Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

It is only in combination with labor, of course, that machines take on their lively powers. Since 1992, 400 million Chinese peasants have been forcefully “depeasantized” and put to work in industrial factories. On the other side of the Pacific, campesinos and Indigenous peoples are also being driven off their land. Marx dubbed this process “primitive accumulation”: the forcible separation of people from their means of subsistence, compelling them into wage labor and the cash nexus. These shifts in class structure aren’t unfolding in parallel; they are internally related. The reproduction of the Chinese working class hinges on the dispossession of Latin American peasants—and the deforestation, contamination, and cancer epidemics that rapacious extraction and mega-agriculture entail. Their shared domination is, for Arboleda, a clue to the shared conditions of their emancipation: Chinese and Chilean workers have more in common with one another than they do with their respective ruling classes. And, in a useful corrective to Sinophobic tropes, China shouldn’t be seen as a conniving, conspiring hegemon bent on world domination. Rather, riffing on Stuart Hall, imperialism is the modality through which global capitalism is lived. In this reading, the role of Chinese banks and firms in expanding the extractive frontier is an expression of a process that is global in scope.

cute

—p.15 Seize and Resist (12) by Thea Riofrancos 1 month ago