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https://aerion.com.au/blog/5-reasons-why-the-government-should-fund-local-start-ups/#:~:text=Government%20funding%20is%20important%20for,services%20that%20other%20businesses%20need

If you’re a start-up owner, you know how difficult it can be to get funding. Banks are hesitant to give out loans to businesses that don’t have a proven track record, and venture capitalists often want a large stake in the company in exchange for their investment. So where does that leave the little guy? Start-ups are the bread and butter of the American Dream. They’re what make our economy innovative and always moving forward. But not all start-ups are created equal. Some have more difficulty than others making ends meet, which is where government funding comes in. Queensland is a great example of how government should support start-ups. They recently announced a new $24 million Enterprise Acceleration Fund that will invest in growing startups across the sunshine state. What is Government Funding? Government funding, also known as public financing, is money that comes from either the local, state or federal government to be used for a specific project or purpose. This can come in the form of grants, contracts, loans, or even insurance. Start-ups can apply for government funding through agencies such as the Small Business Administration or the Department of Commerce. So, why should the government fund start-ups? Here are a few different reasons. 1. Government Funding Helps Start-Ups Survive and Grow One of the main reasons why government funding is so important for start-ups is because it allows them to survive during tough times. Every business goes through ups and downs, but start-ups often have less margin for error than larger businesses. This is because they’re constantly reinvesting whatever they make back into the company in order to keep things going. Government funding can act as a safety net for start-ups during difficult periods. It can help them stay afloat long enough to weather the storm and come out on the other side stronger than ever before. This type of stability is essential for young businesses and can often mean the difference between success and failure. 2. Government Funding Gives Start-Ups Access to Important Resources Another reason why government funding is so important for start-ups is because it gives them access to important resources that they would otherwise not have access to. Start-ups often lack the capital and connections necessary to get off the ground, which puts them at a serious disadvantage from the very beginning. Government funding can level the playing field by giving start-ups access to important resources like capital, mentorship, and networking opportunities. This can help them get their business up and running sooner, which gives them a better chance at success in the long run. 3. Government Funding boosts Local Economies by Creating Jobs Government funding is important for start-ups because it helps boost local economies by creating jobs. Start-ups don’t just provide jobs for the people who work at the company—they also often create jobs indirectly by providing products or services that other businesses need. This ripple effect can have a major impact on local economies and should be taken into consideration when making decisions about funding. 4. Start-ups Drive Innovation Start-ups are all about innovation. They are constantly coming up with new and better ways to do things. This spirit of innovation is what drives the economy forward and keeps us competitive in the global marketplace. When the government funds start-ups, they are investing in the future of our economy. 5. Start-ups Grow the Tax Base Start-ups don’t just create jobs; they also grow the tax base. As start-ups become successful, they begin to generate revenue for local, state, and federal governments through payroll taxes, income taxes, and other commercial activity taxes. This additional revenue can be used to fund important public goods like education and infrastructure. Bottom line Government funding can be a great way for start-ups to get the capital they need to grow their businesses. In addition, these programs often offer other perks, such as access to business mentors and advice from experienced entrepreneurs. So, if you’re having trouble finding funding through traditional channels, don’t forget to look into government assistance programs – you may be surprised at what’s available. The bottom line is that government funding is essential for start-ups if we want to continue promoting innovation and economic growth in our country. Start-ups provide jobs, drive economic growth, and promote innovation, but they can’t do it without help from government programs designed to support them.

Canada’s emerging technology sector is a pillar of our future growth and prosperity. A successful tech industry creates innovation to enhance our lives and grow our economy, including through financial returns to investors and the creation of high paying jobs. Everyone recognizes this great potential, leading us into a global competition for the highly educated and mobile talent that can bring these benefits to our communities. The key to attracting and developing a growing technology sector is Venture Capital: the fuel to keep this engine moving forward. What Has Been Going on So Far? In 2014, the Government of Canada launched the Venture Capital Action Plan (VCAP) to stimulate investment in Canada’s emerging technology sector. Kensington was proud to have been selected as one of the firms to manage a VCAP fund, and has raised and invested approximately $300 million in the intervening years. VCAP was widely viewed as a success for Canada’s tech sector, although the work is not finished: more remains to be done to solidify these gains in our market. Following the success of VCAP, the Government has launched a new program to attract more investors into our Venture Capital market. The new Venture Capital Catalyst Initiative (VCCI) is backing the creation of new private sector funds-of-funds with a lead investment from the Business Development Bank of Canada. Private investors will invest $2.50 for every dollar invested by the Government, to leverage the impact of taxpayer funds. The program is expected to inject over a billion dollars into the Canadian market to be deployed into new emerging tech companies. The Government conducted a competitive selection process and, once again, Kensington is very proud to have been chosen as a VCCI fund manager. For investors, the appeal of venture capital is the possibility of out-sized gains in brand new companies that can change the world. Typically, most of these gains occur while the companies are still private and not available on any stock exchange. Most investors find it very difficult to get in early when the real money is made. At these stages, investments in individual companies can be very risky and difficult to identify and evaluate, and many opportunities that appear to be very promising can crash and fail. Venture Capital is the classic “high risk, high reward” play: it is essential to have experienced hands and a diversified portfolio. The VCCI fund-of-funds is a unique opportunity for investors to balance the risk/reward equation in their favour. In a diversified fund-of-funds, investors will own a slice of more than 150 different companies spanning different subsectors, investment stages and geographic regions. Further, the 30% investment from the Government of Canada is subordinate to private sector investors, acting as a cushion against potential losses. As a result, the overall risk to investors in a VCCI fund is substantially reduced. The Canadian Venture Capital Landscape The past few years have seen tremendous growth in the Canadian tech sector, with new company formation, total investment dollars and job creation all rising steadily. The CVCA — Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, reports that almost $1 billion was invested in 166 companies across Canada during Q2 2018, representing the third time in the past 18 months that quarterly investment pacing has reached this level. We see strong anecdotal evidence supporting this continuing growth cycle beyond the hard financial numbers: Amazon has identified Toronto as a short-listed candidate for its new second headquarters; Silicon Valley Bank has announced the opening of a Canadian bank to support its growing activity in Canada; Google’s Sidewalk Labs has chosen Toronto for the development of its “smart city” project. At Kensington, we see continued growth ahead as several new technologies move from exploration and research to commercial deployment. The most important driver of the current global technology cycle is artificial intelligence/machine learning, as software developers become more adept at creating applications that can derive useful insights from massive data sets, with the ability to get better results as these algorithms learn over time. Canada is a market leader in AI/ML, with leading global research centres at Toronto’s Vector Institute, Montreal’s Element AI and Google’s DeepMind project at the University of Alberta. We see AI/ML as a foundational new technology with lots of open field opportunities ahead. Additional sub-sectors such as industrial automation, cybersecurity, fintech, transportation, IoT and digital media continue to spawn new companies, with new opportunities arising every day, building on the success of each new technology development.

As an Air Force Captain charged with distributing R&D money to private companies, Jason Rathje observed plenty of overlap between the innovations that the military, industry leaders and academic institutions were pursuing. He even helped create a consortium to bring these groups together. Still, he found that the set of firms interested in partnering with the government was often surprisingly narrow. Which made him wonder: What was holding companies back from pursuing relationships with the government? “I went around and interviewed a bunch of VC groups,” he says as he sits in a Stanford coffee shop nursing a mid-afternoon coffee. “And they told me: ‘If you’re a startup, one: Don’t ever have the government as your first customer. And two: Only go to the government after you have a complete product to sell.’” Clearly, the sense from Silicon Valley venture capitalists was that early-stage startups had more to lose by partnering with the government than they had to gain. But given his experiences funding private firms from the government side, Rathje suspected that the actual picture was more complicated. Government funding sometimes offers more than just money, including access to advanced national laboratories and internal government information. To dig into quantitative data about public-private partnerships, Rathje came to Stanford University’s Ph.D program in Management Science and Engineering. Working with his advisor Riitta Katila, a professor of Management Science and Engineering, he focused his research on how governments and private companies (particularly startups) interact when pursuing technological innovation. Here’s what we already know: Government and private companies have worked together to advance recent technologies like autonomous vehicles (Ford engineers David Hall and Jim McBride introduced rotating lidar in 2005 via DARPA’s Grand Challenge). Government funding sometimes offers more than just money, including access to advanced national laboratories and internal government information. Government funding often leads to more government funding, and can result in firms that are less engaged with the broader commercial market. “Mission-based” agencies like the Department of Defense and NASA — which have significant purchasing power — can serve as the lead market for new technologies. Recently, companies in sectors like AI (Palantir) and private space exploration (SpaceX) have been able to leverage early government funding to find competitive advantages and simultaneously grow both public and private business streams. Measuring the Effects of Government Funding So when is it a good idea for a young firm to pursue government funding? In a recent working paper, Rathje set out to investigate how public-private R&D partnerships affect innovation, in particular. Innovation might, on the surface, seem like an easy thing to measure, but it’s actually quite difficult. Innovation isn’t a linear path, and a technology that seems revolutionary in a cultural sense can be very simple on a technical level. Public-private R&D collaborations that emerge from government grants tend to produce more disruptive invention than private firms inventing on their own. To map innovation, Rathje turned to one of the few massive and — crucially — interlinked datasets that captures technical innovation: patents. Individually, a patent is a description of a single unique invention. But almost every patent cites previous patents, and is in turn cited by subsequent patents, sometimes hundreds of them. The result is a complex web that serves as an imperfect but useful map of how technology advances. Examining US patent data from 1982 to 2012, he studied over 33,000 patents that resulted from public-private R&D collaborations. He then analyzed the data by tracking patterns in patent citations, an accepted standard for determining the nature of the emergent technology. Two of his findings, in particular, will catch the ears of early-stage startups: Public-private R&D collaborations that emerge from government grants tend to produce more disruptive invention than private firms inventing on their own. Public-private R&D collaborations that emerge from cooperative agreements lead to more impactful innovation than a private firm acting on its own. Impactful technologies, Rathje explains, generate direct market value. A disruptive technology, on the other hand, radically changes the technological field and makes previous technology effectively obsolete. A simpler way to think about it: When you’re pursuing an impactful technology, your goal is to design a more effective ball. A disruptor, by contrast, is proposing an entirely new kind of ball that will require changing the rules of the game. Government funding comes in many forms, but much of Rathje’s research focuses on the implications of three sorts of R&D funding: grants, cooperative agreements and contracts. Each type of relationship, he finds, has important implications for companies that partner with government funders. Disruption: Granted If you’re imagining an aspiring disruptor as a lone figure with a singular, novel view of the future, think again. In actuality, disruptors often travel in packs. “Even in nascent markets, everybody has competitors,” says Rathje. There are always a few players swirling around the same opportunity, working on similar products and approaching the problem in similar ways. In academic circles, that’s called “isomorphism” — the tendency of companies in a particular ecosystem to gravitate toward similar solutions. And that, Rathje finds, is where government grants can be useful. “Instead of, ‘How can the government fund what I want to do?’, it’s: ‘How can I engage with the government to do something different?’” he observes. Grants tend to emerge from science organizations like the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health, and focus on reporting scientific results rather than delivering fully realized products. “When you fund science, there’s a lot less restrictions,” Rathje observes. Beyond the required reporting, there are no concrete deliverables. Because they’re geared toward scientific exploration rather than commercial product development, a common misperception is that most grant opportunities go to research institutions rather than private firms. The reason grants tend to generate novel, disruptive inventions, Rathje suspects, is because of that very scientific autonomy. Companies can tailor their scientific research to explore concepts beyond the scope of their core day-to-day business, coming up with inventions that might propel their own business in the long run, and also potentially open up entirely new technological streams. Because they’re geared toward scientific exploration rather than commercial product development, a common misperception is that most grant opportunities go to research institutions rather than private firms. Yes, research institutions make heavy use of government grants, and we’ve certainly seen many disruptive inventions come from universities. A NASA-funded 1989 California Institute of Technology patent for a fiber optic voice/data network perfectly illustrates what grant-funded disruptive technology looks like. The patent itself speaks to the limited use cases for the technology at the time, describing it as “an asynchronous, high-speed, fiber optic local area network originally developed for tactical environments with additional benefits for other environments such as spacecraft, and the like.” Fast forward 25 years, and fiber optic LAN networks weren’t uncommon on college campuses and offices. But a company trying to commercialize that technology in the early 1990s would have been decades too far ahead of the curve. In actuality, many companies also receive government grants. Only companies are eligible for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, for example, which primarily funds companies via grants and distributes around $2 billion dollars each year to small businesses in the US. “Grants can range from pretty small to pretty large,” Rathje observes. Even within a single funding program, awards can differ greatly. The smallest 2018 award for the U.S. Geological Survey’s 3D Elevation Program was about $23,000, while the largest was just over $1 million. But companies rarely pursue a single government-funded project in isolation. In 2015, the Los Angeles Times reported that Elon Musk’s three companies — Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX — had collectively pulled in $4.9 billion dollars in government support (meaning grants, but also things like tax breaks and discounted loans). Making an Impact Cooperative agreements are similar to grants, but involve additional layers of government oversight and participation. A grants.gov blog lays out the basics: “In a cooperative agreement…federal employees participate more closely in performing the program. When you read ‘cooperative,’ think working ‘side-by-side.’” In some cases, government partnerships provide the sort of advanced “smart capital” that even the most specialized VC firms won’t be able to supply. In these cases, there’s less autonomy, but cooperative agreements generally mean gaining more access to government technology and expertise, which can provide a competitive advantage. “It’s a government smart capital play,” Rathje says. In some cases, government partnerships provide the sort of advanced “smart capital” that even the most specialized VC firms won’t be able to supply. “I love the national laboratory system,” Rathje says, pointing to places like the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which hosts the world’s second-most-powerful supercomputer. “I think they are an amazing resource. Engaging in these cooperative agreements is a great way to gain access.” In his dataset, a Photon Energy, Inc. patent for a thin-film photovoltaic device — developed in partnership with the Department of Energy — is a classic example of an impactful technology. It cites a significant body of previous work, including numerous Texas Instruments patents, and is in turn cited in over 100 subsequent patents. In other words, it’s an important incremental advancement in solar power. “The research shows very clearly: If new technologies actually come out of the cooperative agreement they’re way more impactful,” observes Rathje. “And, with respect to other partnership types, companies have a much more direct path to commercialization.” A Contract to Innovate The government uses contracts to purchase goods and services, which doesn’t sound much like a research and development activity. But sometimes, especially when a government agency is interested in bringing an immature technology into production, it will issue a “cost-plus” contract. These sorts of contracts cover the cost of development, plus a fixed profit margin that maxes out at 15%. (Not a very exciting margin in the world of high-risk technology R&D project, Rathje points out. Plus, the government often claims intellectual property rights in these cost-plus contracts.) Young firms with an actual product or service to sell might also pursue a simple procurement contract, and use that revenue to fund further growth. This is the preferred arrangement of “mission-based” entities like NASA and the Department of Defense. The margins on such contracts can be much larger, Rathje finds, but they can also be risky for startups trying to quickly innovate and scale. “If you’re a startup, the DoD or NASA can be really interesting resources, both in terms of money and technical talent,” he says. “But if you’re a young firm and you devote your internal resources to their needs, you could be limiting your ability to allocate those resources to other opportunities.” In one paper that he’s working on, he spoke to a start-up that won a NASA contract for extraterrestrial imagery analysis. “And they said: Looking back on it, we should have never taken the contract,” Rathje says. “It took them 30% off of their target in terms of their R&D strategy.” The Big Question: What About Growth? As funders, VC firms are powerfully motivated to help companies grow — IPOs and acquisitions are what make their investments pay off. In the case of the government, on the other hand, the goal might be to pursue exploratory research or to purchase equipment, but the goal is rarely to directly promote the health and growth of private companies. “The company needs to scale along with the technology.” And yet, Rathje argues, a government mindset that thinks more about private company growth could create a more robust and sustainable ecosystem for public-private innovation. “The company needs to scale along with the technology,” he says. Last year, Rathje’s own Air Force working group partnered with the Air Force’s SBIR program to implement a new, commercially-oriented approach to innovating with companies. In less than 9 months, they awarded $80 million to private firms. “What I’m dealing with in my Air Force job is: How do we deploy some of this in the DoD to get around some of these things that are detrimental to firm growth?” Rathje says. “How do I implement changes in my world to better adapt to the environment in the commercial sector?” So far, that strategy has meant incentivizing fund matching and pursuing products and services that are useful beyond just the government, so companies don’t need to stretch their R&D so far to fit the government’s specifications. “They can get more money from us if they bring in other partners: a VC, or another government funder, private equity, etc.,” he says. “And rather than developing an exquisite solution just for us, we maybe want to use something that’s available commercially, and just deploy it differently.” His perspective suggests one final question to ask of a potential government funder: How much are you thinking about my own company’s growth? If the government partner understands and supports that imperative, then aligning your R&D priorities with the government’s needs becomes much easier.

USAID proves it works.

Venture Capital Action Plan In 2013, the Government announced the Venture Capital Action Plan (VCAP). It is a market oriented approach to put Canada's VC industry on the path to sustainability, make it more globally competitive, and increase the availability of financing for innovative Canadian firms. Under VCAP, the Government is deploying $390 million in new capital. In particular, VCAP has made available: $340 million to establish and recapitalize four large scale private sector-led funds of funds in partnership with institutional and corporate strategic investors, as well as interested provinces; and $50 million in four existing high-performing VC funds in Canada. The four VCAP funds-of-funds attracted significant investments from a diverse set of investors that included pension funds, high-net-worth individuals, corporations, banks, and the Governments of Ontario and Quebec. Including the federal government investment, the four funds-of-funds raised $1.356 billion. Of that, $904 million came from private sector investors. Funds-of-funds selected under VCAP Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund Teralys Capital Innovation Fund Kensington Venture Fund HarbourVest Canada Growth Fund High-performing funds selected under VCAP Lumira Capital II Real Ventures III CTI Life Sciences II Relay Ventures III VCAP data and impact VCAP capital is now flowing to leading VC funds to help high-potential start-ups grow and innovate. The Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada will be releasing regular updates on how the funds raised under VCAP are being distributed, and the companies benefiting from these funds.

This article examines enterprises funded by government-sponsored venture capitalists (GVCs). We find that enterprises funded by both GVCs and private venture capitalists (PVCs) obtain more investment than enterprises funded purely by PVCs, and much more than those funded purely by GVCs. Also, markets with more GVC funding have more VC funding per enterprise and more VC-funded enterprises, suggesting that GVC finance largely augments rather than displaces PVC finance. There is also a positive association between mixed GVC/PVC funding and successful exits, as measured by initial public offerings (IPOs) and acquisitions, attributable largely to the additional investment. 1. Introduction Governments around the world have taken a strong interest in venture capital (VC). This interest stems in part from the important role venture capitalists have played in the development of some of the world’s most influential enterprises. More broadly, VC provides significant support in many countries for entrepreneurial enterprises that are major sources of innovation, employment, and productivity growth. In addition, there is a sizable body of research in economics emphasizing potential market failures associated with innovation and entrepreneurial finance—market failures that might create a reasonable economic rationale for government intervention in VC markets. 2 It is therefore not surprising that many governments encourage the provision of VC finance to entrepreneurial ventures. The global public sector commitment to VC is substantial, including forgone taxes, outright subsidies, preferential regulation, and public provision of investment capital. In our data, VC firms owned or supported by governments invested over $4 billion per year in privately held enterprises around the world. Over a quarter of all enterprises financed by VC received some government sponsored VC funding. However, there is also considerable resistance, or at least scepticism, regarding the role of government in VC finance as expressed, for example, in Cohen and Noll (1991) and Lerner (2009). Critics doubt whether governments can improve upon private sector VC activity and many fear that government activity in VC markets might be associated with problems arising from political pressures, rent-seeking, and general bureaucratic inefficiency.

And yet, something has changed in this landscape from the initial erasures of Native futurity we drew out in the first chapter. In the narratives of colonial actors like Duncan Campbell Scott, it was absolutely clear that “Indians” were disappearing because their social worlds were being superseded by more “civilized” ways of living and being, ones that these Native subjects would also, inevitably, in the end, adopt (or failing that, perish outright). There was a future. It was simply a settler one. But the nightmare futures of that my Haida interlocutors ward against in their own future-making reach beyond Haida life alone. Environmental collapse, most dramatically, threatens the sustainability of all life; toxins in the land and the waters threaten human lives regardless of their relative indigeneity, race, or gender (e.g. Choy 2011; Crate 2011). Put another way, the impetus for non-Haida (and non-First Nations subjects more generally) to be “united against Enbridge” with their indigenous neighbours comes in no small part because an oil spill also profoundly threatens the lives and livelihoods of non-Aboriginal coastal residents, a fact which Masa Takei, among others, made clear in Chapter 3. Nor is the anxiety that young people might abandon their small town to pursue economic and educational advantage in an urban context limited to reserve communities. Instead, the compulsions of capitalist economic life compel such migrations throughout the globe. The nightmare futures that Haida people constitute alternative futures to ward against are not just future of indigenous erasure under settler colonialism. They are erasures of settler society itself. There is thus an extraordinary political claim embedded in Haida future-making, a claim which gains its power precisely because Haida future-making as we have seen it does not (perhaps cannot) escape from the larger field of settler-colonial determination. Instead, in Haida future-making we find the implicit assertion that Haida people can make futures that address the dilemmas of Haida and settler life alike, ones that can at least “navigate,” to borrow Appadurai’s phrasing, towards possible futures that do not end in absolute erasure. If Povinelli and Byrd are correct and settler liberal governance makes itself possible and legitimate through a perpetual deferral of the problems of the present, then part of the power of Haida future-making is to expose the threatening non-futures that might emerge out of this bracketed present, to expose as lie the liberal promise of a good life always yet to come and to attempt to constitute alternatives. It is no coincidence that we find this in the midst of a struggle over sovereignty. And this not just in the sense of the Council of the Haida Nation’s ongoing assertion of its sovereign right to govern the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii on behalf of all Haida people, as we saw in Chapter 5. Rather, as Joanne Barker has argued, over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century sovereignty has emerged as a: particularly valued term within indigenous scholarship and social movements and through the media of cultural production. It [is] a term around which analyses of indigenous histories and cultures were organized and whereby indigenous activists articulate their agendas for social change (Barker 2005:18). Through the assertion of sovereignty, indigenous political leaders, activists and scholars refute “the dominant notion that indigenous people [are] merely one among many ‘minority groups’ under the administration of state social service and welfare programs.” Instead, “sovereignty defines indigenous people with concrete rights to self-government, territorial integrity, and cultural autonomy under international law” (18). The trouble is, of course, that indigenous claims to sovereignty are always made within the context of colonial nation-states, ones whose own legitimacy is put at considerably risk both by the prospect of self-determining indigenous Nations (re)-emerging within their boundaries and the troubling of their own historical narratives of sovereign rights (cf: Comaroff and Comaroff 2003b). (One of these narratives, which reinterpreted indigenous lands as terra nullius and thus open to occupation, we’ve encountered already in Chapter 3). Thus, while sovereignty might indeed “define” indigenous peoples with concrete rights to territorial Title and self-determination, in theory equal under international law to the states who also lay claim to their territories, that definition does not in and of itself make possible the practice of this sovereignty. In this regard settler states such as Canada have shifted in their response to First Peoples’ sovereignty claims from outright rejection to a set of policies of selective recognition,5 but even the latter still positions Native nations as being subject to the authority and oversight (if not the structural forms) of the state. This means, as we have seen in Chapter 5, that indigenous governments such as the Council of the Haida Nation are in a precarious position, attempting to constitute their own sovereign authority without access to many of the conventional means of sovereignty in Western political thought – e.g., the monopoly on legitimate violence (Weber 1946), decisive authority to make and enact law (Schmitt 2005), or exclusive territorial control (Brown 2010; cf: Hobbes 1994). Alongside this precarity is the equally anxious question of whether or not sovereignty is even an appropriate analytical to center indigenous rights around precisely because it is historically a Western concept, one that had been drawn on to dispossess indigenous peoples over the course of settler colonial history (Barker 2005:18–19). (Indeed, the very next essay in Barker’s edited volume, by Mohawk scholar Taiake Alfred, categorically rejects sovereignty as an inappropriate tool for indigenous political assertions for these reasons and, also, because it draws attention away from developing and furthering “genuinely” Aboriginal political modes of thought (Alfred 2005; cf: Alfred 2009). The fact that sovereignty remains such a preeminent concept in the struggle for indigenous rights even though it is both epistemologically problematic and politically constrained has meant that there has been a recent push in both anthropology and indigenous studies to “widen” the definition of sovereignty, so that it might encompass multiple forms of indigenous social, political and legal practice outside of the conventional purview of “sovereign power” (e.g. Cattelino 2008; Richland 2011; Simpson 2000; Simpson 2014). Or, as Joanne Barker puts it: There is no fixed meaning for what sovereignty is – what it means by definition, what it implies in public debate, or how it has been conceptualized in international, nation, or indigenous law. Sovereignty – and its related histories, perspectives, and identities – is embedded within the specific social relations in which it is invoked and given meaning. How and when it emerges and functions are determined by the “located” political agendas and cultural perspectives of those who rearticulate it into public debate or political document to do a specific work of opposition, invitation, or accommodation. It is no more possible to stabilize what sovereignty means and how it matters to those who invoke it than it is to forget the historical and cultural embeddedness of indigenous peoples’ multiple and contradictory political perspectives and agendas for empowerment, decolonization, and social justice (Barker 2005:21, emphasis original). The opening up of sovereignty as flexible, multiple, and subject to all manner of diverse rearticulations carries particular weight (and, perhaps, ambiguity) since, as a historical concept in Western political theory, sovereignty was overwhelmingly concerned with closure. As Wendy Brown argues in her Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, the classic vision of sovereign power rests in the capacity to divide the inside from the outside, to make borders around a people – a “nation” – and separate that people from those outside it. Thus Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction, for instance, or even John Locke’s consistent preoccupation with fences as a way of marking the existence of territory (Brown 2010; cf: Schmitt 1996; Locke 1988). The historical conditions of indigenous sovereignty claims in the context of settler colonialism make such absolute closures impossible for indigenous peoples. We might add, though, that their persistent presence also challenges the closure of the settler nation-state. Indeed, this is part of Brown’s point. The very fact that we see ever more spectacular performances of sovereign power on the part of contemporary nation-states – e.g., the titular “walls” that are being constructed along the borders of an increasing number of states - is a sign of the very insecurity of their political authority (Brown 2010).6 The conditions of settler colonial sovereignty, in other words, may be rather more “open,” and thus closer to those of indigenous “nation-within-nations,” then they may at first appear. If this means, in turn, that the future of settler political life is becoming as uncertain as the future for indigenous life has always been since the advent of settlement, then this means only what we have already begun to see: the dilemmas that Haida people confront in their future-making practices are also the dilemmas facing settler society. Take Chapter 4, in which the absence of any “one” definitive governing entity compels the constitution of an aspirational framework of accountability which could, were it realized, render navigable Haida relations to the many governments that claim their loyalties. As I hinted at there, such dilemmas are not restricted to the Haida sociopolitical world; rather, they may in fact be endemic to contemporary democratic societies and the multiple forms of governance (licit and otherwise) that emerge therein. In suggesting that there are Haida ways of refiguring a shared Haida-settler set of contemporary problematics, we might think of Haida future-making as simultaneously an instantiation of the multiple, flexible and always contingently located practices of sovereignty to which Barker points and a different way of thinking about indigenous political potentiality. In the former sense, Haida future-making is without doubt concerned with carving out spaces in which Haida existence can continue, expand, and change without losing the capacity to reproduce itself as, precisely, Haida existence. Thus the processes of homecoming we explored in Chapter 2, or Chapter 5’s explicitly political attempts to establish control over the islands for future generations. If the absence of indigenous sovereignty is the absence of the capacity of an indigenous people to (self)-determine their own futures, then the constitution of Haida futures can be seen exactly as sovereign work, whether in the overt sense of the Council of the Haida Nation’s assertions or the somewhat more implicit mode of Alice Stevens’ proposed mass adoptions. Significant here, though, is the fact that these acts of future-making carry meanings beyond their status as “responses” to the social and political dilemmas of contemporary Haida life. Thus Alice Stevens’ adoptions bring “hippie” children into the framework of Haida kinship relations, in one sense neutralizing their potential threat, but also constituting a complex new network of social relations between Haida and non-Haida whose potential significances go well beyond the protection of Haida territory and resources; thus the Council of the Haida Nation emerges as a “state-like” governing entity through its authorizing promise to “take care” of the islands, but in so doing takes on a series of new roles in Haida political life whose full consequences remain to be seen. If it is a sovereign action to envision an opening of possible futures for Haida people, then this very openness might also exceed the boundaries of sovereignty as a problematic for indigenous people even as it responds to them. Which is also, perhaps, why Haida futures seem so consistently to sketch out social, ecological, and political fields that encompass non-Haida; more, that are futures for Canada as well as for the Haida people living within the nation-state’s borders. Or, at least, futures that have the capacity to be so. What would it mean to figure an indigenous sovereignty that speaks beyond itself, one that promises to invert the order of settler domination through reconfiguring the shared futures of indigenous and settler peoples? This would not be a sovereignty premised on territorial closure, or even absolute political autonomy. It would, however, decisively overturn any settler colonial anticipations of the inevitable erasure of Native peoples. Quite the opposite, it would position indigenous practices of anticipation, aspiration, certainty, and anxiety at the forefront of contemporary modes of political imagination. Unsettling Futures A question remains, however. Could such a refiguring of the temporal and political horizon of settler and indigenous relationships remain possible even if the futures that indigenous people work to constitute remain unrealized in the settler colonial present? Or, put another way, we must always be careful not to conflate a capacity to form new futures for settler nation-states with the actual materializations of these futures. The Haida futures that I have discussed, even as they promise possible ways of navigating – of restructuring, even – the settler-Haida present, remain firmly bound by the colonial constraints of this present. But perhaps the stakes here have never been about overthrowing the Canadian colonial order outright. Rather, what I hope this dissertation has shown is that Haida future-making has the capacity to unsettle the settler colonial present, to challenge its received categories and demonstrate how, slowly, gradually, Haida people are reconfiguring its terms through the work of producing the future. Certainly, the sheer fact of Haida futurity should put to the lie any further notion that Haida people exist only to replicate their past or live only in the deferral of their eventual disappearance. The future is alive and well in Old Massett, although this does not meant that it is not also a site of profound anxieties. In working to ward off those anxieties through the juxtaposition of nightmare futures against their more desirable alternatives, then, Haida people unsettle the epistemological foundations of the forms of settler colonialism and liberalism against which Byrd and Povinelli write. At the same time (if you’ll pardon the pun), I think we can see the social work that futuremaking does iteratively, as a gradual reshaping of the actual conditions of Canadian society. Here I borrow Judith Butler’s suggestion, following Foucault, that the regulatory norms of society function only through their consistent and unstable reiteration (and materialization) in everyday social life.7 From this perspective, the ways in which Haida people work within and even reiterate the constraints and demands of Canadian settler mainstream society can also slowly and strategically shift those very constraints and demands, materializing a HaidaCanadian future that might in fact be quite different from the present even as it does not ever fully “escape” from its dilemmas. Perhaps the most unsettling potential of all here lies simply in the ways in which Haida people incorporate the conditions of the settler colonial present as being paths towards Haida futures. Not vanished, or vanquished. Ongoing.

The logics of elimination and expansion are rooted in the colonial ideology of ‘progress’ – the steady and inevitable march towards an evolutionary apex of western civilisation. The ideology of progress, in turn, is inflected with a logic of exceptionalism, which rationalizes, and renders essential, inevitable and heroic the self supersession of settler colonialism. As Collins explains, exceptionalism gives settler colonialism its sense of purpose, mission, righteousness and, indeed, destiny. Settlers, as ‘chosen people,’34 are charged with ‘a daring, necessary and even altruistic undertaking.’35 At the same time, settler colonialism relies on denial of the ‘hidden structures of violence that extend into the present.’36 Collins borrows Cohen’s taxonomy of denial.37 ‘Literal denial’ denies the ‘raw facts’ of atrocity or wrongdoing Interpretative denial invests the raw facts with different meanings. Implicatory denial denies neither the facts nor their common meanings, but denies the moral, psychological or political implications that flow from the wrong. Cultural denial encourages social disregard or normalization of wrong. For Collins, all of these modes of denial characterize settler colonies. Mississauga Nishnaag scholar and artist, Leanne Simpson, captures the imbrication of exceptionalism and denial in Canada’s historical narrative: Mistakes were made. Land was lost. Children were stolen. Cultures were adapted. Treaties didn’t work out. We [settlers] meant well. We tried our best. Progress is inevitable, and while it is regretful you [Indigenous peoples] didn’t have the intelligence or fortitude to be successful, that’s life. Maybe we’ll try and be nicer and help more.38 Denial, in its myriad forms, is imperative to the invisibilization and trivialization of elimination, but is also foundational to self-supersession: ‘The most basic form of denial,’ writes Collins, ‘is that which enables members of the dominant culture in settler societies to examine their surroundings and view no evidence of colonization.’39 Indeed, settler societies are founded on a disavowal of originary violence, the ongoing disavowal of Indigenous presence on the land and the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty,40 while asserting settler sovereignty. The imbrication of eliminationism, expansionism, exceptionalism and denial, and their culmination in settler self supersession renders a picture of settler colonialism as a totalizing, perfectionistic project that strives to extinguish Indigenous futurity and establish a settled future. Importantly, settler colonialism is our ‘colonial present,’41 not a finished project ‘neatly located in the past.’42 Understanding settler colonialism through this theoretical constellation raises questions about what it means to engage in transitional justice in settler democracies. I turn, now, to a paradigmatic concept of transitional justice as a heuristic device to guide an analysis of the limits of transitional justice in the face of settler colonialism.

Of course, constantly reminding people of their impending deaths is not necessarily a great long-term business strategy. In a new review on terror management theory, psychological scientists Jacob Juhl (University of Southampton) and Clay Routledge (North Dakota State University) find that reminders of death can provoke anxiety and harm psychological well-being.

Mulvey Gareth and Davidson Neil- Profs @ U. of Glasgow, UK; “Between the crises: Migration politics and the three periods of neoliberalism”; [TMS—GK]

Vanguard and social neoliberalism emerged sequentially, but once the latter had modified the overall nature of the regime, it became possible for governments to alternate. The return of the Conservatives to office in the United Kingdom, first in Coalition with the Liberal Democrats (2010) then as a majority government (2015), might suggest that crisis neoliberalism is simply a return to vanguard politics, but this would be simplistic. Vanguardism cannot be revived in its original form, partly because the division between vanguard and social neoliberalism has to a certain extent broken down, but mainly because most of the original economic objectives of vanguard neoliberalism were achieved. That said, a return of aspects of vanguardism may be more evident in migration practice, to which we return below. ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’, wrote the German legal theorist and future Nazi Carl Schmitt (2006 [1922]: 5) in 1920. By this, Schmitt meant that sovereigns, which could be collective bodies, were defined by the ability to suspend established legal norms during moments, which they deemed to be crises or emergencies. In effect, the decision to which Schmitt refers involves identifying those groups which are to be treated as outside the law. Much of the more critical securitization work points to migrants being placed outside of the law through the employment of ‘extraordinary measures’ (see, for example, Bigo 2002). At the dawn of neoliberalism, left commentators predicted that a new form of ‘exceptional state’ was emerging in response to the crisis (Hall et al. 1978). Their error was partly one of timing and partly in relation to where the exception lay. For what is being constructed are not ‘states of exception’ but rather regimes of exception – involving both preemptive repression and diversionary scapegoating of groups ranging from people with disabilities to the entire Muslim population and, increasingly, to migrants from both inside and outside of the EU.

Todd Dufresne- Canadian social and cultural theorist best known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history of psychoanalysis. He is Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario; Clara Sacchetti- PhD York University, Social Anthropology; 2013; The Economy as Cultural System: Theory, Capitalism, and Crisis; ; [TMS—GK]

The emergence of biopower and individuality Hal Niedzviecki (2004) has written extensively about the recent shift in capitalism toward the active production of individuality. He argues that the requirement to express our uniqueness has become so intense that individuality is, ironically, now the new conformity, a kind of inescapable commandment (see p. xvi). He points to the rise of the internet (and now social media), do-it-yourself culture, reality television, the use of rebellion in advertising as well as a whole host of celebrity chefs, bartenders, hairstylists, bloggers, and other self-styled experts who have achieved fame through their own “special” talents as part of a general cultural trend to recognize everyone’s uniqueness. This expectation of nonconformity and uniqueness highlights the intensification of previous instantiations of biopower that worked to produce individuals in specific homogenizing ways. Foucault (1978) argues, for instance, that since the eighteenth century, capitalism has employed biopower to direct “the performances of the body ... with attention to the processes of life” (Foucault 1978, 139). The emergence of biopower is tied to capitalism and its requirement for a productive, efficient, healthy, and sane population by and through its continuous and routine management of the human body. This corresponds to capitalism’s deep-going concern to generate a vast, efficient, controllable, and productive workforce that is indispensible to its overall success (see Kingwell, chapter 7). The history of capitalism’s reliance on biopower is bound up with a corresponding history of capitalism’s seemingly never-ending expansion that results from its need to increase profits, control natural, and human resources, and promote continuous growth. Expansion is necessary to capitalism because it is only by extending its limits (i.e. the places that it operates, the nature that it uses, and the people that it exploits) that it can absorb additional resources and grow profits year after year. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) point out, capitalism’s quest for expansionism is evident in its relationship to a colonial project that sought vast material and financial wealth through the “superexploitation” of colonial territories and the indigenous peoples who inhabit them (Hardt and Negri 2000, 122). Capitalism must, in other words, push against its limits in order to grow and this has historically been achieved through territorial expansion that requires an engagement with the people who live in those territories. To manage this colonial situation, biopower was put into play to hierarchically order colonized populations and organize indigenous peoples in opposition to a supposedly superior colonializing power (see Morgensen 2011). Biopower was fundamental to capitalism here because it functioned to produce specific kinds of individuals that facilitated the management and hierarchization of large and diverse populations (what Foucault refers to as to as the process of individualization i.e. the creation of one’s gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality as well as workers, bosses, doctors, patients, students, teachers, etc.). Unsurprisingly, as capitalism today continues to extend its limits, its use of biopower has similarly expanded and intensified. Unlike the earliest forms of biopower that “fixed individuals within institutions but did not succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive practices and productive socialization,” the contemporary version of biopower effectively transforms all facets of human life and experience into resources for capitalist exchange (Hardt and Negri 2000, 24). Biopower under contemporary capitalism seeks to manage individuals in increasingly subtle and commonplace ways by engaging each person as a unique individual. Whereas previous forms of capitalism employed biopower to produce fixed, homogeneous identities, biopower under a “postmodern” form of capitalism helps produce “hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges” (Hardt and Negri 2000, xii–xiii). The focus here is on one’s unique and special individuality, an expansion that Foucault calls “the Californian cult of the self,” that now permeates our lives (1983a, 245). Biopower today infiltrates the most mundane, and the most profound, aspects of human life. This is illustrated, for example, in an interest in memoirs as a literary form which gives preference to the personal; the fact that “home is the new work and play space of our time” (Nealon 2008, 86); the popularity of grunge in the 1990s which “was absolutely dedicated to some notion of subjective authenticity and the revelation of personal experience” (Nealon 2008, 87); and “the triumph of student-centred process pedagogies” that, among other things, make “education personally ‘relevant’ to the students” (Nealon 2008, 88). More recently, social media such as Facebook and Twitter amplify such individuality by allowing and encouraging users to widely broadcast their unique preferences and accomplishments. The shift to the production of a multiplicity, and fluidity, of unique identity does not, however, mean that biopower no longer orders, manages, and hierarchically arranges individuals. Instead the spread of biopower coincides with the increased flexibility and adaptability of capitalist regimes of management and hierarchization. And yet, even though biopower may instigate the production of individuality and difference (or uniqueness), it is not necessarily a liberatory practice. For, as Chicchi (2010) points out, biopower seeks to incorporate all facets of human life (such as relationships, emotions, interaction, creativity, cooperation, languages, and communication) into capitalist economics to better control and regulate them. Biopower is thus no longer simply about the creation of a healthy, controllable, sane body; it seeks to manage what could be viewed as mundane aspects of human life, such as relationships, communication, creativity, and problem solving (see Lazzarato 2002; Lucarelli 2010; Marazzi 2008; Virno 2004). More specifically, biopower is integral to the shifting requirements of capitalism that have moved toward what Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) terms “immaterial labour” and the emergence of financialized capitalism. For these reasons, biopower no longer seeks to produce homogeneous conformity but seeks to produce uniqueness, diversity, and difference.

In attempting to theoretically and historically justify the conception of bottom-up, direct democracy assemblies establishing dual power and then supplanting bourgeois rule, Kali Akuno, overall an excellent model of honesty and critical summation, sinks to his one disingenuous line of argumentation: During pre-revolutionary periods an Assembly can function as a genuine ‘dual power’ and assume many of the functions of the government (state). Perhaps the best example of this over the past 10 years comes from the revolutionary movement in Nepal, where the revolutionary forces stimulated and organized Assemblies to act as a direct counterweight to the monarchical government and the military. What is disingenuous here is the use of the vague term “revolutionary forces.” As Akuno knows, the revolutionary forces in question were the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the People’s Liberation Army under its leadership. To say that these forces “stimulated and organized Assemblies” mischaracterizes the way a communist vanguard party organized and led local forms of revolutionary political power involving the oppressed masses in territory liberated by the People’s Liberation Army running the local authorities and the enemy’s police and military out of Dodge. The so-called “Assemblies” were not the main “direct counterweight to the monarchical government and military”— it was the People’s Liberation Army that performed this function. Furthermore, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) never characterized this situation as “dual power,” but as the stage of strategic equilibrium within the strategy of protracted people’s war. It is a telling indication of the inability of direct democracy-style assemblies to ever supplant bourgeois rule that Akuno, referring to this dual power assembly strategy, calls the people’s war in Nepal “perhaps the best example of this over the past 10 years” when this best example directly contradicts his line (and so he distorts the reality and revolutionary strategy in Nepal).

Moreover, a global police state is centrally aimed at coercive exclusion of surplus humanity. The restructuring of world capitalism through globalization has greatly expanded the ranks of the surplus labor population. The processes by which surplus labor is generated have accelerated under globalization. Spatial reorganization has helped transnational capital to break the territorially bound power of organized labor and impose new capital–labor relations based on fragmentation, flexibilization, and the cheapening of labor. Crises provide capital with the opportunity to accelerate the process of forcing greater productivity out of fewer workers. These developments, combined with a massive new round of primitive accumulation and displacement of hundreds of millions, have given rise to a new global army of superfluous labor that goes well beyond the traditional reserve army of labor that Marx discussed. Global capitalism has no direct use for surplus humanity. But indirectly, it holds wages down everywhere and makes new systems of 21st-century slavery possible (on the new slavery, see, i.a., Patel and Moore, 2017, 30). Surplus humanity cannot consume and so does not provide transnational capital with a significant market. Dominant groups face the challenge of how to contain both the real and potential rebellion of surplus humanity. As world capitalism reaches the limits of its extensive expansion, new spaces have to be violently cracked open and the peoples in these spaces must be repressed by a global police state. The mechanisms of coercive exclusion include mass incarceration and the spread of prison-industrial complexes, pervasive policing, anti-immigrant legislation and deportation regimes, and the manipulation of space in new ways so that both gated communities and ghettos are controlled by armies of private security guards and technologically advanced surveillance systems, ubiquitous, often paramilitarized policing, “non-lethal” crowd control methods, and mobilization of the culture industries and state ideological apparatuses to dehumanize victims of global capitalism as dangerous, depraved, and culturally degenerate. States abandon efforts to secure legitimacy among this surplus population, and instead turn to criminalizing the poor and the dispossessed, with tendencies towards genocide in some cases. But these mechanisms also involve ideological campaigns aimed at seduction and passivity among those locked out. The newfound ability of transnational capital to achieve political domination through control over the means of intellectual production, the mass media, the educational system, and the culture industries allows it to achieve a much more profound and complete penetration into the spheres of culture and community, indeed, into the life world itself. Corporate marketing strategies depoliticize through the manipulation of desire and of libido, so that the grievances and frustrated aspirations of the excluded become channeled into petty consumption and flight into fantasy rather than into placing political demands on the system through collective mobilization. In this regard, I observed in my earlier work that the heightened role of political and ideological domination in this digital age through control over media and the flow of images and symbols would make any project of 21st-century fascism more sophisticated and, together with new panoptical surveillance and social control technologies, probably allow it to rely more on selective than generalized repression — unless a revolt from below comes to actually threaten the rule of the TCC. These new modalities of social control and ideological domination blur boundaries, so that there may be a constitutional and normalized neo-fascism (with formal representative institutions, a constitution, political parties and elections), all while the political system is tightly controlled by transnational capital and its representatives and any dissent that actually threatens the system is neutralized if not liquidated (see Robinson and Barrera, 2012). We may see a “withering away” of constitutional order rather than a rupture, if a global police state and the impulse towards 21st century fascism are not contained. The Social Bases of 21st-Century Fascism Twentieth-century fascism took root in an earlier stage of capitalist development, when middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie that represented a significant portion of the population were experiencing a destabilization of their status and the threat of downward mobility into the ranks of the proletariat. Fascist movements offered the ruling groups the ability to successfully compete with mass working-class parties for the allegiance of the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie, although these movements did recruit among the working class as well. These strata came to be seen as the core social base of the fascist movements — instruments in the hands of national capitalist classes attempting to resolve the crisis of capitalism (Rosengarten, 2014). The middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie are strata that own their own means of livelihood and therefore do not have to sell their labor to capital; among them, small shopkeepers, businesspeople, independent artisans and professionals, family farmers, and other small commodity producers. These strata were reduced to small pockets in the cores of world capitalism as proletarianization accelerated in the latter half of the 20th century, and especially in the age of globalization. While analysis of the petty bourgeoisie remains important in assessing current political processes, this class is not numerous enough to form a critical mass that could provide a viable social base for 21st-century fascism to triumph.

My goal in this essay is to argue that base building and dual power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing, and that party organizing can allow this emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the United States. One of the crucial insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the United States is one in which revolution is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for socialist politics. A century of anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed and marginalized that communism has nothing to offer them. The base building emphasis on dual power responds directly to this insight. By building institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to concretely demonstrate that communists can offer the oppressed relief from the horrific conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy recognizes that actually doing the work to serve the people does infinitely more to create a socialist base of popular support than electing democratic socialist candidates or holding endless political education classes can ever hope to do. Dual power is about proving that we have something to offer the oppressed. The question, of course, remains: once we have built a base of popular support, what do we do next? If it turns out that establishing socialist institutions to meet people’s needs does in fact create sympathy towards the cause of communism, how can we mobilize that base? Put simply: in order to mobilize the base which base builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of building a communist party. It is not enough to simply meet people’s needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of dual power in the name of communism. We must refuse covert front organizing and instead have a public face as a communist party. When we build tenants unions, serve the people programs, and other dual power projects, we must make it clear that we are organizing as communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply with establishing endless dual power organizations. We must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in order to make this clear we must adopt party organizing. By “party organizing” I mean an organizational strategy which adopts the party model. Such organizing focuses on building a party whose membership is formally unified around a party line determined by democratic centralist decision making. The party model creates internal methods for holding party members accountable, unifying party member action around democratically determined goals, and for educating party members in communist theory and praxis. A communist organization utilizing the party model works to build dual power institutions while simultaneously educating the communities they hope to serve. Organizations which adopt the party model focus on propagandizing around the need for revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political organizing, empowering local communities to theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing communities to literally fight for their liberation. A party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together, but is a formal organization unified in its fight against capitalism. Party organizing has much to offer the base building movement. By working in a unified party, base builders can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a unified national and international strategy. While the most horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and unique form at the local level, we need to remember that our struggle is against a material base which functions not only at the national but at the international level. The formal structures provided by a democratic centralist party model allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but also allow for a unified strategy to emerge from democratic consensus. Furthermore, party organizing allows for local organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable for their actions. It allows criticism to function not as one independent group criticizing another independent group, but rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity working together to sharpen each other’s strategies and to help correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of the socialist movement within the United States, such accountability is crucial. As a movement which operates within a settler colonial society, imperialist and colonial ideal frequently infect leftist organizing. Creating formal unity and party procedure for dealing with and correcting these ideas allows us to address these consistent problems within American socialist organizing. Having a formal party which unifies the various dual power projects being undertaken at the local level also allows for base builders to not simply meet people’s needs, but to pull them into the membership of the party as organizers themselves. The party model creates a means for sustained growth to occur by unifying organizers in a manner that allows for skills, strategies, and ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows community members who have been served by dual power projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members and participating in the continued growth of base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for educating communities in communist theory and praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with their own local conditions. We also must recognize that the current state of the base building movement precludes the possibility of such a national unified party in the present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a number of already established organizations, it is not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in favor of founding a unified party. Additionally, it would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete unification because it would mean abandoning the organizational contexts in which concrete gains are already being made and in which growth is currently occurring. What is important for base builders to focus on in the current moment is building dual power on a local level alongside building a national movement. This means aspiring towards the possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued local growth. The movement within the Marxist Center network towards some form of unification is positive step in the right direction. The independent party emphasis within the Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive approach. It is important for base builders to continue to explore the possibility of unification, and to maintain unification through a party model as a long term goal. In the meantime, individual base building organizations ought to adopt party models for their local organizing. Local organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment into their organizations, education of community members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of armed and militant party cadres capable of defending dual power institutions from state terror. Dual power institutions must be unified openly and transparently around these organizations in order for them to operate as more than “red charities.” Serving the people means meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing. The party model remains the most useful method for achieving these ends. The use of the party model by local organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most importantly, to mobilize their base of popular support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel economy which exists as an end in and of itself. It is my hope that we will see future unification of the various local base building organizations into a national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at the local level. If local organizations adopt party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national party will have to be the long term goal of the base building movement. Many of the already existing organizations within the base building movement already operate according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, my hope is to suggest that we ought to be explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship between dual power and the party model. Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative economy alongside capitalism, but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism. The long term details of base building and dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the movement finds itself operating within. I hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about base building organizing, and have demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the base building tendency maintains a revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will be worked out over time and are not a good subject for public discussion.

Tyler Hansen- Economics PhD Candidate; October 2021; "Three Essays on The Political Economy of Global Inaction on Climate Change,” University of Massachusetts Amherst Economic PhD Program, Doctoral Dissertations, 2334; ; [TMS—GK]

A revolution would entail halting capital accumulation, the central process of capitalism. The wealth of the capitalist class—those who own most of society's productive resources—would be appropriated, and society's surplus would be controlled collectively by either (1) the workers who produced it, (2) the community in which it was produced, or (3) the entire society. Wealth and income caps would be required to prevent further capital accumulation of individuals and groups. Private wealth is protected by property laws and law enforcement. These laws would have to be changed, which would require control of political institutions. In a democracy like the U.S., control of these institutions can come through elections or by directly taking power, i.e., a coup d'etat—removing current elected (and unelected) officials from their positions of power. Both cases would require a mass anti-capitalist movement. Revolutionaries, including Foster and Malm, tend to frown upon the electoral approach, which is a longer-term reformist approach.22 Thus, I will assume that they are in favor of building a mass anti-capitalist movement and directly taking power. To be successful, they would have to take control of the military, which would otherwise put an end to the attempted revolution. In the event that a revolution is successful, the revolutionaries would then have to re-build the economic, political, and legal institutions that make up organized human society. There would be counter-revolution attempts by the former political and economic elites and their supporters, and likely by external forces (i.e., other countries). In the U.S., for example, they would have to deal with Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. They would also have to establish relationships with international trading partners to ensure that they can sufficiently provide for the entire population. Finally, they would have to implement policies to reduce CO2 emissions in line with the 1.5-2 °C warming target, and create enforcement mechanisms to deal with those who do not follow the policies, e.g., fossil fuel producers and counterrevolutionaries. Given the scale and timeframe for addressing climate change, the revolution approach is extremely unlikely to find success. Moreover, its short-term strategy, i.e., what to do before a revolution, is unnecessarily restrictive—it rejects all policies that do not go against the "logic of capital." Thus, like the degrowth approach, the revolution approach would make climate stabilization exceedingly difficult.

Any discussion of which scenarios for the future have become more salient since Paul Raskin and his co-authors published their seminal 2002 essay Great Transition must place global capitalism and its crisis at the center of analysis. We are all too familiar with the symptoms of our existential predicament: unprecedented inequality; the spread of hunger and disease; the collapse of the biosphere; widespread social disintegration; the displacement of hundreds of millions by climate change, economic collapse, wars, and persecution; the breakdown of state legitimacy; and the violent crack up of the post-World War II international order. Yet all these symptoms have a common denominator that cannot be considered as simply another factor in discussion of alternative futures: a global capitalist system whose imperative to endlessly accumulate trumps all else. The future is not predetermined, and nothing is inevitable. We are at this time in the situation described by Gramsci that so many people have of late cited, and with good reason: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old way is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” We do not know which future we are living in precisely because the battle for the future is being waged at this very time. Nonetheless, as Raskin also observes, correctly in my view, the Barbarization scenario has gained significant ground over the past two decades at the expense of Conventional Worlds, whereas Great Transition scenarios have made considerably less headway. At the structural level, capitalism faces a crisis of chronic overaccumulation. The transnational capitalist class has accumulated obscene amounts of wealth, well beyond what it can reinvest. The flip side of this expansion of surplus capital is the expansion of surplus humanity—billions locked out, thrown beyond the precipice of survival, and held down by an expanding global police state. Low-end estimates place the number of migrants and refugees worldwide at nearly 400 million, while United Nations data indicates that more than one billion people may become climate refugees by 2050.1 The ten richest men doubled their fortunes during the COVID pandemic while the income of the 99 percent of humanity fell.2 Capitalism’s crisis is also political: capitalist states face spiraling crises of legitimacy, and the system is rapidly losing its ideological hegemony. These are explosive conditions. Crises are times of escalating social and political conflict. They are also times when the variables that help us make sense of things are most fluid and great uncertainty hangs in the balance. What is certain is that the existing state of affairs cannot be sustained. Radical change is coming, but exactly what that change will involve is not yet clear. The crisis has devastated communities around the world and disrupted sectors that were privileged enough in the twentieth century to enjoy some security and stability. Just as Raskin notes, the resultant mass social anxiety has provided far-right, authoritarian, and neofascist forces with opportunities to recruit these destabilized sectors into a mass base for the Barbarization scenario. The ultra-rich appear to have read the writing on the wall. They are preparing for a collapse by buying up islands, building luxury bunkers, and hiring private armies. In his book Survival of the Rich, Douglas Rushkoff describes a meeting he had with a handful of tech billionaires, concluding, “Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.” Should the Barbarization scenario solidify, global capitalism would become a fortress in which the global elite and a narrow stratum of highly skilled intellectual and technical workers are able to survive, even flourish for a time-being, behind the ironclad walls of a global police state, with tightly controlled flows of labor and resources from the mass of humanity to the privileged few. However, such a Fortress World should not be counterposed to collapse, because it could not be sustained indefinitely. Apart from massive widespread conflict that unprecedented inequalities and mass deprivation generate that elsewhere I have referred to as global civil war, the fortress can never be self-contained. The collapse of agriculture, resource depletion, the inability to maintain industrial production and global supply lines, and so on, would not make the fortress sustainable.

(William I, professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara )

In these mean streets of globalized capitalism in crisis, it has become profitable to turn poverty and inequality into a tourist attraction. The South African Emoya Luxury Hotel and Spa company has made a glamorized spectacle of it. The resort recently advertised an opportunity for tourists to stay "in our unique Shanty Town ... and experience traditional township living within a safe private game reserve environment." A cluster of simulated shanties outside of Bloemfontein that the company has constructed "is ideal for team building, braais, bachelors [parties], theme parties and an experience of a lifetime," read the ad. The luxury accommodations, made to appear from the outside as shacks, featured paraffin lamps, candles, a battery-operated radio, an outside toilet, a drum and fireplace for cooking, as well as under-floor heating, air conditioning and wireless internet access. A well-dressed, young white couple is pictured embracing in a field with the corrugated tin shanties in the background. The only thing missing in this fantasy world of sanitized space and glamorized poverty was the people themselves living in poverty. Escalating inequalities fuel capitalism's chronic problem of over-accumulation. The "luxury shanty town" in South Africa is a fitting metaphor for global capitalism as a whole. Faced with a stagnant global economy, elites have managed to turn war, structural violence and inequality into opportunities for capital, pleasure and entertainment. It is hard not to conclude that unchecked capitalism has become what I term "sadistic capitalism," in which the suffering and deprivation generated by capitalism become a source of aesthetic pleasure, leisure and entertainment for others. I recently had the opportunity to travel through several countries in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, East Asia and throughout North America. I was on sabbatical to research what the global crisis looks like on the ground around the world. Everywhere I went, social polarization and political tensions have reached explosive dimensions. Where is the crisis headed, what are the possible outcomes and what does it tell us about global capitalism and resistance? This crisis is not like earlier structural crises of world capitalism, such as in the 1930s or 1970s. This one is fast becoming systemic. The crisis of humanity shares aspects of earlier structural crises of world capitalism, but there are six novel, interrelated dimensions to the current moment that I highlight here, in broad strokes, as the "big picture" context in which countries and peoples around the world are experiencing a descent into chaos and uncertainty. 1) The level of global social polarization and inequality is unprecedented in the face of out-of-control, over-accumulated capital. In January 2016, the development agency Oxfam published a follow-up to its report on global inequality that had been released the previous year. According to the new report, now just 62 billionaires -- down from 80 identified by the agency in its January 2015 report -- control as much wealth as one half of the world's population, and the top 1% owns more wealth than the other 99% combined. Beyond the transnational capitalist class and the upper echelons of the global power bloc, the richest 20 percent of humanity owns some 95 percent of the world's wealth, while the bottom 80 percent has to make do with just 5 percent. This 20-80 divide of global society into haves and the have-nots is the new global social apartheid. It is evident not just between rich and poor countries, but within each country, North and South, with the rise of new affluent high-consumption sectors alongside the downward mobility, "precariatization," destabilization and expulsion of majorities. Escalating inequalities fuel capitalism's chronic problem of over-accumulation: The transnational capitalist class cannot find productive outlets to unload the enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated, leading to stagnation in the world economy. The signs of an impending depression are everywhere. The front page of the February 20 issue of The Economist read, "The World Economy: Out of Ammo?" Extreme levels of social polarization present a challenge to dominant groups. They strive to purchase the loyalty of that 20 percent, while at the same time dividing the 80 percent, co-opting some into a hegemonic bloc and repressing the rest. Alongside the spread of frightening new systems of social control and repression is heightened dissemination through the culture industries and corporate marketing strategies that depoliticize through consumerist fantasies and the manipulation of desire. As "Trumpism" in the United States so well illustrates, another strategy of co-optation is the manipulation of fear and insecurity among the downwardly mobile so that social anxiety is channeled toward scapegoated communities. This psychosocial mechanism of displacing mass anxieties is not new, but it appears to be increasing around the world in the face of the structural destabilization of capitalist globalization. Scapegoated communities are under siege, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Muslim minority in India, the Kurds in Turkey, southern African immigrants in South Africa, and Syrian and Iraqi refugees and other immigrants in Europe. As with its 20th century predecessor, 21st century fascism hinges on such manipulation of social anxiety at a time of acute capitalist crisis. Extreme inequality requires extreme violence and repression that lend to projects of 21st century fascism. 2) The system is fast reaching the ecological limits to its reproduction. We have reached several tipping points in what environmental scientists refer to as nine crucial "planetary boundaries." We have already exceeded these boundaries in three areas -- climate change, the nitrogen cycle and diversity loss. There have been five previous mass extinctions in earth's history. While all these were due to natural causes, for the first time ever, human conduct is intersecting with and fundamentally altering the earth system. We have entered what Paul Crutzen, the Dutch environmental scientist and Nobel Prize winner, termed the Anthropocene -- a new age in which humans have transformed up to half of the world's surface. We are altering the composition of the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans at a rate that undermines the conditions for life. The ecological dimensions of global crisis cannot be understated. "We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed," observes Elizabeth Kolbert in her best seller, The Sixth Extinction. "No other creature has ever managed this ... The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust." Capitalism cannot be held solely responsible. The human-nature contradiction has deep roots in civilization itself. The ancient Sumerian empires, for example, collapsed after the population over-salinated their crop soil. The Mayan city-state network collapsed about AD 900 due to deforestation. And the former Soviet Union wrecked havoc on the environment. However, given capital's implacable impulse to accumulate profit and its accelerated commodification of nature, it is difficult to imagine that the environmental catastrophe can be resolved within the capitalist system. "Green capitalism" appears as an oxymoron, as sadistic capitalism's attempt to turn the ecological crisis into a profit-making opportunity, along with the conversion of poverty into a tourist attraction. 3) The sheer magnitude of the means of violence is unprecedented, as is the concentrated control over the means of global communications and the production and circulation of knowledge, symbols and images. We have seen the spread of frightening new systems of social control and repression that have brought us into the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control. This real-life Orwellian world is in a sense more perturbing than that described by George Orwell in his iconic novel 1984. In that fictional world, people were compelled to give their obedience to the state ("Big Brother") in exchange for a quiet existence with guarantees of employment, housing and other social necessities. Now, however, the corporate and political powers that be force obedience even as the means of survival are denied to the vast majority. Global apartheid involves the creation of "green zones" that are cordoned off in each locale around the world where elites are insulated through new systems of spatial reorganization, social control and policing. "Green zone" refers to the nearly impenetrable area in central Baghdad that US occupation forces established in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The command center of the occupation and select Iraqi elite inside that green zone were protected from the violence and chaos that engulfed the country. Urban areas around the world are now green zoned through gentrification, gated communities, surveillance systems, and state and private violence. Inside the world's green zones, privileged strata avail themselves of privatized social services, consumption and entertainment. They can work and communicate through internet and satellite sealed off under the protection of armies of soldiers, police and private security forces. Green zoning takes on distinct forms in each locality. In Palestine, I witnessed such zoning in the form of Israeli military checkpoints, Jewish settler-only roads and the apartheid wall. In Mexico City, the most exclusive residential areas in the upscale Santa Fe District are accessible only by helicopter and private gated roads. In Johannesburg, a surreal drive through the exclusive Sandton City area reveals rows of mansions that appear as military compounds, with private armed towers and electrical and barbed-wire fences. In Cairo, I toured satellite cities ringing the impoverished center and inner suburbs where the country's elite could live out their aspirations and fantasies. They sport gated residential complexes with spotless green lawns, private leisure and shopping centers and English-language international schools under the protection of military checkpoints and private security police. In other cities, green zoning is subtler but no less effective. In Los Angeles, where I live, the freeway system now has an express lane reserved for those that can pay an exorbitant toll. On this lane, the privileged speed by, while the rest remain one lane over, stuck in the city's notorious bumper-to-bumper traffic -- or even worse, in notoriously underfunded and underdeveloped public transportation, where it may take half a day to get to and from work. There is no barrier separating this express lane from the others. However, a near-invisible closed surveillance system monitors every movement. If a vehicle without authorization shifts into the exclusive lane, it is instantly recorded by this surveillance system and a heavy fine is imposed on the driver, under threat of impoundment, while freeway police patrols are ubiquitous. Outside of the global green zones, warfare and police containment have become normalized and sanitized for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. "Militainment" -- portraying and even glamorizing war and violence as entertaining spectacles through Hollywood films and television police shows, computer games and corporate "news" channels -- may be the epitome of sadistic capitalism. It desensitizes, bringing about complacency and indifference. In between the green zones and outright warfare are prison industrial complexes, immigrant and refugee repression and control systems, the criminalization of outcast communities and capitalist schooling. The omnipresent media and cultural apparatuses of the corporate economy, in particular, aim to colonize the mind -- to undermine the ability to think critically and outside the dominant worldview. A neofascist culture emerges through militarism, extreme masculinization, racism and racist mobilizations against scapegoats. 4) We are reaching limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism. Capitalism is like riding a bicycle: When you stop pedaling the bicycle, you fall over. If the capitalist system stops expanding outward, it enters crisis and faces collapse. In each earlier structural crisis, the system went through a new round of extensive expansion -- from waves of colonial conquest in earlier centuries, to the integration in the late 20th and early 21st centuries of the former socialist countries, China, India and other areas that had been marginally outside the system. There are no longer any new territories to integrate into world capitalism. Meanwhile, the privatization of education, health care, utilities, basic services and public land are turning those spaces in global society that were outside of capital's control into "spaces of capital." Even poverty has been turned into a commodity. What is there left to commodify? Where can the system now expand? With the limits to expansion comes a turn toward militarized accumulation -- making wars of endless destruction and reconstruction and expanding the militarization of social and political institutions so as to continue to generate new opportunities for accumulation in the face of stagnation. 5) There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a "planet of slums," alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins and subject to these sophisticated systems of social control and destruction. Global capitalism has no direct use for surplus humanity. But indirectly, it holds wages down everywhere and makes new systems of 21st century slavery possible. These systems include prison labor, the forced recruitment of miners at gunpoint by warlords contracted by global corporations to dig up valuable minerals in the Congo, sweatshops and exploited immigrant communities (including the rising tide of immigrant female caregivers for affluent populations). Furthermore, the global working class is experiencing accelerated "precariatization." The "new precariat" refers to the proletariat that faces capital under today's unstable and precarious labor relations -- informalization, casualization, part-time, temp, immigrant and contract labor. As communities are uprooted everywhere, there is a rising reserve army of immigrant labor. The global working class is becoming divided into citizen and immigrant workers. The latter are particularly attractive to transnational capital, as the lack of citizenship rights makes them particularly vulnerable, and therefore, exploitable. The challenge for dominant groups is how to contain the real and potential rebellion of surplus humanity, the immigrant workforce and the precariat. How can they contain the explosive contradictions of this system? The 21st century megacities become the battlegrounds between mass resistance movements and the new systems of mass repression. Some populations in these cities (and also in abandoned countryside) are at risk of genocide, such as those in Gaza, zones in Somalia and Congo, and swaths of Iraq and Syria. 6) There is a disjuncture between a globalizing economy and a nation-state-based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and do not wield enough power and authority to organize and stabilize the system, much less to impose regulations on runaway transnational capital. In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, for instance, the governments of the G-8 and G-20 were unable to impose transnational regulation on the global financial system, despite a series of emergency summits to discuss such regulation. Elites historically have attempted to resolve the problems of over-accumulation by state policies that can regulate the anarchy of the market. However, in recent decades, transnational capital has broken free from the constraints imposed by the nation-state. The more "enlightened" elite representatives of the transnational capitalist class are now clamoring for transnational mechanisms of regulation that would allow the global ruling class to reign in the anarchy of the system in the interests of saving global capitalism from itself and from radical challenges from below. At the same time, the division of the world into some 200 competing nation-states is not the most propitious of circumstances for the global working class. Victories in popular struggles from below in any one country or region can (and often do) become diverted and even undone by the structural power of transnational capital and the direct political and military domination that this structural power affords the dominant groups. In Greece, for instance, the leftist Syriza party came to power in 2015 on the heels of militant worker struggles and a mass uprising. But the party abandoned its radical program as a result of the enormous pressure exerted on it from the European Central Bank and private international creditors. The Systemic Critique of Global Capitalism A growing number of transnational elites themselves now recognize that any resolution to the global crisis must involve redistribution downward of income. However, in the viewpoint of those from below, a neo-Keynesian redistribution within the prevailing corporate power structure is not enough. What is required is a redistribution of power downward and transformation toward a system in which social need trumps private profit. A global rebellion against the transnational capitalist class has spread since the financial collapse of 2008. Wherever one looks, there is popular, grassroots and leftist struggle, and the rise of new cultures of resistance: the Arab Spring; the resurgence of leftist politics in Greece, Spain and elsewhere in Europe; the tenacious resistance of Mexican social movements following the Ayotzinapa massacre of 2014; the favela uprising in Brazil against the government's World Cup and Olympic expulsion policies; the student strikes in Chile; the remarkable surge in the Chinese workers' movement; the shack dwellers and other poor people's campaigns in South Africa; Occupy Wall Street, the immigrant rights movement, Black Lives Matter, fast food workers' struggle and the mobilization around the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in the United States. This global revolt is spread unevenly and faces many challenges. A number of these struggles, moreover, have suffered setbacks, such as the Greek working-class movement and, tragically, the Arab Spring. What type of a transformation is viable, and how do we achieve it? How we interpret the global crisis is itself a matter of vital importance as politics polarize worldwide between a neofascist and a popular response. The systemic critique of global capitalism must strive to influence, from this vantage point, the discourse and practice of movements for a more just distribution of wealth and power. Our survival may depend on it.

BRETT CHRISTOPHERS- Christophers is professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, and author The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet and Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World; MARCH 20, 2024; Capitalism Can’t Solve Climate Change; ; [TMS—GK]

Amidst the gathering gloom about climate change and continuing growth in global greenhouse-gas emissions, the one bright spot appears to be clean energy development. 2023 saw another, much-trumpeted record for renewables installations worldwide, with an estimated 507 GW of new generating capacity being nearly 50 percent higher than 2022’s figure. The positivity is misplaced. Even on the transition from dirty to clean power, the world is still failing. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that both electricity generation from coal and gas, and total power-sector CO2 emissions, continued to grow in 2023, to all-time highs of 17,252 TWh and 13,575 Mt CO2, respectively. In other words, even as renewables are growing fast, they are not yet growing fast enough to displace dirty power generation, which remains the single largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions. Worse still, the world is failing on the energy transition for reasons that strike at the heart of capitalist economies, and which will therefore be very difficult to surmount. The core issue here is easy to state. Most countries are relying predominantly on the private sector to drive faster renewables investment; private firms invest on the basis of expected profits; but profitability in renewables is rarely attractive. Stick with an approach to climate change mitigation in which the private sector continues to be seen as the savior, and we are setting ourselves up to continue to fail. Veiled by discussion of headline global trends in new renewables capacity investment is the fact that almost all the incremental progress is currently being made in one country: China. Trumpeting 2023’s 50 percent growth in annual global capacity installations as a global achievement is wrongheaded, given that China by itself delivered nearly 80 percent of the increment. And the IEA, for its part, expects China to continue to be the sole meaningful over-achiever. It recently revised upwards by 728 GW its forecast for total global renewables capacity additions in the period 2023–27. China’s share of this upward revision? Almost 90 percent. While China surges ahead, the rest of the world remains stuck. This raises a crucial question. What is different about the development of solar and wind resources in China from the rest of the world? The main answer is that in China, such development is capitalist in only a very limited sense. Certainly, the entities centrally involved in building out new solar and wind farms in China are companies. But almost all are state-owned. Take wind. Nine of the country’s top 10 wind developers are owned by the government, and such state-owned players control in excess of 95 percent of the market. Moreover, the state is far from being a passive shareholder in these companies. The companies are best seen as instruments wielded by the state in the service of achieving its industrial, geopolitical, and – increasingly – environmental objectives. The best example of this concerns the gargantuan ‘clean energy bases’ first announced by President Xi Jinping in 2021. To be built mainly in the Gobi and other desert areas by 2030, these new bases will have a combined capacity of in excess of 550 GW – more than Europe’s total solar and wind capacity at the time of this writing. Such development is as far from ‘capitalist’ as is imaginable. This is the state, in its most centralized and authoritative form mustering whatever resources it needs at its disposal to ensure that it delivers what it has said it will deliver. Add to this the fact that the banks financing all the new renewables development in China are generally also state-owned and directed, and a stark reality comes into focus. This is essentially central planning in action. Does the profit motive figure? To be sure, it does. But usually only marginally, and it is ridden roughshod over whenever Beijing deems fit. In the West, by contrast, the energy transition has effectively been outsourced to the private sector. Governments are by and large relying on private firms, driven by the profit motive, to substitute carbon-free for fossil-fuel-based power generation resources. Of course, this does not mean that governments in the West play no role in the energy transition at all. They fashion and (indirectly) regulate the markets in which renewables developers and generators operate. They set targets for the scale and speed of decarbonization – although it is debatable how seriously such targets are, and should be, taken. Most importantly of all, Western governments all provide support mechanisms of various kinds designed to incentivize new renewables investment, whether it is the United States’ tax credits or the feed-in tariffs and premiums more familiar in non-US markets. But in two key senses, this is a very different government role than in China. Firstly, Western governments do not direct renewables development. They merely ‘nudge’. The Chinese authorities nudge too, but always with a willingness to move into hands-on direction mode when necessary. Secondly, Western governments typically do not own and operate renewables generating facilities. The lion’s share of such facilities – more than 95 percent of installed capacity – are owned and operated by the private sector: the exact mirror image of the renewables ownership picture in China. The West’s reliance on the private sector to decarbonize power generation is proving a major problem, and for a strikingly simple reason, albeit one that is almost never acknowledged. Under capitalism, profit expectations drive companies’ investment decisions. Developing and operating solar and wind farms and selling the electricity they generate, however, generally is not a very profitable business.

Past public ire over high drug prices has recently taken a back seat to a more insidious problem – no drugs at any price. Patients and their providers increasingly face limited or nonexistent supplies of drugs, many of which treat essential conditions such as cancer, heart disease and bacterial infections. The American Society of Health System Pharmacists now lists over 300 active shortages, primarily of decades-old generic drugs no longer protected by patents. While this is not a new problem, the number of drugs in short supply has increased in recent years, and the average shortage is lasting longer, with more than 15 critical drug products in short supply for over a decade. Current shortages include widely known drugs such as the antibiotic amoxicillin; the heart medicine digoxin; the anesthetic lidocaine; and the medicine albuterol, which is critical for treating asthma and other diseases affecting the lungs and airways. What’s going on? I’m a health economist who has studied the pharmaceutical industry for the past 15 years. I believe the drug shortage problem illustrates a major shortcoming of capitalism. While costly brand-name drugs often yield high profits to manufacturers, there’s relatively little money to be made in supplying the market with low-cost generics, no matter how vital they may be to patients’ health. The problem boils down to the nature of the pharmaceutical industry and how differently the markets for brand and generic drugs operate. Perhaps the clearest indication of this is the fact that prices of brand drugs in the U.S. are among the highest in the developed world, while generic drug prices are among the lowest. When a drugmaker develops a new pill, cream or solution, the government grants the company an exclusive patent for up to 20 years, although most patents are filed before clinical testing, and thus the effective patent life is closer to eight to 12 years. Nonetheless, patents allow the drugmakers to cover the cost of research and development and earn a profit without the threat of competition from a rival making an identical product. But once the patent expires, the drug becomes generic and any company is allowed to manufacture it. Since generic manufacturers are essentially producing the same product, profits are determined by their ability to manufacture the drug at the lowest marginal cost. This often results in low profit margins and can lead to cost-cutting measures that can compromise quality and threaten supply.

Here, we map some processes that may have led to the emphasis upon resistance as a form of micro-practice in organizational communication. This focus is ironic but understandable, in light of the historical origins of the field, characteristic research methodologies, and an overall U.S. centrism. First, it may be that existing work displays a bias towards studying resistance at the individual rather than collective level because the field historically has been concerned with the communicative practices of individuals in organizations. This bias toward individuals as the centerpiece of organizational communication research is analogous to Putnam and Poole’s (1988) assessment of organizational conflict research, where they argue that the field has been more concerned with studying conflict patterns between individuals in organizational settings than it has with studying organizational conflict strategies per se. Moreover, some primary theorists have been read as encouraging a focus on the individual as the locus of resistance. For example, Mumby (1997), like many communication scholars in the critical tradition, draws from Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) writings on hegemony to critique research that ignores the dialectic of resistance and control by addressing only issues of domination or failing at “appropriately situating such resistance in the wider context of capitalism and patriarchy” (p. 346). He then goes on to suggest that studying hegemony and resistance in communication involves “explicating the degree to which social actors are able to discursively penetrate the everyday conditions of their existence” (p. 350). Although much work on resistance in organizational communication now illustrates the simultaneity of domination and resistance, much of it has focused on Mumby’s latter suggestion by conceptualizing resistance as individual awareness of power inequities. Such a narrow application of the hegemony-resistance dialectic, coupled with the dominance of Foucaultian (1980) and allied models of power/resistance, may have resulted in critical organizational communication research defining resistance in terms of an individual’s ability to articulate alternative meanings to that of dominant constructions. For Foucault, power is an immanent dimension of all social relations and symbolic constructions. His work often equates power with diffuse networks of social discipline, and correspondingly conceives of resistance in terms of fragmented acts of communication. Consequently, it is easy to read any form of collective action through a Foucaultian lens as a form of discipline, and view resistance as lying with the individual. For example, Tracy (2000) describes identity as a “dance of resistance and domination” (p. 99), conceptualizing resistance for individual cruise ship employees as the ability to define the self in ways that countered the emotional labor norms established by cruise ship management. Similarly, Tretheway (2001) examines resistance through individual narratives about aging, asking, “How do White middleclass professional women resist the discourse of decline through their narratives and embodied identity?” (p. 188). Second, characteristic methodologies may be another source of individualism in critical organizational communication research. The way that scholars typically implement ethnographic investigations may actually reinforce the individual emphasis, by focusing on single sites of analysis rather than making comparisons across cases (Ganesh, 2005; Larson & Tompkins, 2005; Zoller, 2003). Consequently, ideas about the potential for resistance often remain organizationally specific, and this may weaken the focus on broader social, political, movement, and policy contexts. Moreover, questions of generalizability that often challenge ethnographers result in a timidity to argue for broad cultural or policy changes in such issues as emotional labor norms or new technological systems of production. This pattern of critical, ethnographic work focused on individuals in individual workplaces is not specific to organizational communication, but, with exceptions (Egri, 1994), appears to be true of organizational studies in general. For example, Jermier, Knights, and Nord’s (1994) volume on resistance focuses on individual strategies such as sabotage or elongated break times, that leave workplace norms and structures largely intact (see, e.g., Gottfried, 1994; LaNuez & Jermier, 1994; O’Connell Davidson, 1994). Given the scope of these mainly single-organization investigations, the empirical stress on individual and local action is not surprising; what is worthy of comment is that such research provides little insight into the structural possibilities for or implications of resistance. Third, it is also likely that because much of organizational communication research still focuses on U.S. workplaces (see, for exceptions, Cheney, 1998b; Deetz, 1994; Ganesh, 2003; Townsley & Stohl, 2003) researchers may tend not to encounter examples of broad-based collective resistance. For example, in a study of employee resistance to an organizational merger, Howard and Geist (1995) found examples of passive rejections involving “discrediting the dominant ideology” (p. 123) such as by expressing a sense of betrayal. Yet the examples of active rejection the authors found primarily involved exiting the company, thereby leaving the managerial plan intact. A history of worker–management co-operative schemes, the ideology of individuality, the waning power of unions, job scarcity, and economic globalization itself tend to impede collective forms of resistance centered in U.S. workplaces (Fantasia, 1988; Goodstein, 1999). This U.S. focus may also contribute to the fact that critical organizational communication researchers have not devoted very much time to tracing the role of class in articulations of resistance, given cultural reluctance to discuss the issue. Recent interest in broad and ideologically loaded discourses of “professionalism” (Cheney & Ashcraft, 2003) indicates that this trend could change. Nonetheless, we believe that overlooking class issues contributes to the overall lack of focus on issues of collective resistance. In sum, theoretical and methodological issues, along with the choice of cases for analysis have resulted in our emphasis upon resistance as a form of micro-practice. However, we by no means intend to suggest that organizational communication researchers have entirely ignored the issue of collective resistance or are oblivious to class-based issues in and around organizations. Accordingly, we need to assess the manner in which the field has linked individual resistance to collective action. We turn to this task in the following section. Linking Individual to Collective Resistance in the Global Economy Individually focused studies of resistance differ in the degree to which they theorize linkages between individual acts of resistance and collective attempts at change. Much work in the field of organizational communication continues to investigate individual strategies and thus delays examining how these practices might link to transformational politics. Moreover, there are some studies where it appears that resistance is more amenable to interpretation as a coping mechanism than an attempt at transformation per se (Fleming & Sewell, 2002). Bell and Forbes (1994), for example, chronicle office folklore and resistance strategies among mostly female office workers in a university, but they do not discuss the relationship between the stories, drawings, and other symbols that these workers used to parody and perform their oppression, and change in the symbolic or material conditions of their workplace. It is also evident that researchers are aware that individual resistance often does not translate into collective change. For example, Tracy (2000) acknowledged that while cruise ship staff developed hidden transcripts in the form of making fun of passengers and the program, doing so did not alter the burden of emotional labor in their workplace. Other researchers note the need to carefully trace a connection between individual and collective change, but their data do not capture that process. Murphy’s (1998)study of the resistant practices of flight attendants highlights the need to connect these hidden practices, or transcripts, with collective change, but that process is not evident in any of the three gendered themes (hierarchy, space, and appearance) that constitute the hidden transcripts of flight-attendant discourse. Of course, this absence is likely due to the research site. Tretheway’s (2001) research on women managers and age-based ideology is an interesting example of how linkages between micro-level discourse and collective action might be constructed. The author describes the response of individual women managers as more and less transformative of age ideology for women, such as women’s decisions not to wear make-up or dye their hair. Importantly, the author theorizes a path of at least four steps that move toward transformative politics in changing the “master narrative” of aging for women, from the use of mentors and social support groups to social movements, coalitions, and broader cultural changes. Further empirical research on these processes would help to fill the gap in knowledge about collective resistance. Other scholars have also emphasized the importance of connecting individual action with social movements. Deetz (1995), for example, theorized macro-level political issues and the need for transformation in terms of a stakeholder model for ethical corporate communication. In organizational communication studies, prescriptions for good, ethical, transformative practice often promote corporate social responsibility and the development of a stakeholder model that highlights the connections and responsibilities of a variety of groups with a stake in corporate behavior (see the special issue of Management Communication Quarterly on “The Corporate Meltdown,” 2003). However, there are very few empirical studies of this model (see, for exception, Ulmer & Sellnow, 1997), and this absence leaves the concept under-theorized regarding its usefulness in achieving collective change in corporate structures. Additionally, we note potential limitations of the stakeholder model that may impede our ability to connect individual resistance with social transformation. First, work outside our field points to the problem of co-optation in stakeholder models that may prevent transformative change (Moberg, 2002). Second, the stakeholder model assumes that all individuals and groups necessarily have an equal stake in the contemporary form of corporate capitalism. This is evident in Deetz’s (1995) discussion of “reformation” and his recommendation that we create workplaces where every member thinks and acts like an owner. The need to do so may be compelling in U.S. contexts where corporations are arguably the dominant social institution. However, the value of this prescription as a transformative tactic might not be quite so great in more hybrid economies, including those of India and China, which blend socialist and capitalist principles. Moreover, the very assumption that we all necessarily have a stake (understood as investment with endorsement) in contemporary multi-national corporate capitalism could well result in a very limited notion of social transformation itself. At the very least, the notions of “ownership” and “stake” should be rendered problematic and subject to investigation in themselves. In sum, we seek to expand theorizing and practical work on resistance, calling for more research that moves beyond the description of systems of power and resistance to a truly critical engagement with the social processes that link individual-level resistance with attempts at transformational change (see, for an exception, Lukes, 1974).1 Below, we describe an alternate read of resistance that highlights its transformational potential in the context of “globalization from below” and explain further why critical organizational communication studies needs to take these movements more seriously than it has thus far. In contrast to the often individualized and accommodative ways that resistance has been understood, we would like to encourage attention to collective resistance efforts that aim for the transformation of power relations in the global economy. Thus, resistance efforts would be, at least in part, explicitly evaluated in terms of their transformational potential. We see transformation as a term that highlights attempts to effect large-scale, collective changes in the domains of state policy, corporate practice, social structure, cultural norms, and daily lived experience. Cloud (2001) presages our argument when she critiques critical organizational communication studies for a preoccupation with infra-political micro-strategies at the expense of attention to class issues, labor, and macro-level social change. Cloud’s conceptualization of “macro changes” implies the assessment of collective transformation of largely class-based power structures. While this is an example of the “transformative” change we discuss, we would also include other discourses and movements that influence class-based structures, for example, race or gender. Protest movements against global economic and development institutions provide the impetus for the kind of theorizing of transformative resistance to which we allude. We believe that the individualization of resistance in organizational communication may contribute to the paucity of attention to protests and social movements associated with globalization from below. Another possible reason for such neglect may be recommendations to focus on the everyday level of resistance, defined in terms of communication rooted in mundane, unmediated, and routine situations. For example, Deetz’s (1992) influential work, which represents a key critical survey of corporate power, directs attention toward the everyday level of resistance and unfortunately excludes “protest” from the category of the everyday. Deetz describes the public forum as colonized by news reporters and those who can afford to buy airtime, stating: “The ‘protest’ as a modern public expression is totally mediated and demonstrates rather than challenges the structural issue” (p. 50). Although it is vital to question the power relations involved in the formation and expression of political ideas, such dismissals of protest prevent us from learning more about organizational communication phenomena. We maintain that it has never been more important for our field to engage significantly with social protests, both traditional, such as mass demonstrations and strikes, and new, such as “hacktivist” groups and the public melodrama of organizations such as Act Up and Ad Busters (Jordan, 2002). Accordingly, we describe four reasons why we believe studying collective resistance in the context of globalization from below is significant for critical organizational communication theory and research.

The "post" in deconstructive semiotics is itself the subject of ludic textuality and marks an indeterminate non-history that occults the material contradictions of capitalism. Post-ality invokes a playfulness that blurs the lines of the "before" and "after" and thus making "post" a waving-wavering "puncept" of undecidability what Ulmer calls "moira," which is the textual equivalent of the "visual illusion known as the moire effect" ("The Puncept of Grammatology" 179-189)-that obscures its retrograde political valence. This "blurring" is, as I will argue, simply an inaugural move for cutting off-in the pedagogy of "double session"-the relation of the past and present by constructing a history that "has no middle" (Derrida, Dissemination 227). "Post" in post-al theory is not the concept of a decided linear temporality in history but the puncept of a crisis-effect "within" history itself (postality as what Derrida calls "spacing" across the ages). As such, it is both a "before" and an "after," a supratemporality that contains "The Seeds of Time," to use the title of Fredric Jameson's neoconservative book of, what Hal Foster has called, "untimely meditations" on a theory of history. This atemporal "post" is motivated by the movement not of class struggle but of differance, the optics-moire-effect- of the sign. In this reactionary avant-gardism, the waving-wavering effect (moire) gives "post" the "paradoxical ability both to precede and to come after itself" (Elarn 12) and turns "post" into a conceptual slippage, a puncept. The notion of history without a middle now informs both right-wing circles and the postal left, which has fully surrendered to this bourgeois notion of history. As I will argue at the end of this section, left writers such as Fredric Jameson are now in the forefront of a double sessional theory of history. The notion of differance post" as "moire" effect) generates a radical fissure that renders knowledge the source of wealth and consequently posits culture and politics as autonomous from the production practices in advanced industrial societies. This enables bourgeois theory to propose a radical break from a "before" to an "after." In its formal discourses, of course, post-al theory vehemently denounces, as historically naive and epistemologically simplistic, any notion of a linear history that could establish a self-identical "before" and "after." It does not regard the "before" as a place of origin and reads the "after" simply as an "after-effect": a complex rewriting of the "before" (Lyotard, "'Re-writing' Modernism"). This disconnecting of the "before" and "after" is itself part of a larger move to exclude causality from the domain of history and with it "historical necessity." The dismantling of "historical necessity" is the project of a post-al science of historiography specified as "genealogy." in place of "historical necessity" and "causality," post-al genealogy installs the "haphazard" (the "event") which is excessive and not subordinate to any "laws" but acts by the alea-the chance and randomness of desire (Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 154). The need for a "break" (post-alityl is a symptom of a recurrent crisis in the labor practices in capitalism. Bourgeois philosophy "solves" this material crisis in the theoretical imaginary (on the superstructural level) by inventing the "new" (over and over again), that is to say, by producing a post-al state which provides a "beyond" to the crisis-a novel post-al state free from the burden (contradictions) of· the past. The turmoil of the contemporary labor force, for instance, is mystified by the post-al discourses on the outdatedness (the "before") of labor and the radically new knowledge worker who is an "after" without any connection to the before. This paradigm of explanation is highly attractive to post-al knowledge industry because it does not have to "explain" the contradictions that transforms the "before" into an "after." Post-al theory simply starts all over again until what is now the "after" itself becomes untenable owing to the increasing contradictions and at which time the "after" is abandoned in favor of a newer "after." Post-al historiography is, in fact, a series of these accelerated "afters" without "befores": a history which "has no middle" and as such does not have to account for its own historicity (what, as I will discuss later) Leo Strauss calls history without historicity and is now the basis of not only academic historiography but also right-wing conservative theory. In my discussion of the construction of a "post" in post-al theory, I leave aside the writings of such theorists as Foucault and Bell who postulate a "discontinuity" (Archaeology of Knowledge, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) and a "difference" (Bell xiii) between various events and stages of history without at the same time giving up the notion of history as "palimpsests" (Bellxvi)andtdiscourse" (Foucault). I will focus instead on the more complicated fate of the "post" in Lyotard and Derrida who formally denounce the "break" and the "post''-as-break and instead talk of post-ality as immanent to history: as a continuing rewriting, which is another way of saying the "post" is a crisis of representation across the ages----no age is immune to it.