Dr Alex Sutton

This paper revisits the Groundnut Scheme, a postwar colonial development project in East Africa infamous for its catastrophic failure. It examines the plans made by British state managers and the Scheme’s planners at both the United Africa Company and the Overseas Food Corporation to transform African colonial subjects into stabilized wage-labourers. The paper seeks to understand this social transformation in the context of the contradictory nature of capitalist social relations. This is achieved by using Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation: the separation of the worker from their means of subsistence. The paper focuses on two aspects of this process. Firstly, the creation of remote villages for the Scheme’s workers, physically separating them from traditional support structures. Secondly, the creation of a new gendered division of labour that would have transformed the homelife of the Scheme’s workers.

Building on recent work on the political and everyday nature of comedy, this paper seeks to situate the
genre of stand-up comedy as a form of capitalist social relations. The paper focuses on the emergence
of Alternative Comedy in the 1980s in contrast to the comedy of Working Men’s Clubs. This cultural
development is placed in the context of Marx’s understanding of capitalist society and a critique of
Adorno’s notion of the culture industry. The paper argues that this radical change in British comedy
was only made possible by the policies of the British state in the 1980s. In particular, the paper
considers the changing ideas comedians had of property, propriety and performance. While
Alternative Comedy was highly critical of Thatcherism and neoliberalism, it owed its existence to these
modes of state management. The paper contends, then, that comedy can be seen as a form of class
struggle and should not be judged by its capacity to be a mere instrument of resistance, or condemned
by some spurious inability to achieve this. The paper concludes by considering the development of
comedy production since the 1980s.

This paper seeks to problematize the historical significance of the EU for British governing strategy with reference to immigration policy and the concept of depoliticisation. Situating British governing strategy in terms of the crisis-prone nature of capitalist society, this paper argues that British immigration policy has been depoliticised through, initially, the invocation of globalisation and, more recently, the EU. Through this strategy, the British state has been able to repeatedly claim that immigration policy is largely out of its hands, as they have no control over workers wishing to enter Britain looking for work. This paper makes three claims: firstly, immigration policy has been used as a means by both Conservative and Labour governments to manage inflation and labour; secondly, successive governments have sought to depoliticise immigration policy through
reference to external forces; thirdly, this strategy of depoliticisation ultimately failed, politicising Britain’s relationship with the EU and creating conditions for Britain’s exit from the EU.

This article develops a critical engagement with the politics of British satire. After first engaging the mainstream critique of satire—that it promotes cynicism and apathy by portraying politicians in stereotypically corrupt terms—we develop a performative approach to comedy as an everyday vernacular of political life. Beyond a focus on ‘impact’, we suggest that satire can be read as an everyday form of political reflection that performs within a social context. This argument yields an image of Morris, Iannucci and Brooker as important critics of contemporary British politics, a point which we explore through their interventions on media form, political tragedy and political agency.

Approaches to depoliticisation have tended to focus on its use as a domestic strategy. Where the literature tends to be lacking is in consideration of its international role. This article examines the way in which imperialist policies have been depoliticized through technically managed or apparently economic institutions. It explores the way in which British imperial strategy was depoliticised by the use of the Sterling Area, analysing an episode in British-Malayan relations in which the apolitical character of the Sterling Area was brought into question.

The article focuses on Britain’s relationship with Malaya shortly before and after its independence from the British Empire. The article looks at the negotiations concerning the financial settlement prior to independence. Britain sought to keep Malaya within the sterling area at all costs, even after de jure convertibility had been achieved, due to its high dollar earning capacity, which remained important due to persistent trade deficits with the US from the end of the Second World War. The article argues that this settlement, while seemingly very generous for an independent Malaya, was still very much intended to maintain Britain’s role within the global economy, to ensure sterling’s status as an international currency and to support conditions for British economic growth.

This article seeks to review the recent incarnation of a long-standing engagement in international political economy (IPE) and critical theory between open Marxist perspectives (OMPs) and their critics. The article aims to identify the enduring relevance of this debate in order to think about the possibility and future of critical social inquiry in our time constructively. It criticises elements on both sides of the debate that no longer serve but rather hinder achieving this objective. We argue that the recent criticisms make a number of important constructive points that could help enhance the explanatory power of OMPs yet still portray the latter uncharitably. We propose to take the emphasis on openness in OMPs seriously as a scholarly and political orientation without immersing the debate with the charges of reductionism, instrumentalism, determinism and functionalism which are frequently raised by various versions of Marxism against one another—often to little avail.

The purpose of the paper is to provide the basis for a theory of imperialism that is consonant with open Marxism. The need for an open Marxist theory of imperialism derives from two sources: firstly, a critique from open Marxism of extant theories of imperialism that they treat contingent factors as necessary elements of imperialism. Secondly, and certainly a less theoretical point, is the obvious and intuitive value of an account of imperialism. Where states compete to immobilise capital within their own territory, this leads to unequal relationships between states, one of which is imperialism. It is essential to understand what the nature of this relationship is if we are to understand capitalism on a global scale, which is to say at all. This can only be accomplished by understanding what the state is, how it is constituted and what its function is within society. Open Marxism is particularly well placed to accomplish this. The paper argues that accounts of imperialism heretofore have been contingent and focused on the appearance of imperialism

and spent little time considering its essence as a manifestation of the state’s power and desire to maintain the circuit of capital both nationally and internationally. The paper then seeks to show that open Marxism is well placed to achieve this and to move towards an idea of an open Marxist theory of imperialism.

A prominent theme in scholarly analyses of contemporary international affairs concerns the extent to which the unrivalled power and activities of the United States can be said to constitute a form of imperialism. Typically, the contours of this debate centre on the ostensible differences between 'old' and 'new' varieties of imperialist practice. Yet the concept of 'new imperialism' remains one on which little consensus exists. Wide differences of opinion on its origins, dynamics and characteristics are evident, as is an analytical bifurcation between distinct 'economic' and 'geopolitical' explanations. This absence of conceptual unity leads to accounts of new imperialist strategy that are partial, limited and incomplete. If the theoretical value of new imperialism is to be realised, a more holistic approach is needed. To this end, some of the key differences between the contexts of new and old imperialism are explored. The paper concludes that a holistic approach requires an appreciation of imperialism as a strategic choice that springs forth from the intersection of the goals and perceptions held by, as well as the constraints on and opportunities available to, state managers. The distinct environment within which this choice is made provides the novelty of contemporary  imperialism, and the particular nature of this environment is further explored in this paper.