Class formation and commodity chains in the making of regional monocultures: Agrarian reform from above and below in Mexico's henequen and cotton zones

This paper analyses the rise and fall of two regional monocultures in Mexico: the henequen zone in the southern state of Yucatán and the cotton‐growing area of La Laguna. Both regions experienced a dramatic expansion of commodity production between 1870 and 1910, but their key crops came to be cultivated under different labour regimes: debt peonage in the case of henequen and wage labour in the case of cotton. The process of class formation that unfolded in each region culminated in the 1930s in different kinds of crises. In Yucatán, a political struggle between hacienda owners and the federal government resulted in an agrarian reform “from above.” In La Laguna, class conflict between rural wageworkers and the landed bourgeoisie forced an agrarian reform “from below.” These previously distinct labour regimes converged in subsequent decades, however, as rural producers became de facto wageworkers on state‐organized and state‐administered production units known as collective ejidos. Ultimately, changes in the global markets for cotton and henequen, combined with the inability of the Mexican state to reconcile the political logic of agrarian clientelism with shifting commodity chain dynamics, resulted in the collapse of these regional monocultures in the late 20th century.     

Producing Localized Commodity Frontiers at the End of Cheap Nature: An Analysis of Eco‐scalar Carbon Fixes and their Consequences

There is no single ‘great’ commodity frontier whose exploitation under current socio‐technical conditions could fuel capital accumulation at the global scale. According to Jason Moore, this represents the ‘end of Cheap Nature’ and signals a terminal crisis for capitalism as we know it. In this article we complicate this assertion by showing how, in the context of global environmental governance frameworks of carbon control, a diverse range of actors situated at multiple scales are intensifying the use of cities and their hinterlands for the production/transgression of localized commodity frontiers. We draw on scholarship on uneven geographical development, state‐led restructuring and eco‐scalar fixes to present two case studies from different segments of the carbon cycle in the global South. The first case demonstrates how the introduction of waste‐to‐energy technology in Delhi facilitated the generation of ‘carbon credits’ while waste matter itself became a commodity. The second discusses attempts by the Brazilian state of Amazonas (Amazônia) aspiring to shift from rainforest exploitation to financialized conservation supported by the ‘green global city’ functions of metropolitan Manaus. These cases demonstrate that although the global carbon‐control regime may enable accumulation, implementation remains speculative, and localized commodity frontiers provoke social resistances that jeopardize their durability.     

Do country risk and financial uncertainty matter for energy commodity futures?

Using an instrumental variable quantile regression technique, this paper assesses whether country risk and financial uncertainty exert an impact on energy commodity futures prices under different commodity conditional return distributions over the period from January 1994 to July 2017. We also discuss whether the correlations change with different dimensions of country risk, that is economic, financial, and political. The results reveal that country risk and financial stress do have a significant impact on energy commodity returns of futures contracts with different maturities, but their direction, intensity, and significance differ, caused by the distinct market situations and divergent channels of country risk.     

On commodity price limits

This paper examines the behavior of futures prices and trader positions around the occurrence of price limits in commodity futures markets. We ask whether limit events are the result of shocks to fundamental volatility or the result of temporary volatility induced by the trading of noncommercial market participants (speculators). We find little evidence that limits events are the result of speculative activity, but instead associated with shocks to fundamentals that lead to persistent price changes. When futures trading halts price discovery migrates to options markets, but option prices provide a biased estimate of subsequent future prices when trading resumes.     

Price discovery and volatility spillover in spot and futures markets: evidences from steel-related commodities in China

The price discovery and spillover effect are significant indicators in futures markets. This study examines the price discovery and spillover effects using vector error correction model and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic for seven types of steel products in Chinese spot and futures markets. The results show that the price discovery exists in all of steel futures market. It is also confirmed that futures prices in all items are mainly leading spot prices via permanent-transitory and information share. In the results of spillover effects, it is found that wire rod, coking coal, coke and silico-manganese have the effects between spot and futures market. In rebar market, there is the spillover effect from spot to futures. This information about futures prices can help the market participants to make decisions when they predict the spot prices.     

Natural resources,technological progress,and economic modernization

The present inquiry focuses on the modernization perspectives of the commodity‐exporting countries through the lens of development economics. To this end, the study adopts the Kaldorian framework to address the modernization effects, epitomized in the absorption of surplus labor. To trace the process of economic modernization, the study augments Lewis’s dualistic economy model by the extractive sector. Three different scenarios for the management of resource revenues are scrutinized. An altruistic mode, which implies a pure redistribution of the revenues among the poor swaths of the population, protracts the process of economic modernization, requires a greater amount of capital stock, and harbors a greater risk of a poverty trap. This effect is less pronounced if the modern sector is more capital‐intensive. A productive mode, which elicits full reinvestment of the commodity revenues, in contrast, accelerates the pace of economic modernization. Further, predicated on the scrutiny of a more realistic scenario, a bargaining mode, the study derives the condition for a net positive (or negative) modernization effect. The study identifies technical progress alongside capital accumulation as a further important source of economic modernization.     

Marx 200: The Abiding Relevance of the Labour Theory of Value

ABSTRACT

Marxist political economy is alive and well, and not just because of the habitual turn to Marx in response to any crisis of capitalism. Both through Capital and through the continuing evolution of Marxism, Marxist political economy offers valuable insights that can illuminate the modalities of social and economic reproduction and the relationships between (different aspects of) the economic and the non-economic. Marxism’s presence has been felt through its own internal debates and debates with other approaches to political economy, and even through its influence on those reacting against Marxism. The key to the continuing relevance and analytical strengths of Marxist political economy lies in its capacity to provide a framework of analysis for unifying disparate insights into and critiques of the contradictions of capitalism across the social sciences. The instrument for forging that unity is Marx’s theory of value, the potential of which is examined and illustrated with reference to the Sraffian critique and two key concepts in Marxian political economy: the value of labour power and financialisation. They are explored in the light of the processes of commodification, commodity form and commodity calculation.     

Territorialization in a closing commodity frontier: The Yasuní rainforests of West Amazonia

In Ecuador's Yasuní rainforests and the lived history of the Waorani that live there, the commodification of first rubber and then oil shaped territorialization into particularly violent form. The formative role of rubber production in the 19th century involved local despots' imposition of a regime of violence. Reacting to this violent capitalist system, individual Waorani forged new socio‐spatial territories through violence with rubber slavers and cooperation with the Taromenane, a people who continue to live in isolation. Today, an oil complex exerts control to bring the end of Yasuní's commodity frontier, even while the Waorani Nation and Taromenane hold legal rights to parts of the forests. In this article, I analyse how rubber and oil exploitation has unfolded as capitalist territorial violence, spurring Waorani and Taromenane social expressions and political mobilizations that are at times violent, but primarily not.     

Shifting frontier dynamics in Latin America

The concepts of resource frontier and commodity frontier are often treated interchangeably. This article suggests the benefits of clarifying these concepts because frontiers remain important analytics for understanding drastic land‐use changes and other socio‐environmental transformations. Based on long‐term field research in different parts of South and Central America, we use frontier concepts as heuristic devices to analyze heterogeneous frontier situations and make broader generalizations. Our synchronic and diachronic analyses of frontier dynamics elucidate different frontier modalities and shifting frontier expansions. The concept of commoditizing resource frontier is introduced to explain recent frontier‐makings in Brazilian Amazonia and Cerrado and in the Nicaraguan Río San Juan. Although earlier frontier research took a short‐term time perspective and created conceptualizations based on a single modality of a particular period, our longitudinal analysis shows that drastic changes and complex overlappings are the hallmarks of frontier dynamics.