Nick Bernards
@nickbernards
Critical Political Economist -- Author: A critical history of poverty finance ( Fictions of financialization ( -- Reader in Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick. Views mine.
New article! @giuliadalmaso.bsky.social, Laura Quinteros and I on experiments with ‘green fintech’, and what they tell us about green finance as a form of fictitious capital. Just out in @antipodeonline.bsky.social. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
New article! On the echoes between projects of 'financial inclusion' and colonial statecraft. Just out in @ripejournal.bsky.social, in an incredible SI on raced finance ed. by @iliasalami.bsky.social, @vincentguermond.bsky.social and @alibhagat.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Enough ‘now is the time of monsters’, in with ‘widespread participation in financial markets compels contradictory state action to backstop financial markets’ Gramsci.
And finally, I write about how the specific modes of exploitation prevalent in the production of colonial export crops have shaped the uneven distribution and form of exposure to climate hazards, using examples from Senegal and Ghana. 12/ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Shae Frydenlund writes about the 'dialectical disposability' of Rohingya refugees in Kuala Lampur. Exploring the uneven temporalities through which refugees' labour is exploited helps grasp the complex 'modes of existence' of relative surplus populations. 10/ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Ben Selwyn with a really useful conceptual provocation about capital's 'conjoined appropriation' of labour and nature, in and through the operation of capitalist value chains. 9/ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Bridget Kenny has contributed an awesome piece on logistics in Gauteng, South Africa. She shows how the remaking of labour processes to capture value in the process of circulation has re-articulated old racial hierarchies and transformed urban space. 8/ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Out now! I've edited a special issue of New Political Economy on 'Centring exploitation in global political economy'. Link to the intro: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Other articles (all brilliant!) and a short summary 👇 1/
Levels of financial engineering going on in municipalities which would give Floridan mortgage markets circa 2006 a run for their money:
Along with all the obvious ways this is stupid, it’s bothering me that the guys having lunch on the steel beam in the original photo were decidedly not the ‘architects’. It’s all very ‘bourgeois pretense of doing labour’…
What kind of a fucking statement is this. ‘Some people move across borders because they want a better life’, but that’s meant to be the scary thing we need to watch out for?
Probably as good a time as any for Sivanandan on the British state's contortions around immigration. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10....
Really enjoyed this book! Raises a whole bunch of really vital questions about power and transition, and does so much to get us beyond a rote insistence on state action in climate politics.
This kind of half-hopeful take hoping that some imminent Chinese hegemony will save us from climate breakdown is grimly fascinating.
Giving up my principled refusal to take ideas about ‘neo-/techno-feudalism’ seriously and giving this a (skeptical) read:
The word ‘despite’ is doing an incredible amount of work here. How else *would* an asylum hotel provider make a £180m profit? This is exactly the ‘efficiency’ the private sector offers…
Exciting new arrival on my pile of books I don’t know when I’ll get to read now that term has started!
Just bleak as hell that doing peer reviews apparently now includes ticking this box...
Free books! For reasons too complicated to explain I now have multiple copies of all of the books 👇… if you’re fairly local (ie. in the UK) and would like any/all of them please let me know…
Another SI article now out! Bridget Kenny looks at emerging forms of exploitation linked to the rise of logistics and e-commerce in Gauteng, showing how these ‘adapt and reproduce’ historic racial hierarchies. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Another SI contribution now out! Ben Selwyn on capital's appropriation of the living world, through the conjoined exploitation of labour and extraction of nature, exacerbated through the restructuring of global production around capitalist value chains. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
New article! In this extended introduction to an imminent SI, I argue for renewed engagement with key Marxist debates about exploitation as a way of understanding the mutations of contemporary global capitalism. Now out in @NPEjournal! (Open Access) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Really excited for this collection! On renewing Marxist debates about exploitation as a lens on the transformations of contemporary capitalism. Coming soon...
The Economist joining Larry Summers in noticing that mobilizing private capital isn’t working…
‘AI is inevitable; we need to teach students how to use it’. Also, unrelatedly, ChatGPT can’t afford for you to say ‘please’.