.”
– Dr. Festival Godwin Boateng“Much enjoyed reading this book… one of those books with the potential to change the way you see the world – for the better. With a special focus on global warming, unhealthy food environments and car dependence, it’s a brilliant articulation of the corporate framings which, seemingly forever, are stalling our progress towards a socially and environmentally just world. In addition to equipping us with the knowledge of how these ‘dark and devious frames’ work and how we unwittingly help them with some of our well meaning practices, the book shows us the way forward. Thank you for taking the time to write this book, Grant Ennis, it’s a gift to us all.”
– Dr. Hulya Gilbert, Lecturer at La Trobe University“If you are looking for activism at the national level, we have to take into consideration the reality and understand the nuance of corporate influence and continued massive government subsidies bestowed on Motordom. For this, I highly recommend the book Dark PR by Grant Ennis.”
– John Simmerman, Active Towns“[Dark PR is very relevant] not just alcohol policy but tobacco, cannabis, gaming…”
– Dr. Raymond Walley, Vice President of the European Doctors Association“Could not agree more [that Dark PR is very relevant for those working in alcohol policy]. It’s a great read and a reminder to focus on the big stuff that will make a difference.”
– Elinor Jayne, Director, Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (SHAAP)“Provocative … I encourage everybody to pick up a copy…. A very helpful tool for advocates”
– Doug Gordon, Host, Host of the War on Cars Podcast“Grant Ennis exposes corporate tactics in “Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment,” highlighting how industries maintain a harmful status quo. Valuable insights for advocates.”
– California Bicycle Coalition“We all know car culture distorts the way we talk about the world, but I don’t know if I’d ever seen a really thorough accounting of how that happens, exactly, until I read Grant Ennis’s book… and now I can’t stop seeing corporate spin everywhere.”
– Kea Wilson, StreetsBlogUSA“Grant Ennis’ call for action on global health crises challenges perceived notions of corporate propaganda, government culpability, and political organization. Dark PR asks us to reconsider the public discourses we see on key issues such as global warming, obesity, and road deaths. Ennis systematically reveals the ways in which corporations mislead, misdirect, and lie to protect their interests. … Ennis is gentle but firm in discussing how even well-intentioned people unwillingly or unknowingly play into corporate interests. … the incensed writing builds towards a powerful call to action. The path to genuine political change is treacherous. The devious frames utilized by corporations to suppress activism often plays on individualism and consumerism. The only way forward is organized, collective, and policy-focused action. Dark PR swings between carefully researched yet devastating facts and determined aspirations for a healthier collaborative future.”
– Mayaluna Bierlich, Montreal Review of Books“A terrific book!”
– Professor Samantha Thomas, Deakin University“In this challenging but fascinating read, Ennis utterly rejects the received wisdom that if enough individuals change their behaviour, we can change the world. For Ennis, “be the change you want to see in the world” is, at best, a distraction. Instead, he argues that we need to direct all our attention and energy to attacking the perverse incentives of government subsidies and corporate welfare.”
– Dr. Margaret Steele, University College Cork“Grant Ennis has a fantastic take on [the diabetes pandemic] in his book Dark PR. I highly recommend it.”
– Dr. Marek Vanzura, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, George Mason University“Excellent”
– Melissa & Chris Bruntlett, Authors of Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality & Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives“Dark PR is a very powerful read and excellent commentary also on alcohol industry which uses very similar techniques to frame discussion on alcohol and thwart the evidenced based policy measures which are known to reduce harm from alcohol.”
– Dr. Sheila Gilheany, CEO, Alcohol Action Ireland“One of the best books I read last year.”
– Martina Mullin, Health Promotion Officer at Trinity College Dublin“For all of us who are working on inflammation and chronic illness, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome and food, [Dark PR] by Grant Ennis is a must read!”
– Dr. Ioannis Zabetakis, University of Limerick -
Oil Politics: Echoes of Ecological Wars
The essays here contribute to developing and deepening an understanding of the ecological challenges ravaging Nigeria, Africa and our world today. They illustrate the global nature of these terrors. These essays are not meant just to enable for coffee table chatter: they are intended as calls to action, as a means of encouraging others facing similar threats to share their experiences.
Set out in seven sections, this book of 54 essays deals with deep ecological changes taking place primarily in Nigeria but with clear linkages to changes elsewhere in the world. The essays are laid out with an undergird of concerns that characterise the author’s approach to human rights and environmental justice advocacy. The first section rightly presents broad spectrum ecological wars manifesting through disappearing trees, spreading desertification, floods, gas flaring and false climate solutions.
You can read this book online for free.
The second section zeroes in on the different types of violence that pervade the oil fields of the Niger Delta and draws out the divisive power of crude oil by holding up Sudan as a country divided by oil and which has created a myriad of fissures in Nigeria. The exploitation of crude oil sucks not just the crude, it also sucks the dignity of workers that must work at the most polluting fronts.
Section three underscores the need for strict regulation of the fossil fuels sector and shows that voluntary transparency templates adopted by transnational oil companies are mere foils to fool the gullible and are exercises in futility as the profit driven corporations would do anything to ensure that their balance sheets please their top guns and shareholders. The fourth section builds up with examples of gross environmental misbehaviours that leave sorrow and blood in a diversity of communities ranging from Chile to Brazil and the United States of America.
Section five of the book is like a wedge in between layers of ecological disasters and extractive opacity. It takes a look at the socio-political malaise of Nigeria, closing with an acerbic look at crude-propelled despotism and philanthropic tokens erected as payment for indulgence or as some sort of pollution offsets.
The closing sections provide excellent analyses of the gaps and contortions in the regulatory regimes in Nigeria. It would be surprising if these were not met with resistance on the ground.
These essays provide insights into the background to the horrific ecological manifestations that dot the Nigerian environment and the ecological cancers spreading in the world. They underscore the fact there are no one-issue struggles. Working in a context where analyses of ecological matters is not the norm, decades of consistent environmental activism has placed the writer in good stead to unlock the webs that promote these scandalous realities.
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Insurrectionary Uprisings: A Reader in Revolutionary Nonviolence and Decolonization
Insurrectionary Uprisings is a compendium of essays that explore what it will take to win a world based on love and justice. From historical writing, including Thoreau, Gandhi and Arendt, to essays that address the multiple crises we face in the 21st century, the volume brings together authors and thinkers from around the globe. With an emphasis on the quotidian violence of racial monopoly capitalism and Western imperialism, Insurrectionary Uprisings insists that the possibility of revolutionary nonviolence rests, in part, on decolonization and decoloniality and a thorough analysis of the deep and violent roots of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony at the 1964 Democratic Convention underscores the inherent violence that saturates life in the U.S., while Cabral’s “Message to the People of Portugal” challenges the working class of imperial Portugal to recognize their kinship and to form alliances with the people of Guinea-Bissau. The very different strands of activist thinkers who comprise the book centre it on the experience of the global majority.
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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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Transcending our Colonial Place: Africa and the dialectics of emancipation
Fanon exhorted us (his posthumous comrades) to abandon Eurocentric thinking and to reconnect with dialectical thought in order as he puts it to “work out new concepts” and he insisted that “if we want humanity to advance a step farther […] then we must invent and we must make discoveries”. I propose to take Fanon at his word and to return to the dialectic as subjective thought rather than as motion of history; as a specific political subjectivity rather than as an objective development. Dialectical thought should be considered as the core feature of any politics of emancipation, a politics that is founded on what is common to humanity, an egalitarian alternative to the existing neocolonial racist capitalist organisation of society.
This book seeks to outline and assess the thinking of emancipatory politics in Africa as it changed in different historical periods. It also contrasts such politics to state political subjectivities which, by their very nature, reproduce given social placements or stated differently the allocation of people to hierarchical locations in society. Emancipatory politics always affirms a rejection of the place allocated to the oppressed and therefore contradicts and transcends the regular state subjectivities embodied in culture which ultimately attempt to justify such placement. Emancipatory politics is exceptional and therefore rare, and it is dialectical because it combines in a contradictory manner the culture of placement from which it emanates with the idea of universal freedom.
Dialectics is not the affirmation of historical necessity; it is a subjective political possibility opposed to (neo)colonial capitalism which has relegated the majority of our population to conditions of perennial impoverishment, oppression and gradual alienation from any Idea of being Human. This work illustrates the fact that dialectical thought has existed in Africa over millennia, with its earliest manifestation being in Ancient Egypt. The text also draws on the universalist content of African proverbs to show the possible dialectical content of African modes of thought, illustrating the emancipatory potential already in existence in some African cultures.
The contemporary attempts at achieving freedom on the African continent – the liberation struggles of the twentieth century – failed fundamentally because they rapidly abandoned any idea of universal humanity and held that emancipation was to be achieved through the medium of the state. It was the desire of the oligarchy that inherited independence to be accepted and integrated into the global capitalist economy for the purposes of state-led ‘development’. The effect, after a short nationalist interlude, was not an inclusive form of ‘nation-building’ but rather the building of a neocolonial state by a Western-oriented oligarchy unable or unwilling to meet the basic needs of its own people. To succeed in this endeavour, the newly independent state retained many oppressive features of its colonial predecessor remoulding them to suit its needs. The book shows how in an overwhelmingly neocolonial context, it is of little consequence to the oppressed masses in Africa whether their political system is formally labelled as ‘democratic’ or not. In fact, given the endemic corruption among the oligarchies in power, military dictatorships can garner mass popular support for shorter or longer periods if they are seen to resist (however mildly) neocolonial domination. The recent examples (early 2020s) of proto-nationalist military coups in Francophone West Africa (Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger) are cases in point.
This book develops theoretical arguments that redirect intellectual thought away from Euro-American liberal conceptions as well as from neo-nativist fashions and vulgar Marxisms, so as to reassert the importance of latent ‘African potentials’ that are frequently embodied in collective popular statements for rethinking, dialectically, a true politics of emancipation on the African continent.
1) the Ancient World: Ancient Egypt (The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant – 4000 BCE) and Plato (as read by Alain Badiou);
2) Pre-colonial Africa and resistance to slavery: the Donsolu Kalikan (in the Manden/Mali, 1222), the Antonian Movement (in Kongo, 1684-1706) and its continuation in the Lemba Movement, and the Haitian Revolution (undertaken by slaves from Africa),
3) The National Liberation Struggles of the 1960s as thought by Fanon and Cabral, and
4) The mass popular struggles in South Africa during the 1980s.
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The great climate robbery: How the food system drives climate change and what we can do about it
The 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.
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Tishio La Ukombozi: Ubeberu na Mapinduzi Zanzibar
Kitabu hiki kinaturudisha katika kipindi cha kusisimuwa cha miaka ya vita baridi, kipindi ambacho, sambamba na kipindi cha leo, madola ya kibeberu yamekuwa yakifanya njama za kubadilisha serikali zilizokuwepo na kuziweka madarakani zile zenye kufuata amri. Kwa kutumia kumbukumbu za picha za Johari, nyaraka za siri za Marekani na Uingereza, pamoja na mahojiano ya kina, kitabu kinatowa uchambuzi juu ya nafasi na satwa ya Chama cha Umma Party nchini Zanzibar na kiongozi wake mwenye upeo mkubwa wa mambo, Mwanamapinduzi mfuasi wa Itikadi ya Karl Marx, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu. Kwa kuangalia kwa njia ya uwiano wa mifano inayokwenda sambamba ya wahka wa Marekani kuhusu Uchina ya Kikomunisti katika miaka ya 1960 na woga walionao hivi sasa kuhusu ushawishi wa Uchina, kitabu kinatafakari juu ya mivutano mipya iliyopo katika kupigania rasilmali za Afrika, kuundwa kwa kikosi cha AFRICOM, na jinsi Wanasiasa wa Afrika Mashariki wanavyoshiriki katika kuimarisha udhibiti wa Marekani katika nchi zao, na “Vita dhidi ya Ugaidi” katika ukanda wa Afrika Mashariki hivi sasa.
Now available from Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania: http://www.mkukinanyota.com
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Stop the Continent Grab and the REDD-ification of Africa
So-called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is emerging as a new form of colonialism and economic subjugation. This book shows how these unjust mechanisms were designed to usher in a new phase of colonization through an invasion of genetically modified crops and trees which threatens to take over entire ecosystems.