We hosted an event on the 8th of October to launch three new publications by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India by P. Sainath, The Fate of Xolobeni Would be the Fate of Us All by Kevin Bloom, and The Rate of Exploitation (the Case of the iPhone).
Dossier 21: The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India
This dossier features two stories on India’s agrarian crisis. The first story is about the harsh impact of the changing climate on top of an already battered rural economy in Andhra Pradesh, where farmers are growing for seed companies in the most adverse conditions. The second story takes us to Kerala, where we find the Kudumbashree women’s cooperative, which has resiliently resisted the devastation of the worst floods in the state in nearly a century. These stories not only document the ugly side of history; we are keen as well to detect the initiatives that breathe life into a future for the planet.
The Fate of Xolobeni Would be the Fate of Us All
Since 1996, the South African indigenous community Xolobeni has been fighting a foreign mining conglomerate that learned that their ancestral lands happen to be rich in titanium. The anti-mining activists of Xolobeni, who have lost many members to hit squads, continue to struggle against this foreign company and its partners in the South African government. Given that their land is located in a global biodiversity hotspot, their struggle is the struggle of us all: it is the fight for water, soil, food, and air.
The Rate of Exploitation (the Case of the iPhone)
Our second Notebook analyses the contemporary production process that results in Apple’s iPhone. We move from a look at the iPhone’s production to the inner workings of profit and exploitation. We are interested not only in Apple and the iPhone, but more particularly in the Marxist analysis of the rate of exploitation at play in the production of such sophisticated electronic devices. It is necessary, we believe, to learn how to measure the rate of exploitation so that we know precisely how much workers deliver into the total social wealth produced each year.