Introduction

The revolt in the North-West Provinces, Bengal, and the Panjab left the government with a serious problem: where to put recaptured and surrendered prisoners, and the increasing number of new offenders convicted by the special commissioners for crimes associated with the revolt. As we have seen, rebels damaged or destroyed many jails. In addition, government often converted those that remained intact into military barracks, necessitating structural changes such as the pulling down of outbuildings and walls. As well as the difficulties caused by the lack of accommodation for prisoners, the mass desertion of prison guards in some areas meant that their security could not be guaranteed. There were few if any European soldiers to spare to ease the shortage. Further, hundreds of prisoners had been sentenced to transportation overseas, but there was no means of forwarding them from the districts to the holding jail at Alipur. The river steamers usually employed for the purpose were busy carrying European officers, civilians, and wounded soldiers.

This chapter will explore the development of a penal crisis in the aftermath of the revolt. District magistrates made a series of pleas for a solution to the many problems they faced, but in the short term there were only limited options. Especially in the North-West Provinces, jails needed major repairs, complete rebuilding or new sets of prison guards. An uneasy attempt to deal with the lack of jail accommodation came with the transfer of large numbers of prisoners to more secure jails, notably Alipur in the Bengal Presidency.

Introduction

This chapter seeks explanations for the last period (roughly three decades) of volatile global capitalism in order to advance strategic resistance. The merits of ‘classical political economic theory’ include the identification of crisis tendencies at the core of capital's laws of motion, tendencies which are met by countervailing management techniques. Crisis displacement techniques became much more sophisticated since the 1930s freeze of financial markets, crash of trade, Great Depression and inter-imperial turn to armed aggression. The chapter documents the global economy's vast credit expansion and the use of geographical power to move devaluation to Third World and emerging market sites, as well as vulnerable markets in the North that have suffered substantial ‘corrections’ in past years. Extra-market coercion including gendered and environmental super-exploitation has intensified in the process. The result is an ‘uneven and combined’ capitalism that concentrates wealth and poverty in more intense ways, geographically, and brings capitalist markets and the non-market spheres of society and nature together in ways adverse to the latter.

As for resistance, popular movements across the world are divided on strategies and tactics. While there are some crucial sites of national state control by anti-capitalist forces in Latin America, we can consider the options faced by the popular movements in terms of three alternative orientations: (i) ‘autonomism’, (ii) ‘global governance’; and (iii) ‘decommodification’ of life/nature alongside the ‘deglobalization’ of capital.

It is certainly possible to overestimate the practical importance of arguments for the normative legitimacy of global capitalism. But normative arguments continue to circulate in the social world, and it would be foolish to think that they do so without significant social effects. As long as ideological defences of capitalism continue to be produced, there will be a need for ideology critiques.

Arguments – for the normative legitimacy of global capitalism – unfold in three main stages. A normative principle (or set of principles) must be proposed and defended. Then, it must be established that a global capitalist order is compatible with, or even necessary for, the adequate institutionalization of that principle. If the global economy is at present flawed from the standpoint of the given principle, this must be shown to be a contingent matter, capable of being reversed through appropriate reforms.

In the first section I shall present what I take to be the strongest contemporary version of this argument, combining the normative principle articulated by the leading contemporary theorists of global justice with the most significant recent development in mainstream economics – ‘new growth theory’. In the second section, I shall present a critical assessment of this position from a Marxian standpoint. In the third section it will be shown that the position is internally incoherent. The paper concludes with a speculation regarding the future course of global capitalism.

Introduction

This chapter will consider one of the most important penal and spatial legacies of the mutiny-rebellion, Britain's permanent settlement of the Andaman Islands as a colony for the reception of convicts. Before the outbreak of the revolt the British had vague plans to populate the Islands, setting up the Andamans Committee to consider the issue in April 1857. At this time the government saw convicts as a means to an end, as labourers who might secure its long-term aim of productive colonial expansion, notably the protection of shipping and trade routes. In the aftermath of the uprising the British required urgently a place for the exile and imprisonment of mutineer-rebels. The trajectory of proposed settlement therefore changed between the constitution of the committee a month before the revolt began and its departure for the Islands in November 1857. The committee's original plan was to consider the suitability of the Andamans for colonization, but by the time it left India its brief had changed. Government then assumed that the Islands would be settled as a penal colony and the committee was asked to report on where best such a settlement should be located. Clearly, both during pre-settlement surveys and in the months after transportation began the government recognized convicts' economic and social potential as permanent settlers. In part, this was related to the government's desire to promote the colony's self-sufficiency.

The intellectual impetus for this volume is the abiding interest of its editors in promoting in-depth, cutting-edge analysis of the current global political economy in order to advance a political economy of more equitable, humane, eco-sensitive global futures. In meeting this challenge, the contributors of this book develop distinctive and original theoretical frameworks and propose new mediations between theory and history, which is a deeply problematic relationship in the social sciences. Put differently, this volume offers theoryinformed writing which contextualizes empirical research on current worldhistoric events and trends with an eye towards realizing a future of human socio-economic betterment. We view this project as a sequel to an earlier collection, edited by Albritton, Itoh, Westra, and Zuege, Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises, and Globalizations. Like with that well-received volume, we have gathered internationally recognized contributors who are based in diverse countries and write from different conceptual perspectives within the critical political economy tradition broadly understood. The key difference between the earlier and current volumes, however, is their respective orientations to time and location in time. While the previous work focused on periodizing capitalism and theorizing its successive world-historic phases to understand the present, the current project focuses on the present in order to better inform our reflections on possible or likely global futures. Moreover, whereas all the essays in the previous volume were written during or prior to the year 2000, this collection captures the momentous transformations of the global political economy, and its leading economies, in the intervening years.

Introduction

In February 1858 the superintendent of Meerut jail, H.M. Cannon, submitted the usual annual report to the government of the North-West Provinces. There was, however, nothing ordinary about his account. As Superintendent Cannon explained, he was not able to provide a formal report because rebels had either burnt or destroyed all the jail records during the previous year's disturbances. Instead, he presented a narrative of what had happened when mutiny broke out in the town. At the beginning of May, 85 sowars of the third regiment of light cavalry were sentenced to imprisonment by a general court martial, 80 for ten years and five for five years. The prisoners arrived at the old jail, which was situated about two miles from the cantonment, on the morning of 9 May. What Cannon did not mention was that these men had been tried over the previous three days for having refused to take the cartridges issued to them for use on parade when ordered to do so by their superior officer, Brevet-Colonel G.M.C. Smyth. These were of course the fated greased cartridges that allegedly were smeared in animal fat and coated with gelatine paper.

J.W. Kaye, who recorded an account of the events at Meerut that day in his classic account History of the Sepoy War in India, described what happened next. Guards brought the prisoners before their regiment. They stripped them of their uniforms and accoutrements.

It is widely recognized that the past three decades mark a significant break with the social, political, economic and cultural order that characterized the decades following World War II. Basic changes include the weakening and transformation of welfare states in the capitalist West, the collapse or fundamental metamorphosis of bureaucratic party-states in the communist East, and the undermining of developmental states in what had been called the Third World. More generally, recent decades have seen the weakening of national, state-centred economic sovereignty and the emergence and consolidation of a neo-liberal global order. Social, political and cultural life has become increasingly global, on the one hand; on the other hand, they have become increasingly de-centred and fragmented.

These changes have occurred against the background of a lengthy period of stagnation and crisis: since the early 1970s, the growth of real wages has decreased dramatically, real wages have remained generally flat, profit rates have stagnated, and labour productivity rates have declined. Yet, these crisis phenomena have not led to a resurgence of working class movements. On the contrary, the past decades have seen the decline of classical labour movements and the rise of new social movements, often characterized by the politics of identity, including nationalist movements, movements of sexual politics and various forms of religious ‘fundamentalism’. Trying to come to terms with the large-scale transformations of the past three decades, then, entails addressing not only the long-term economic downturn since the early 1970s, but also important changes in the character of social and cultural life.

Introduction

In this chapter, I argue that in the current phase of social development, a crisis of exhaustion of the biosphere may be beginning to radicalize segments, or ‘fractions’ of what I call the class of managerial cadre – the auxiliary, executive arm of the capitalist class properly speaking.

The capitalist ruling class is the owner of capital, who by its restless quest for high-yield assets decides the direction of social development. The cadre are the paid functionaries overseeing that development in the economy and society at large, integrating all its technical, educational, and other aspects, and as organic intellectuals, providing ideological cohesion to the consequences of this particular course. Thus, when capitalist discipline is effectively imposed on a global scale, the cadre will be involved in managing globalization in all its aspects, from actual transnational business operations and training other managers, via propaganda praising the blessings of free trade and payments, to organizing forms of ‘global governance’. In the process, certain fractions of the cadre are in a position to observe, at close range, current developments from a different angle than that of the stock market operator. And what they see is not necessarily encouraging. Indeed as Anthony Hopkins playing Nixon in Oliver Stone's movie says to his First Lady, ‘It's not pretty, Buddy! It's not pretty!’

The effect of the world-embracing operation of capital creates complex webs of interaction, a socialization of labour on a planetary scale.