This is the fourth section of a review paper I just finished writing for a directed studies course on the history of capitalism.

Read part one here, part two here and part three here.

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Ideology and Institutions of Capitalism

Wood and Polanyi on state-building, intervention, improvement and colonialism

Both Wood and Polanyi devote a considerable amount of time to the relationship between capital and the state in capitalism’s early development. A particularly compelling account comes with Wood’s discussion of the “division of labour” between England’s monarchical state and its aristocratic ruling class in early state-building efforts (p. 172). Noting again that the crucial feature of 16^th and 17^th century English politics was a relatively powerful centralizing state headed by a monarchy with a growing monopoly on legitimate political violence (ie., powers of coercive expropriation from direct producers), a symbiotic relationship between the state and ruling classes emerged in which the aristocratic classes limited themselves to purely economic forms of expropriation from direct producers and the state maintained order and enforced a property system benefitting large landholders.

This is precisely the type of interventionism to which Polanyi refers when he points out that markets have never been free. Either by slowing down or speeding up the rate of social and economic change (or even attempting both simultaneously), the state has always been a central actor in the transformation to and maintenance of a market society (Ruggie’s observations about “horizontal policy incoherence” confirms the truth of this to the present day). As Polanyi points out, “there was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course” (p. 145). During the height of liberal interventions in establishing a market economy in the 1830s and 40s, policies were enacted that simultaneously restricted state function and repealed legislation that was seen to interfere with the free functioning of the market, while at the same time increasing the administrative function of the state – in essence, creating a centralized bureaucracy focused on managing social and economic forces in such a way that the market remained as “free” as possible. This effort, paradoxically, required an enormous amount of “adjustment” and intervention – Polanyi points out that “administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the free working of the system” (p. 147). Of course, much could be said here about the parallels to late 20^th century structural adjustment and privatization policies under neo-liberalism.

Such massive projects of state-building and economic reform could not be undertaken without a powerful ideological underpinning that “closely fitted the society that was emerging” (Polayni, p. 120). Early on, this came in the concept of “improvement,” which both Wood and Polanyi recognize to be the cornerstone of capitalism’s social property relations and liberal economic ethic. Wood details, in particular, the ways in which the idea of improvement was invoked to legitimate the elimination of traditional customs and habits that interfered with emerging 17^th century social property relations. The political philosopher John Locke was, of course, the key figure of this era, and his conception of natural right to property as derived from the productive use of land for profit was instrumental in the dispossession of masses of subsistence peasants in the English countryside during the enclosure movement, not to mention in colonial land grabs, genocide and slavery (Wood, p. 107, 158). Thus, the idea of private property emerged as perhaps the most violent and salient forces in capitalism’s early history – that unimproved land was waste, that private property rights could (and, indeed, ought) to result from expropriation and productive use of “unimproved” land for profit (according to the English standards of productivity of the day), and further, that property title was not just private, but also exclusive (Wood, p. 108-111).

As is evident from this discussion, the ethic of improvement was a powerful force not only in the early transformation of social property relations that saw the destruction of traditional common land use customs in England, but also in the colonial imperialism that followed early domestic capitalism. Again, Polanyi and Wood focus on different dynamics relating to capitalist colonialism, but their key points are complementary. Wood points to the early example of Ireland as the first historical example of a specifically capitalist type of imperialism. Wood shows how, unlike other imperialist projects, which relied primarily upon extra-economic forces of expropriation and control, England’s colonization of Ireland worked to transform the pre-existing social property relations, and replaced them with distinctly capitalist landlord-tenant relations, settling huge areas of productive Irish land with English farmers and waged labourers. The result was a new type of imperialism, one that could operate even in the absence of direct domination – what she calls “perhaps world’s first structural adjustment programs” (Wood, p. 155).

Similarly, Polanyi suggests that a key feature of colonialism is the destruction of indigenous social relations, drawing an analogy between the 18^th century industrial capitalism and colonialism in the common strategy of “smashing up … social structures in order to extract the elements of labour from them.” On a related point, Polanyi argues that the threat of starvation is of key importance in the formation of a labour market: “to this end their traditional institutions must be destroyed, and prevented from reforming, since, as a rule, the individual in primitive society is not threatened by starvation unless the community as a whole is in the same predicament” (171). This is a direct reference to Joseph Townsend’s 1786 “Dissertation on the Poor Laws,” in which can be found another core idea underpinning economic liberal ideology – that the “improvidence of the poor was a law of nature, for servile, sordid, and ignoble work would otherwise not be done” (Polanyi, p. 123). Indeed, Polanyi identifies the 19^th century abolition of outdoor relief and reform of the Poor Laws as the crucial step solidifying England’s first true labour market, and thus the advent of industrial capitalism as a social system (p. 87).

Conclusion: A City Built on Fault Lines

The purpose of this paper (and in fact, the entire reading list of this course), is to begin to construct an understanding of the history of capitalism from “the foundations up,” so to speak. The first two books on the reading list sketched out the historical conditions surrounding the emergence and early development of capitalism. Although, as Wood claims, “how we understand the history of capitalism has a great effect on how we understand the thing itself” (p. 34), I think that locating the precise moment of capitalism’s emergence is less important than understanding the fundamental principles that shaped its emergence and early development. Wood and Polanyi differ on their assessment of the “prime mover” of capitalism, but I don’t see their ideas as mutually incompatible. Wood offers a compelling account of the transformation of social property relations and the emergence of market imperatives during an early period of agrarian capitalism which created the conditions in which the emergence of machine in early industrial capitalism led to what Polanyi understood as the market society. Although each located a major historical rupture some 150 years apart and referred to it as “the origin of capitalism,” it would be more accurate, in my view, to see these as major events in a long continuous process that might be likened to plate tectonics.

The idea of capitalism is a useful signifier to mark the specific social, cultural, economic and political mechanisms of a phase of human history that has triggered enormously complex problems. These problems have been a long time in the formation, as Polanyi’s prescient 1944 remarks demonstrate. In an era defined not by not the freedom that Polanyi so hopefully called for, but by a permanent war against “terror,” a culture based on fear and consumption, and a reckless collision course with irreversible global warming, it is almost heartbreaking to read the optimism in Polanyi’s final chapters. An industrial society “can afford to be both just and free,” he writes (p. 265). Certainly, we’ve seen some extension of certain types of justice and freedom since Polanyi wrote these words, but I wonder what he’d say about the ongoing economic imperialism affecting most of the world’s developing nations, or the excessive and growing imbalance between the consumers and the producers of the world.

But as Wood rightly points out (and certainly Polanyi would agree), the principles of justice and freedom cannot equally apply to all under the logic of capitalism: “The expansion of capitalist imperatives throughout the world has regularly reproduced the effect that it had at the beginning within its country of origin: dispossession, extinction of customary property rights, the imposition of market imperatives, and environmental destruction” (p. 194). Put short, capitalism as such cannot be a force for justice and freedom, but rather must be dismantled or transformed in the same way that it dismantled and transformed earlier social relations.

If there is one certainty that the long history of capitalism demonstrates, it is this: deep internal contradictions and tensions ensure that it is subject to periodic ruptures. And like residents of a city built on a fault line know well, each minor tremor reminds us of two things. First, although the ground we walk on is not entirely to be trusted, we are safe for the time being. Second, the big one is coming.

References

Polanyi, Karl. (1944 [2001]). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Beacon Press: Boston.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. (2002). The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. Verso: London.

This is the third section of a review paper I just finished writing for a directed studies course on the history of capitalism.

Read part one here and part two here.

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Polanyi on the Market Society

Capitalism as market society: fictional commodities, social dislocation and the double movement in early industrial capitalism.

As discussed above, Polanyi also viewed the early history of capitalism as representing a major historical break from earlier periods, but he sets his sights later than Wood in identifying capitalism’s decisive developments. While Wood points to social property relations in an early phase of agrarian capitalism in England’s countryside as laying the foundation for the emergence of industrial capitalism, Polanyi focuses more generally on the changing relationships between the supposedly self-regulating market and what he terms “fictional commodities” – labour, land and money – in the transition to a market society.

If, as noted above, Wood’s primary project was to debunk the notion of capitalism as an inevitable and natural extension of humankind’s economic impulses, Polanyi’s efforts to dismantle the “utopian” notion of the self-regulating market were equally urgent. Indeed, throughout The Great Transformation, Polanyi is just as preoccupied with dismantling the idea of the self-regulating market as Wood is with countering the commercialization model.

For Polanyi, the self-regulating market “implied a stark utopia” that “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society,” (p. 3). Further, the measures taken by society to protect itself from the ravages of such a system destabilized both economic and political spheres to the point that society became endangered by another, more explicitly violent threat in the early 20^th century – that of fascism.

Polanyi, like Wood, points to the enclosure movement of Tudor England as perhaps the earliest example of what could be called capitalist dynamics, although Polanyi pegs the actual emergence of capitalism much later. He points out that the catastrophic social dislocation of the enclosures, characterized as “a revolution of the rich against the poor” (Polanyi, p. 37), was slowed only by the intervention of the Crown, as Tudor and Stuart statesmen crafted social policy to ameliorate the worst effects of the enclosure movement and make the rate of social change more bearable to those members of society most affected by it – the dispossessed poor who had previously relied on access to common land as their means to subsistence (p. 39-38).

For Polanyi, however, the dramatic transformation that would threaten to tear apart the fabric of society did not occur during the enclosure movement, but rather began some 150 years later with the industrial revolution– the “new enclosures” of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. It was during the industrial revolution that “an entirely new institutional mechanism was starting to act on Western Society” (p. 42). The “one basic change” during this period was the establishment of a market economy – a self-regulating market system in which “the economy is directed by market prices and nothing but market prices” (p. 45).

Where Wood locates the historical rupture in a revolution in social property relations a century or two earlier, Polanyi is emphatic about the transformative juncture marked by the emergence of machine production and, ultimately, the market economy. No doubt Polanyi’s focus on the radical break accompanying machine production is what led Wood to accuse him of technological determinism, although he does make an effort to sidestep determinism in his claim that the machine did not directly cause the emergence of market society. However, the distinction is somewhat muddied when he follows this disclaimer with the point that “once elaborate machines and the plant were used for production in a commercial society, the idea of a self-regulating market system was bound to take shape” (p. 43). Wood might argue that this is the case only given the pre-existing social property relations of late agrarian capitalism, with its distinctly capitalist market imperatives toward profit and reinvestment.

This key point is perhaps the most obvious of Polanyi and Wood’s divergence, since Polanyi locates the emergence of “market imperatives” in the economies of scale demanded by machine production. Machines are expensive to own and operate, and there must be markets to sell a minimum amount of goods produced to keep the machinery running at a profit. It is precisely in this development that Polanyi identifies a deep shift in “the motive of action” of society – from the motive of subsistence to that of gain (Polanyi, p. 43-44).

Machine production, Polanyi concludes, brought about a change in society that was no less than a complete metamorphosis marking the transformation to a market society in which the raw materials of production – land, labour and money – became commodities regulated by the market. The result of this, he argues, “though weird, is inevitable … the dislocation caused by such devices must disjoint man’s relationships and threaten his natural habitat with annihilation” (p. 44). And, in response to this threat, society acted to protect itself through a restrictive counter-movement.

Thus, in Polanyi’s analysis, the machine gave rise to two key features of market society: fictional commodities and the double movement. Polanyi uses the term fictional commodities to describe land, labour and money (in other words, nature, people and purchasing power) in a market society – while they are not real commodities in the sense of a thing produced for sale in a market, in a market society they are treated as commodities and regulated according to the principles of the market (p. 75-76, 170). This is what Polanyi refers to when he states that “the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market” p. (60).

Following the threat to human life and the natural environment resulting from market society’s commodity fiction, Polanyi points to the emergence of a “double movement,” or protective intervention to prevent the complete destruction of society and nature under market forces. The double movement operates in a kind of dialect between two opposed organizing forces in society. On the one hand, the principle of economic liberalism led to the establishment of institutions and policy instruments enabling the development of the self-regulating market, promoting laissez-faire methods of free trade and commerce with the support of the trading classes. Opposed to this was the principle of social protection, which led to the establishment of institutions and policy instruments designed to counter the threats to both society and productive organization (because even business was threatened by the savage swings of the free market) (p. 138-39). This, Polanyi argues, was the “one comprehensive feature in the history of the age” – that “society protected itself against the perils inherent in a self-regulating system” (p. 80).

As I discuss in more detail in the next section, however, state intervention was not limited to social protection – the state was also a strong liberalizing force in the establishment of early markets. Polanyi is very clear about the fact that markets have never been “free” of state intervention. On the contrary, he points out that “the road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally-organized and controlled interventionism” (p. 147). Taken together with the social protectionism of the double movement described above, this observation posits the state as occupying a highly contradictory role – that of simultaneously promoting economic liberalism and of protecting society from the damaging effects of liberal economic policies. It’s worth noting here that this fundamental contradiction has persisted – and even deepened – up to the present day, representing what the United Nation’s Special Representative on Business and Human Rights refers to as “horizontal policy incoherence” – the tendency for one branch of government to set economic policies without enough regard for the human rights or social policy commitments of other branches of government (Ruggie, 2009).

This is the second section of a review paper I just finished writing for a directed studies course on the history of capitalism.

Read part one here.

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Wood on The Origins of Capitalism

Capitalism as an historical rupture: social property relations, market imperatives and dispossession/proletarianization in 16^th and 17^th century England.

The first half of Wood’s book focuses on dissecting and debunking earlier views of the origins of capitalism based on the “commercialization model,” which holds that capitalism emerged as a natural progression of the human propensity for “trade, truck and barter.” In this view, contemporary capitalism can be seen as essentially an extension or expansion of earlier economic systems, with technological advances and political innovation reducing barriers previously preventing the expansion of capitalism, both in terms of its geographical scope and its complexity. In this model, capital is understood to have historically emerged in a relatively “spontaneous” manner, as if all that was required for this natural process was the removal of various barriers – primarily political and technological ones.

Wood argues that, by ignoring the unique and specific historical conditions surrounding the emergence and early development of capitalism, the commercialization model obscures the true dynamics and nature of capitalism by naturalizing and normalizing its history. Far from being simply a “mature stage” of pre-existing (proto-capitalist) economic systems, capitalism in Wood’s view must be understood in terms of its radical break with all pre-existing economic and social systems. This break, she argues, took place as a result of a very specific set of political, economic and cultural conditions present in England during the period of transition following feudalism, in which social property relations took a very different form from anywhere else in Europe at any time in history.

At this point, it’s worth calling attention to Wood’s distinct Euro- (indeed, Anglo-) centrism. Although she devotes an early section of the book to “anti-Eurocentrism,” she focuses primarily on the tendency for commercialization model explanations of the origins of capitalism to naturalize and universalize the European experience by assuming a sort of economic teleology in which non-capitalist societies are considered to be non-capitalist precisely because they haven’t (yet) overcome whatever political, social or technological barriers have thwarted their development. However, Wood’s insistence on the unprecedented historical and geographical specifics surrounding the emergence of capitalism leads her into another kind of “centrism” – one might wonder if it’s possible that no previous empire in the history of the world featured social property relations bearing any similarity to those in 16^th and 17^th century rural England (the same critique holds for Polanyi’s analysis of the market society, although he is less emphatic about the singular uniqueness of early industrial England).

With that aside, however, and recognizing that such a broad comparative analysis is not the focus of her project, Wood specifically locates the seeds of contemporary capitalism in the changing property relations found in the English countryside in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Unlike continental Europe, where the ruling classes maintained a distinctly feudal relationship with peasants based on extra-economic forms of expropriation (taxation, tributes, etc. taken under the threat of coercive military power), and where internal markets were relatively fragmented with both domestic and international commerce consisting primarily of “carrying trade,” and profits derived from advantages in the process of circulation (such as monopolies on trade routes, etc.), English ruling classes faced a much different set of circumstances.

The difference in social and political circumstances in England triggered a transformation in property relations that set in motion the forces of the market as an economic imperative. The English ruling class, having demilitarized earlier than its continental counterpart and being a part of an increasingly centralized state with a strong monarchy, could not rely upon the autonomous extra-economic powers enjoyed by the Continental aristocracy (Wood, p. 99). Instead, England saw a type of trade-off occur between a centralized state authority and aristocratic control of large land-holdings worked by tenant farmers that led the ruling classes to use property in a new way. The lack of extra-economic powers of expropriation gave rise to new economic powers – primarily, the dismantling of customary fixed rents and the creation of an early “market” for economic rents.

The historical period witnessing these new social property relations, characterized by the triad of the large land-holder, the farmer-tenant and the wage labourer, is marked also by the enclosure movement – a process in which large landholdings were consolidated and the communal land use rights of peasants extinguished in the interests of “productive” agricultural development. In this way, all economic actors became dependent on the market for access to land and livelihood – either as property owners, tenant farmers or waged labourers (Wood, p. 100).

From within this new dynamic of social property relations, Wood points to the emergence of what she calls market imperatives. As English society became increasingly polarized and a new “pauper” class emerged whose access to the basic necessities of survival relied solely on their ability to sell their labour for a wage, English landlords also became increasingly dependent on profit from the productivity of the labour employed on their land. Two corollaries are associated with this dymanic: (1) the emergence of a highly productive agriculture sector that could feed a large population of workers not engaged in agricultural production, and (2) the emergence of both a mass labour force and a large, unified domestic market consisting of the working poor (Wood, p. 103). Both of these key developments set the stage for the advent of industrial capitalism.

This is the first section of a review paper I just finished writing for a directed studies course on the history of capitalism. I’m reading four key texts: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism. Although it’s by no means a comprehensive reading list, it’s a good start. If you’re going to begin to critique something, you’d better know a little bit about its history and major developments. This course marks the beginning of that inquiry for me.

Instead of editing for the blog, I’m just putting the paper up in sections as is.

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Taken together, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism (2003) offer a compelling analysis of capitalism in the early stages of its development in England, and as it expanded to the rest of Europe and the colonial world. Although they focus on different elements of capitalism’s emergence and early development, their respective analyses overlap and complement one another in many ways, offering together a more comprehensive and nuanced framework than either one taken alone. My goal in writing this paper is not to provide a complete overview of each of their arguments, but rather to bring the two together in a dialectical fashion, allowing the play of synergies and tensions within to work toward an integrated view of capitalism’s early history.

If there is one point that Polanyi and Wood agree upon emphatically, it is the decisive and complete historical break with previous economic systems represented by capitalism. Wood stresses that capitalism is a “late and localized product of very specific historical conditions” that marks both transformation of and rupture in “the most basic human relations and practices” – most notably, those relating to “human interaction with nature” (Wood, p. 95, 193). Similarly, Polanyi notes that the 18^th century transition to self-regulating markets represented “a complete transformation of the structure of society” (Polanyi, p. 74) in which human needs became secondary to the needs of the market. In Polanyi’s words, this reorganization of society into what he called “market society” entails no less than the disembedding of economics from society and a complete reversal in the order of importance. Instead of the market fitting into and serving the needs of human society (as, Polanyi argues, had previously been the case throughout human history), in a market society, social relations are embedded in the economic system in such a way that society must be shaped to conform with the needs of the market (Polanyi, p. 60, 74). This new type of social organization “annihilate[s] all organic forms of existence” and replaces them with “atomistic and individualistic” ones (Polanyi, p. 171) that better serve the functioning of the market.

While agreeing fundamentally on the historically transformative and destructive nature of capitalist social and economic relations, Polanyi and Wood differ in their focus on the specific dynamics that give rise to these transformations. While Wood focuses on the 16^th and 17^th century conditions that enabled a profound change in social property relations in the English countryside, leading to the emergence of powerful new market imperatives, widespread dispossession and proletarianization, Polanyi sets his sights later in history to explain the emergence of market society in the early industrial period, focusing on the contractions and instabilities inherent in this system that set in motion the early 20^th century emergence of fascism in Europe. In Part 2 and Part 3, I explore each of these lines of thought before turning in Part 4 to a more general analysis of some of their common themes relating to ideology, institutions and colonialism.

CERRO DE SAN PEDRO, MEXICO: MEMBERS OF ANTI-MINING GROUP ASSAULTED BY NEW GOLD INC./MINERA SAN XAVIER WORKERS AND SUPPORTERS

Community members receive death threats as conflict deepens around Canadian-owned Mexican mine

Tensions are building in the Mexican village of Cerro de San Pedro, where a Canadian-owned gold and silver mine has been forced to close due to a Supreme Court decision that cancelled its environmental permit.

On Friday, December 11, 2009, residents of the Mexican village of Cerro de San Pedro and members of the anti-mine group Frente Amplio Opositor (FAO) were attacked by a group of mine supporters. The next day, Federal parliamentarians were stoned in their vehicles by mine employees as they attempted to visit the village. The Mendoza Pence family, who have spearheaded the village’s anti-mine campaign for over a decade, are now receiving death threats.

The Cerro de San Pedro gold and silver mine made international headlines when it was closed following a Supreme Court decision on November 17th, 2009. The environmental permit for the open-pit mine, which used cyanide leaching pads, was revoked definitively by Mexican authorities in response to a legal case filed by project opponents. Operated by Minera San Xavier, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Canadian multinational New Gold Inc., the mine has been subject to local, regional and national opposition since its inception.

The Cerro de San Pedro “ejidatarios” – or traditional landholders – and FAO members were preparing to host a delegation of parliamentarians on December 11th when they were approached by over 100 individuals, most of whom were identified as employees of the mine.

The group of mine supporters entered the “Salón Ejidal”, or the ejido’s common house, where preparations for hosting the parliamentarians were underway on Friday afternoon. Cerro de San Pedro resident Dolores Mendoza Poncé was apprehended and injured, and ejidataria Manuela Tristán was struck with stones. FAO members Ernest García, Ivette Lacaba and James Del Tedesco were all hit and injured, while both García and Del Tedesco were robbed of their cameras. Several of the people attacked were elderly.

Located less than 20 kilometers from the city of San Luis Potosí, the Cerro de San Pedro mine has been criticized for jeopardizing the health and safety of the area’s 1.5 million residents. Environmental laws protect the arid, drought-prone mountains surrounding Cerro de San Pedro due to their importance to local water systems. The village itself was a considered historic tourist destination, and its 400-year old churches and colonial structures are cracking and crumbling due to the daily mine blasting.

Residents also allege that the mine has divided the small community, with mine workers and families receiving compensation packages pitted against residents that work to protect the village and ecosystem.

While most of the individuals who attacked the Salon Ejidal were identified as New Gold employees and pro-mine locals, witnesses allege that others were not from the area and had received payments from the corporation. The FAO states that the mine has kept its employees despite the shut-down in order to maintain political and social control. New Gold’s lawyers are attempting to re-open the mine, although a first injunction was denied last week. The corporation has also bought local radio ads while developing what opponents have called a campaign of fear and intimidation.

This latest incident comes just after a visit of Canadian Governor General Michaelle Jean to Mexico, where she spoke about the responsibility of Canadian mining corporations operating overseas. Canadian corporation Blackfire Explorations was forced to close its mine last week, after its present and former employees were arrested for the assassination of anti-mine organizer Mariano Abarca Roblero on November 27, 2009.

THE FAO IS MAKING AN URGENT CALL TO INDIVIDUALS, COLLECTIVES AND ORGANIZATIONS TO DENOUNCE THE HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN CERRO DE SAN PEDRO

PLEASE WRITE LETTERS CONDEMNING NEW GOLD INC. TO:

Guillermo E. Rishchynski
Ambassador of Canada to Mexico
mxico@international.gc.ca

Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
civilsocietyunit@ohchr.org 
oacnudh@ohchr.org
cidhoea@oas.org

Hannes Portmann, Director, Corporate Development and Investor Relations, New Gold Inc., Direct: (416) 324-6014, Email: info@newgold.com,

WRITTEN BY TAMARA HERMAN WITH INFORMATION FROM THE KOLEKTIVOAZUL/FAO

I credit the title of this blog to Bob Lovelace, who, in his closing remarks at a conference called “Rethinking the Extractive Industries,” spoke about the dangers of trying to engage with corporations on critical issues of rights, resources and responsibility when those same corporations that publish glossy annual sustainability reports are mowing down forests for fibre, tearing open the earth for minerals, and dumping toxic waste in the lakes. He said, it’s like going home to your cabin in the woods and finding a bear in the house. You don’t try to talk to the bear; you don’t reason with it. No, you get your rifle and you fire a shot in the air. You get it the hell out of there, and then you figure out a way to keep it out.

Lovelace talked about academic obligation to human rights, and about how stronger action is necessary from the people who have the power and knowledge to do something. I took it that he meant me, directly. Of course he didn’t, not knowing me from the next dewy-eyed young scholar-activist in the room, but he easily could have.

Needless to say, the image stuck with me, not least because I’ve made it my academic project to talk to the bears, to understand their underlying ideologies and their mechanisms of power. Because it seems to me that the only way to truly counter that power is to understand, in intricate detail, how and why it works.

Perhaps it’s naive, but I feel that studying bear behaviour and habitat might reveal insights about how to keep it out of the house, how to deactivate its capacity for destruction and, perhaps, even learn to live with it.

But that’s where the metaphor falls apart, because multinational extractive corporations are not bears. They do not have a natural habitat apart from accumulation by dispossession and exploitation. And once they smell profit, a rifle shot in the air will not scare them off.

This blog is a space for me to reflect on my academic interests, on what I’m learning about power and privilege and the bloody trajectory of the history of capitalism. It will start with reflections on my reading for comprehensive exams, but I hope it will extend beyond that and become a space for conversation and action.

Lovelace is right: we who occupy a space of privilege have obligations to act upon. Reading, thinking and learning is just the beginning of that — the point, after all, is to change the world.