As the major anti-colonial thinkers understood, this is in fact the key question for achieving substantive decolonization - how to generate domestic stock of capital or appropriate it back from capitalist world market to degree necessary to overcome dependence on colonizers

Fanon articulated this point clearly in Wretched of the Earth. In concluding section of “concerning violence” titled “violence in the international context”, Fanon argues in favor of socialist path to decolonization, but clarifies that this cannot sidestep the capital question:

“But in order that this [socialist] regime may work to good effect so that we can in every instance respect those principles which were our inspiration, we need something more than human output.” By this he means access to investible resources - capital

Capital ≠ capitalism. The latter is defined by the rule of capital, not its mere existence. Capital is nothing more than the concentration of accumulated labor, and it could stand as such as a power in service of society, and not only bourgeois profit.

The store of world’s investable resources came to be concentrated in West - again for Fanon this represents the appropriation of labor power and resources of the colonized. And at the moment of formal decolonization the colonizers undertake one final act of theft - capital flight

The agri-food system is full of trade-offs. This paper shows major sustainability benefits of organic production, but a major drawback in yields (probably even greater than -21% if include other real world factors). For me, it’s yet another check in favour of “ag-pluralism”…

We have an insidious problem of thinking about agri-food in binary ways: Defenders and Detractors of “organic”, “grazing”, “no-till”, “non-GMO”, “small-scale”, etc., argue about whether these things are “good” or “bad”. Instead, we should embrace “ag pluralism” and…

“The crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism. It is because of western imperialism – and those who aid and abet it – that the earthquake and tropical storm become wide scale disasters.”

Not to be missed. Save the date!

@PasturesPolitic I would love it if meat could be lab grown and livestock could be kept around for milk and eggs and stuff as well as cell donation. But corporations controlling it and being more focused on pushing a product to market than developing sustainable technology is gonna go bad fast.

. @RedStarrTheo Small landlords are planning to sell their rental properties to large institutional investors. reuters.com/business/finan…

I’m excited to see my dissertation cited in asad abukhalil أسعد أبو خليل’s column in today’s جريدة الأخبار - Al-Akhbar. The passage concerns the intervention against the left in the 1971 LU student elections by then minister of education Ghassan Tueni, as well as his coordination with the US embassy.

nytimes.com/2021/10/11/opi…

icij.org/investigations…

nytimes.com/es/2021/10/06/…