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LPE Originals

On the Place of Racial Capitalism in China’s Northwestern Frontier

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Though its contemporary theorization emerged from Cedric Robinson and other scholars of the Black Radical Tradition, racial capitalism is neither an idea somehow restricted to the U.S. or Europe, nor an idea that can be provincialized solely within the processes and structures of Western colonial expropriation and exploitation. Rather, this approach can help us understand the immense expansion of securitization and forced assimilation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, not as an aberration, but as the logical extension of Han settler capitalist development strategies since at least the early 1990s.
LPE Originals

China and the Political Economy of the International Legal Order

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There is an urgent need to develop a genuine critical left internationalism to help think through issues related to China. Yet engaging this subject from an LPE perspective confronts two broad challenges. First, it requires bringing LPE concepts into conversation with debates regarding the diverse legal underpinnings of the global economic order. Second, it requires developing a left internationalism that embraces a non-U.S.-centric anti-imperialist position, moving beyond limited Cold War imaginaries.
LPE Originals

Rural Civil Disobedience and Fossil Capital: Toward Radical Futures

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Civil disobedience has long been a core dimension in the struggles against the ravages of the coal, oil, and natural gas industries in the rural United States. While Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline is the most prominent recent example, the past decade has witnessed acts of civil disobedience in such far-flung locations as the Montana coalfields, the Keystone XL Pipeline in Texas, and pipelines in Minnesota and Louisiana. How should we make sense of these actions? And what can these acts of rural resistance teach us about our understanding of civil disobedience?
LPE Originals

The Carceral Conjuncture in Central Appalachia

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As a result of jail and prison expansion in Eastern Kentucky, the region has become a center of gravity in the fight over the future of the carceral state. To understand this carceral boom, we need to appreciate how multiple crises have converged in Eastern Kentucky to produce a historical moment – a conjuncture – in which prisons and jails serve as putative solutions to a variety of social and economic problems.
LPE Originals

Putting Rural Communities on the (Broadband) Map

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Broadband access in rural areas in the United States is not only a market failure, but a market disaster, as private providers have little interest in serving expensive, hard-to-reach places. In its most recent attempt to bridge the rural-urban digital divide, Congress allocated $42.5 billion for broadband deployment, the distribution of which is to be determined by the FCC’s national broadband maps. Yet these maps, which themselves have been outsourced to private actors, have consistently exaggerated broadband availability, depriving many rural communities of much-needed funding and a voice in this critical infrastructural issue.
LPE Originals

Rural and Racialized: How Property Law Perpetuates Racial Disparities

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Research on racial disparities tends to focus on the urban, constructing an important story of race-based segregation and inequality that takes place on the city block or the suburban cul-de-sac. But with nearly all farmland in America (98%) owned by white people, these same racial dynamics are just as important to contemporary generational wealth disparities for rural people. It is thus critical to understand not only how property law has historically constructed these patterns of racial difference but also the role that property law continues to play in maintaining these disparities.
LPE Originals

Regulation’s Role in Geographic Inequality

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For decades now, we have been in an era of geographic divergence, with “superstar” cities and certain regions capturing growth, while others fall behind. Dominant explanations for this phenomenon focus largely on inexorable economic forces, such as globalization or the benefits of concentrating talent. Yet these explanations leave out a critical factor: the effects of specific regulatory choices on economic geography. From the Progressive and New Deal Eras through roughly the 1970s, the United States had a system of structural regulation in transportation, energy, communications, and banking that was designed to disperse economic activity. Deregulation naturally had the opposite effect: it concentrated economic activity and growth.
LPE Originals

The Law and Political Economy of Rural America

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If you read the New York Times or listen to certain economists, you’ve probably heard the following story: rural regions in America are economically unsustainable, irrationally resentful, and increasingly obsolete. An LPE lens can help us see why this narrative is mistaken. If we want to understand the story of rural America, we need to begin by examining the governing choices — the laws and institutions — that have disadvantaged rural communities. By revealing the human agency that shapes our collective fates, we can see that new and better possibilities remain within our collective control.
LPE Originals

Development for Some, Disaster for Others: The Case for Reparations

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Central to Táíwò’s case for reparations is the idea of inertia. This is a useful message for economists, particularly of the mainstream bent, to hear. Without significant changes in the social provisioning processes, wealth and advantage, along with poverty and disadvantage, will continue to accumulate. No marginal change in a tax code or behavioral nudge will induce the radical change that is necessary for those accumulations to reverse course. Instead, we must be guided by a “worldmaking” philosophy, one that seeks to build a just world on a global scale.
LPE Originals

What Will Worldmaking Require?

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Building on Adom Getachew’s account of anticolonial “worldmaking,” Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defends reparations as a worldmaking project aimed at creating a world free from domination. Yet given this ambition, his targets for climate justice seem, if anything, too modest: why stop with eliminating tax havens or endowing the Global Climate Fund? Why not aim at the reorganization of the global economy itself, as many anti-colonial leaders once did? And if we accept these broader ambitions, what political formations might plausibly advance the project of anticolonial climate reparations?
LPE Originals

Reconsidering the Future

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Reconsidering Reparations offers several sound policy proposals about how to pursue reparations and climate justice. Yet its main contribution to the realm of climate politics has little to do with policy. Rather, it’s about a way of situating oneself in historical time. Unlike ordinary philosophical parables that freeze time and abstract away from specific places (think of the “trolley problem” or the “veil of ignorance”), Táíwò is arguing that the big picture is always historical, and always spatially complex. This shift in orientation will change how we see environmental or climate issues, but it will also change how we see much else.
LPE Originals

Reconsidering Reparations

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For better or worse, our world stands on the precipice of major changes. Our current energy system is driving a rapidly unfolding climate crisis, and the need for total transformation “at every level of society” is now the prevailing scientific opinion. Given this context, Reconsidering Reparations argues for two things. First, reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism should be seen as a future-oriented project engaged in building a just social order. Second, if we accept that view, then reparations and the struggle for racial justice should be directly linked to the struggle for climate justice.
LPE Originals

Knitting Together Patchwork Privacy and Labor Law Frameworks to Protect Workers from Corporate Surveillance

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To protect low-wage workers from invasive digital surveillance that follows them home, Congress needs to adopt a comprehensive framework that protects both worker and consumer data. In the absence of such Congressional action, regulatory action such as the FTC’s advanced notice of proposed rulemaking and the National Labor Relations Board’s recent focus on surveillance can be used to improve the situation. Finally, labor law doctrines should venture even further to address the impacts of surveillance: for instance, the NLRB should hold that evidence of surveillance is an essential term or condition of employment for determining whether two companies are a worker’s joint employer under its newly proposed joint employer rule. 
LPE Originals

Beyond Privacy: Changing the Data Power Dynamics in the Workplace

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By generating huge data sets to feed increasingly sophisticated algorithms, workplace surveillance allows employers to extract even more value from their employees. Greater data protection rights provide one possible avenue to change these power dynamics. But if employees truly want to participate in the management of their data and tap into it as a source of value, they need to wield power over data collection systems through collective bargaining and shared workplace governance.

LPE Originals

Electronic Surveillance Is Short-Circuiting Employment and Labor Law

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Electronic surveillance and automated management should not be understood as merely imposing some new, discrete set of harms on workers. Rather, pervasive employee monitoring should be seen as fundamentally altering the employment context in a way that threatens a wide range of employment and labor law protections. From worker safety, compensation, and classification to workplace discrimination and disability policy, policymakers and regulators must ensure that longstanding protections remain effective in the face of new technology.