Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
646
result(s) for
"Bond, Patrick"
Sort by:
South Africa’s Housing Financialisation Crises and Social Resistance
The world’s most unequal country suffers from various housing crises, especially when it comes to excessive reliance upon a private sector prone to market failures, especially affordability. State housing finance strategy during the transition from apartheid to democracy relied upon augmentation of formal banking finance so as to promote home ownership. But as macro-economic conditions changed in the late 1980s, the resulting mass defaults on individual families’ home mortgage bonds led not only to foreclosures by a (white) state, but (black) working-class resistance organised by the country’s leading urban social movement, known as the ‘bond boycott.’ Even after democracy, a worsening housing backlog coincided with resurgence of household debt crises in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown. That generated a new housing finance strategy led by Mastercard and a local fintech firm (supported by the World Bank): collateralisation of welfare grants which in turn allowed debit orders for repayment of microfinance (typically used for minor home improvements). Again, social resistance played an important role, as the strategy caused even worse personal debt crises, and a welfare NGO’s successful fight to close Mastercard’s partner. But beyond periodic revolts of these sorts, a durable housing finance policy has remained elusive.
Journal Article
BRICS : an anti-capitalist critique
\"Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa and China is often considered to be an alternative, antagonistic force to Western imperialism - yet in reporting from fronts as diverse as financial regulation, climate negotiations, minerals extraction or even World Cup soccer, leading political economists in this book show how the BRICS are accommodating and even amplifying the worst features of global capitalism\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Leaning on the BRICS as a Geopolitical Counterweight Leads Only to Faux-Polyarchic, Subimperial “Spalling”
A Third Worldist nostalgia emerged in a few important capital cities over the past decade, one mainly dormant (aside from parts of Latin America) since its 1970s peak: a search for some version of the unity of militant voices from the leading South states as was heard at the 1955 Afro-Asian meeting in Bandung, Indonesian. This nostalgia became especially important during the 2010s, when the Latin American Pink Tide of center-left social and then political movements began to ebb. A view emerged in some sections of the world left, that instead, the Bandung spirit would be found within the BRICS bloc of countries. The BRICS, after all, were ostensibly reconfiguring what Immanuel Wallerstein had described as a semi-peripheral location. Though fluid, the realities of global uneven development prevented all but a few well-managed of these economies from advancing to the per capita income levels and technological prowess of the West.
Journal Article
The long retreat : strategies to reverse the decline of the left
\"Authoritarianism is rampant across the globe. Right-wing governments from Russia to America oversee wars from Ukraine to Palestine, while capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis, its citizens mired in poverty. Imprisoned Putin critic Boris Kagarlitsky confronts this stark reality, demanding a clear strategy from the left to dismantle this ever-darkening nightmare. As well as bringing Russian and Western thinkers into dialogue, Kagarlitsky draws upon his experiences as a Russian dissident since the latter days of the Soviet Union in this detailed analysis of leftist strategy. As a Marxist, he engages in radical ideas including Universal Basic Income and decentralised collective ownership, as well as looking at historical and contemporary examples of revolution and dissent, covering the left's response to the war in Ukraine\"--Page 4 of cover.
Book
Truncated 21st-Century Trajectories of Progressive International Solidarity
Patrick Bond provides a biography of Amin’s work as a global political thinker and leader on the left. From his early days building the Third World Forum and establishing “origins of a South-centric organic intelligentsia with global visions” to his work with the World Social Forum process, Amin dedicated his life to trying to lay the foundations for a Fifth International. Bond notes Amin’s frustration with the extreme fragmentation and limited policy impacts of left struggles. Yet he points out some recent exceptions here in the successes of global South campaigns around the right to water, access to medicines and the right to health, and Via Campesina and MST’s success in building global resistance to corporate land grabbing.
Journal Article
Can Climate Activists’ ‘Movement Below’ Transcend Negotiators’ ‘Paralysis Above’?
Do enough activists - and the societies that generate them - care about climate change to force United Nations (UN) negotiators to make the emissions cuts required to halt warming at 2 degrees? The July 2015 Pew Research Center survey of world awareness confirms that in a list also containing global economic instability and several contingent geopolitical factors, a near majority of the world public is 'very concerned' about climate change (Carle 2015). It is the leading global-scale worry in 2015, but opinion is unevenly distributed: the advanced capitalist societies most responsible for climate change are those which are least willing to acknowledge it as the main threat. They are the societies with the greatest capacity to pay a 'climate debt' for the 'loss and damage' associated with climate change. But their UN negotiators and politicians, mainly influenced by large corporations, are the most reluctant to discuss the North's associated liabilities. Against this 'paralysis above' (to cite the subtitle of Bond 2012), is there opportunity for 'movement below', especially the kind of anti-systemic movement associated with the term 'climate justice'?
Journal Article
Pitfalls of resource-national consciousness
Frantz Fanon warned of various ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’ associated with the shift to post-colonialism, appropriate also for a more recent shift, from resource looting to resource nationalism. Depletion of Africa’s non-renewable mining wealth and the pollution-riddled extraction and combustion of oil, gas and coal – under either the neocolonial or the resource-nationalist agendas – are not economically justifiable, especially when other costs are accounted for, including unpaid women’s labour. None of these are included in gross domestic product accounting methodology and therefore they tend to be erased by proponents of mining and fossil fuels. Yet many African grassroots progressive movements argue that it is preferable now to leave mineral and fossil fuel resources underground, on these and other grounds. Critics of extractivism exist not only in ‘Right to Say No!’ struggles, but also among environmental economists who since the 1970s have confirmed the logic of leaving resources underground with reference to ‘natural capital’ accounts. Moreover, eco-feminists leading local campaigns are more appropriate stewards of intergenerational responsibilities for ecosystem management than the male ‘resource nationalists’ who aim to reform – half-heartedly – the extractive industries.
Journal Article
BRICS banking and the debate over sub-imperialism
Funded at $100 billion each, the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) and New Development Bank (NDB) represent 'sub-imperial' finance, insofar as, by all indications, they fit into - instead of providing alternatives to - the prevailing world systems of sovereign debt and project credits. Balance of payments constraints for BRICS members will not be relieved by the CRA, which requires an IMF intervention after just 30% of the quota is borrowed. In this context the NDB would appear close to the Bretton Woods Institution model, promoting frenetic extractivist calculations based on US dollar financing and hence more pressure to export.
Journal Article