Sunday, November 30, 2008

Property Rights and the Well-Being of the Land

The Great Law Establishes the Preeminent Agency of the Land


Seattle, WA. The Onondaga Nation is one of the affiliated tribes of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy in upstate New York. I just completed a second reading of the Haudenosaunee "Letter to the Western World." My graduate student, Karen Capuder (Mohawk), kindly shared the document with a class I am teaching on environmental anthropology.

This is a document of sublime significance because it marks a definitive critique of the Western world from the location or positionality of a people who have been democratically self-governing in their homeland for a longer span of uninterrupted time than perhaps any other place-based culture in the world.

I have also revisited and reflected on the The Great Law of Peace, Kaianere'ko:wa, adhered to by the five First Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Great Law of Peace is the framework of a place-based and deep tradition of democratic self-governance.

However, at the heart of their concept of "democracy," the Haudenosaunee prioritize the well-being of the land as the true measure of freedom, dignity, justice, and right livelihood.

According to the Great Law, the only way to ensure well-being and peace (the two are equivalent in Haudenosaunee epistemology) is to show respect for the original instructions that are manifest in the agency of the land, in the land's display of health, diversity, and resilience. This is an alterNative concept of property rights where the original and primary rights derive from the land's well-being and ecological integrity.

Now, the Onondaga are working to interject this principle of the well-being of the land into U.S. federal laws governing property rights. They seek to transform American property law through the intervention of the Great Law of Peace.

As long as the land is reduced to the status of a "property right," private or public, the well-being of the land will be violated and the people's capacity for stewardship will be diminished.

According to Haudenosaunee ethics, there are no "individual rights" to property and the land is not a commodity. Instead of focusing on "rights," people also have "obligations" to care for the land and ensure its vitality and integrity. Out of this respect for the well-being of the land as a basic obligation of people, humans find their own needs for right livelihoods met within a widening sense of common wealth that honors the earth, our home.

Why are the Onondaga leading this audacious attempt to transform nearly 300 years of law-making in the United States on that most pivotal of all "rights," the right to private property?

Perhaps it is because of the legacy of environmental racism in Onondaga land? Lake Onondaga is the site where Aionwentha (Hiawatha) once bound together the five arrows symbolizing the strength of the union of five in the Confederacy.

Today, the soils on the shore of Lake Onondaga are contaminated and leaching into the lake waters and feeder streams. A good portion of the watershed is officially designated as a Superfund site. The corporate polluters, including Allied Chemical and Honeywell, Inc., at Lake Onondaga have disrespected the well-being and integrity of this Native land.

Like other indigenous peoples, the Onondaga propose that all living things have standing before the Great Law of Peace. The privileging of private property rights are thus a fundamental violation of the sovereign law of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The Onondaga have declared that the system of private property law is a violation of the Treaty Rights granted the Iroquois First Nations and remembered in the Two Row Wampum belt.

Ecological restoration remains one of the fundamental obligations spelled out by the Onondaga Nation in its quest to transform American property law. At the heart of the Onondaga legal complaint filed in a Syracuse federal court (March 11, 2005) is the argument that the Nation's unique relationship to place "...goes far beyond federal and state legal concerns of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The people are one with the land and consider themselves stewards of it. It is the duty of the Nation's leaders to work for a healing of this land..."

This is not a typical "Indian land claims" lawsuit. In the context of federal litigation, it is based on concepts that speak more to human "obligations" to the land than to individual or even collective property "rights." The Onondaga struggle is for "justice" for the land and water as agencies of their own making.

This lawsuit should be watched and supported by all who support indigenous peoples' and the quest for a just and sustainable future through place-based ecological democracy. Restoring the health of Aionwentha's shoreline at Lake Onondaga is the only true measure of environmental justice in this case.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Thanksgiving Story

NOTE: In the spirit of the Haudenosaunee "Letter to the Western World," we are re-posting Ms. Bate's message to encourage non-Native people to reflect on how the history of the world is filled with the continuing trauma of genocide and the reverberating echoes of ecocide. The widening social movements of indigenous peoples against the destruction of cultural and biological diversity is the planetary challenge of our time. Yet, the USA must have its Founding Myths. To be the shining beacon of democracy and freedom, the legitimizing state needs a history that proves it is worthy of the task. But the history of conquest and colonialism is actually filled with stories of invaders destroying the local food systems of indigenous peoples. I am reminded of Kit Carson burning the Dine peach and apricot orchards at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona before the Navajo were forcibly marched across the desert to a concentration camp at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. Or, of the Dutch Boers burning the field crops and orchards of the Khoikhoi in the Cape of South Africa to establish the roots of their apartheid empire. Or, the death squads in Chiapas burning the Tzeltal milpas to starve the Zapatistas to death. Or,.....the list is endless; check with any locality.

As non-indigenous peoples count their "blessings" this Thanksgiving Day 2008, let them first pledge: "Never again." "Say it. Sing it. Dance it. Never again will I stand aside in silence ignoring the hunger and suffering. Never again will I forget that our "bounty" is rooted in conquest, exploitation, and violence. Never again, will I be an unwitting accomplice of genocide and ecocide." Therefore, pledge to end hunger and violence in your place, in this time. Do not be an "innocent" and quiet bystander for in doing so you are complicit with the violence of hunger wrought of the destruction of original peoples' livelihoods.

The real story of Thanksgiving

by Susan Bates

Most of us associate the holiday with happy Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a big feast. And that did happen - once.

The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language. He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags.

But as word spread in England about the paradise to be found in the new world, religious zealots called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. Finding no fences around the land, they considered it to be in the public domain. Joined by other British settlers, they seized land, capturing strong young Natives for slaves and killing the rest. But the Pequot Nation had not agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought.

In 1637 near present day Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside. Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "A Day Of Thanksgiving" because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered.

Cheered by their "victory", the brave colonists and their Indian allies attacked village after village. Women and children over 14 were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered. Boats loaded with a many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of New England. Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible.

Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches announced a second day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the heathen savages. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets like soccer balls. Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their chief was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts -- where it remained on display for 24 years.

The killings became more and more frenzied, with days of thanksgiving feasts being held after each successful massacre. George Washington finally suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving per year be set aside instead of celebrating each and every massacre. Later Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War -- on the same day he ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota.

This story doesn't have quite the same fuzzy feelings associated with it as the one where the Indians and Pilgrims are all sitting down together at the big feast. But we need to learn our true history so it won't ever be repeated. Next Thanksgiving, when you gather with your loved ones to Thank God for all your blessings, think about those people who only wanted to live their lives and raise their families. They, also took time out to say "thank you" to Creator for all their blessings.

For the original, please go to: http://www.manataka.org/page269.html

And the original scholarly research sources used by Bates from an article by Mike Ely can be found at:

http://links.org.au/node/753/8622#comment-8622

Monday, November 24, 2008

The Zapatistas and the end of Necro-Capitalism

Muerte, capital, vida
Everything here is for sale except for indigenous dignity.

Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional


Seattle, WA. The Zapatistas of southcentral Mexico's zona lacandona, the canyonesque highlands of southeastern Chiapas, are often described as the first post-modern revolutionary movement.

The upland Maya peoples who are the core of indigenous Zapatistas - while rooted in five hundred years of resistance to colonialism, actually started the self-defense form of their organization in the early 1980s in response to the centuries-old practice among the landed gentry, state governors, and various other assorted political thugs to hire and maintain private armies, the mercenary death squads that have long been used to assassinate native farmers, forest dwellers, plantation workers, and itinerant labor organizers.

Neoliberal death

This form of structural violence has long been accompanied by the Mexican state's policy of transmigration that brought huge numbers of outsiders, mainly impoverished and displaced mestizo workers, to la selva. These workers were employed, exploited would be more accurate, in the burgeoning industrial capitalist markets for chiapaneco water, minerals (including oil), timber, coffee, tropical fruits, livestock, and other "resources" including rare and endemic butterflies collected by those who covet the objectified living organisms of the trade in "exotic" biodiversity.

These interloping workers and speculators were recruits of the free trade in ethnocide/ecocide: Slash-and-burn destruction was unleashed by all sorts of "operators" who hired the itinerant workers to toil in the uplands to extend the reach of the landed political gentry. Displacing and starving the Zapatista communities to death by destroying their crops and right livelihoods in their common, is a strategy that serves the ruthless bloody enclosures and the commodification of all life. We arrive at neoliberalism's free trade nirvana, and find nothing but death.

Of course, the history of what I think we should call necro-capitalism is filled with countless such episodes of structural violence unleashed by what Karl Marx called the "primitive accumulation" - the forced separation of the native from her land and her means of autonomous existence. I recall, for example, Kit Carson leading the US Army attack on the Dine peach and apricot orchards at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona before the Navajo were marched across the desert to a concentration camp at Bosque Redondo; or the Dutch Boers destroying the Khoikhoi orchards and row crops fields to establish the roots of apartheid in South Africa; or, well.....ad nauseum.

I am stating that death is an ubiquitous presence at the birth of capitalist enclosure and original accumulation; anywhere; every place.

Karen Capuder, a Mohawk woman and graduate student, reminds us that debates about "over-population" and free markets assume, with calm disregard for westernized hyperconsumerism, that little brown people in the so-called third world, in their abject poverty, are the greatest threat to the environment. What such arguments fail to note is that western capitalist colonizers decimated indigenous populations that are only now starting to recuperate to levels not seen in five hundred years. Western capitalist development is our impoverishment; our death. Indigenous people talk about this a lot. We do it in the old and new wampum belts, medicine bundles, and talking sticks; our "secrets" are embedded in these unfolding stories.

Necro-Capitalism

But back to Chiapas. The slash-and-burn armies of death were not alone. Narco-trafficant networks, some tied to military units and the very same Death Squads employed by the gentry, added to the misery of the Lacandon Maya peoples and their highland forest ecosystem, which by the way ranks among the most significant biodiversity hot spots in Mexico and indeed the world; for example, some eighty (80) percent of all North American butterflies are endemic to la selva lacandona, hence the illegal trade in rare specimens.

The Zapatista revolt, La guerra del nuevo año, launched 1 January 1994, is an amazing accomplishment as an insurgency against the Death Squads of what I call necro-capitalism - a form of exploitation explained best by the Zapatista dicho: "Here everything is for sale except for indigenous dignity."

I have been thinking a lot about death and the "commodity form" of late. About how death comes in the form of the development banker as well as the eco-tourist officer, both promoting "development" of indigenous worlds and hence displacement of natives from their inhabited wilderness (as self-willing land) to make room for coffee plantations or biosphere reserves; or the narco-trafficker and evangelical interloper selling poison and, well, more poison. Death comes in the tracks of death squads and the transformation of the ecology of place whenever/wherever capitalists seek to "develop" or "extract" value from the sovereign "natural resources" in native territories.

If political ecology has something to contribute to all this, a better understanding of necro-capitalism, then perhaps we would do well first to recall that ecology may be the study of life but anthropology haunts the halls of death studies.

How we bring these two "subversive sciences" together is the key. Traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) and the other forms of place-based knowledge (e.g., self-governance) are the door that this key opens for us. A door that leads to a "bridge." A bridge to nowhere? A bridge between what the Zapatistas call "basement" and "penthouse" Mexico? Or, perhaps a bridge to indigenous autonomy and alterNative place-based democracy?

Free markets in the fear of death

Now, life/death is a tricky binary for sure. This seems especially the case in Western epistemologies that champion the subject position of the atavistic individual; the individual is the only rights-holder and no communities are allowed here in the realm of "freedom" in trade nirvana.

This artifactual Westernized entity - the Hobbesian individual reductio absurdium - is the political project of original accumulators and is said to be the sole analog for the practice of rationality. The free trading individual, dancing with prices, is the sole heir of a "naturalized" framework of the "rational self," and this self-interested rational individual is posited as the key to a world with the widest distribution of civil and profitable social good.

Fear of death, especially the mass spectacle sort of death etched in the minds of most Americans post 9/11, seems to be a major driver of the capitalist production of an endless stream of commodities related to security against "terrorist death" (e.g., Blackwater mercenary adjuncts of necro-capitalism), avoidance of illness leading to death (the commodification of biomedicine), or the purchase of death-defying consumption at the expense of others, and this last one is mainly attained through our ability to take advantage of disparate risk that allows us to externalize violence against the environment, labor, and other "subaltern" or "marginalized" populations to enjoy our "consumer choice freedom." This is an epistemology that privileges what van Hayek calls "dances with prices." Makes one yearn for "dances with wolves." That is a pretty ugly epistemology if you think about it.

Are the ecological, social, legal, and economic impacts of our individual consumer right to have limitless access to global commodity chains the root of necro-capitalism? Is it therefore appropriate or useful to conceptualize capitalism as a "death machine"?

But it seems that Americans, who spend a lot of money on various forms of denial of death (risk reduction included), are also into denial about the ability of the privileged to put some distance between themselves as consumers living in urbane comfort, and the violence to environmental space in local places that lies at the root of the commodity chains feeding our ravenous appetites. Does the tin in your laptop come from pit mines in forests stripped bare by the local military thug in Congo after he murdered the forest dwellers and burned their crops?

When the Zapatistas rebelled in opposition to NAFTA, they did so by declaring the US-Mexico-Canada trade pact, "A Death Warrant for Indigenous People."

What would lead a swidden and milpa upland forest-dwelling culture to become the most advanced activists and intellectuals in the frontlines of reiterative place-based communities of resistance organizing a massive movement against globalization and neoliberalism, necro-capitalism? What do the Zapatistas mean by Death and Life? Hint: It is not a binary.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Crisis of Capital, Immigration, and Food Justice

Capitalist Crisis and Immigration

We are all Africans, get over it.

Dolores Huerta to the anti-immigrant hate-group, The Minutemen

Seattle, WA. As I sit in my University office in Seattle thinking about the ongoing struggle for environmental and food justice, it seems reasonable to contemplate the causes underlying the current crisis of “finance capital” that has led to the meltdown in stock markets across the globe, the collapse of major investment banks and insurers (Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, all of Iceland’s four major banks, AIG, etc.), and the freezing up of the credit markets.

A fair question might be: What does this have to do with the history and politics of Mexican immigration? For one thing, surely, we might to well to recall that during the last major crisis of American capitalism, the Great Depression, Mexicans were blamed for everything from the collapse of Wall Street to the surging unemployment that left more than 25 percent of the U.S. workforce unemployed. The result, documented by Abraham Hoffman (1974) in his book, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression, was the rounding-up and deportation of some 500,000 Mexicans including many U.S. citizens who had never set foot in Mexico under the auspices of the “Repatriation Program.”

The current crisis has at least this in common with the Great Depression as we have been hearing for some time now, and certainly since 2006 and the latest upsurge in anti-immigrant and Minutemen-fueled nativist hysteria, that Mexicans are to blame for our country’s growing unemployment, declining wages, rising crime rates, rampant immorality, and the bankruptcy of municipalities and states as a consequence of “illegal aliens” using tax-based services without paying their fair share of taxes. The truth is that transnational Mexican workers are "undocumented taxpayers" that contribute more to the treasury than they receive back in medical or social services; fear of apprehension and deportation means that Mexicans, legal and "out of status" alike, under-utilize public services.

I read this as a crisis for capital because it can no longer “externalize” the costs of the reproduction of Mexican labor power, a point I will return to later. For now suffice it to note that Mexicans have resisted to the point that the costs to capital of exploiting Mexican workers has increased collectively (which is not to argue that Mexicans are paid fair and just wages for they clearly are not). Despite the efforts of the state to criminalize them, immigrants are creatively finding ways to engage in what Adelaida del Castillo calls "the unauthorized practice of social citizenship." This involves the self-provisioning of food, shelter, jobs, crafts and trades, health insurance, education and other aspects of the basic elements of biological and social reproduction. The similarities between the 1930s and our current situation do not end here; but back for a moment to the causes of the current capitalist crisis.

The Great Depression has invariably been described, in largely Keynesian terms, as an “over-production/under-consumption” crisis. That would not appear to be the case this time around since we have had both (primarily outsourced) over-production and (debt-financed, or credit card-based) over-consumption.

We have to, once again, turn to Karl Marx for the most viable theory of the underlying causes of the current crisis. In both Capital and the Grundrisse, Marx noted that capitalism is inherently prone to crisis, although he also understood that capitalism is incredibly resilient and is often able to overcome the contradictions that drive it repeatedly into crisis and ruin only to emerge in some reiterative metamorphosis. Of course, this "creative destruction" usually involves state intervention to bailout the Wall Street speculators and "save capitalism from the capitalists," as FDR is reputed to have observed. So much for neoliberal free market ideology.

Marx’s crisis theory has often been summarized as focused on the two fundamentally inherent contradictions of capitalism: first is the tendency of the falling rate of profit (this is actually not Marx’s theory but a crude, even vulgar, Stalinist misappropriation); second is the tendency for capitalism to destroy the natural conditions of production by externalizing damage unto the environment and labor [sic]. Obviously, for Marx there are no “externalities.” This, however, does not go far enough and certainly not far enough to be of much use in analyzing the current crisis. According to Harry Cleaver (2002), Marx’s theory of crisis is best understood as a theory of working-class struggle.

Underlying the contradictions is the problematic of the "fetishism of commodities." For Marx, production is a social activity requiring the cooperation of workers engaged in what is undeniably a collective endeavor. However, the products of human labor activity, commodities, take on a life of their own, appearing as a thing independent of its creators. This is the "secret" of commodity fetishism: That which we create is owned by another and becomes a thing "dancing with prices" (as van Hayek would have it) guided by nothing except the "invisible hand of the market." That which is socially produced is individually appropriated and therein lies the root of all crises of capitalism since workers constantly struggle to re-appropriate the social wealth they have created through collaborative labors.

In this line of thinking, another dimension provided by Marx, and very little known in the USA, comes from his analysis of the “circuits of capitalist production” outlined in Volume II of Capital. Marx laid out the basic circuit of the reproduction of capital as follows:

M-C….P….C’-M’-M……etc.

or more completely as:

Lp
/
M-C.…P….C’-M’-M…..
\
Mp


NOTE: Where M = money form of capital; C = commodity form of capital; Lp = labor power; Mp = means of production; ….P…. = process of production or labor process; C’ = the commodity produced by the labor process with exchange value to be realized in the circulation phase; M’ = profit or surplus value (s/v) realized after the sale of the commodity in the market. For the expanded reproduction of capital to occur it is absolutely necessary that M’ > M.

Using circuit analysis, we can see that the Great Depression was a crisis in the rupture of the circuit during the P….C’ phase (over-production) and the C’-M’ phase (under-consumption). The current crisis is unfolding because of a different rupture, one that occurs in the M’-M phase (or what Marx classified as the phase of the realization of surplus value).

It is important to understand that there is no mystical process that automatically determines that M’>M. For this to occur, not only must consumers purchase commodities (C’), which embody surplus value as unpaid but as yet unrealized surplus labor time, so that the capitalist receives payment for the good, but also then the capitalist must, besides “hoarding,” redirect some of the surplus value toward reinvesting in new Mp and Lp to get the process moving forward again. Only now, alienated labor under capitalism is not just producing material commodities, indeed, as Negri and Hardt (2000, 2002) have noted a significant amount of “immaterial” production now characterizes much of the neoliberal empire of capital.

The recent phase of this includes much of what is related to the so-called IT or Information Technology Revolution which involves not just the commodification of knowledge (e.g., intellectual property rights, etc.) and of computer software programs but what I am going to call the re-commodification of commodities themselves! I am sure you are thinking, what!!? Yes, a commodity is already a commodity, but in its grotesque wooden head is the twisted potential for an endless reiteration of its value reification.

Allow me to explain. What has occurred, roughly since 1980 and the so-called Reagan Revolution (qua the ascendance to governmentalized power of the deregulatory/privatizing ideology of neoliberalism in the US context), is what the Swiss-Italian Marxist theorist Christian Marazzi (2002) calls “the commodification of risk.”

In the language of neoliberal economics this is what investment bankers refer to as “credit default swaps” (CDS), which is exactly what brought AIG (American International Group) down. This produces a crisis in the realization of surplus value since, not only are the investment bankers losing billions from the collapse of the predatory subprime mortgage market, the insurers (like AIG), who were betting against the probability that many people would default on their mortgages, have lost more than billions. Indeed, the total losses, when we combine the actual subprime mortgages, CDS, and other “exotic” financial instruments are closer to $62 trillion, or about the same as the GDP of the entire world in one year!

This crisis will reshape the structure of the global economy in ways that will leave the emerging system close to unrecognizable from that which just collapsed. I hope what ever emerges is not a socialist form of capitalism (yes, socialism is a form of capitalism but more on that later). Unfortunately, the $700 billion “bailout” is precisely a “socialization” of the risks of private investment decisions (socialism in this sense is always socialism for capital and is often described with the common vernacular phrase, “socialism for the rich”).

How is this related to Mexican immigration? The exploitation of vulnerable populations like undocumented transnational Mexican workers operates on the basis of the same value reification that produced exotic instruments like CDS only instead of ephemeral paper value we are talking about the abstraction of living labor power. Think of Mexican workers as a flesh and blood version of the commodification of risk only in this case capitalists were banking on the unlimited availability of exploitable undocumented workers whose use-value as productive labor was politically devalued and this too has collapsed under the weight of both workers’ struggles and the increasing militarization of the border which has reduced the migratory flow.

The Crisis and Food Justice

One of the most obvious consequences of the current crisis is the widening of the effects that this structural perturbation is having on the reproduction of labor power. There are more homeless people now: the predatory subprime mortgage meltdown has displaced literally millions of families from their homes. There are thus also more hungry people out there trying to find a way to feed their families and this pressure is being felt at food pantries, soup kitchens, homeless shelter cafeterias, and crisis intervention centers.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this crisis is that some investment banks had structured credit default swaps as bets against the stability of world food prices. These speculators have gambled that the inflationary pressures of oil prices will lead to a crisis in the affordability of food for a growing proportion of the world's already severely malnourished population. In a nutshell, these capitalist speculators gambled that more people would go hungry; they did this to make a profit from the commodification of risk. This is criminal behavior and the millions of deaths that are resulting from hunger, malnutrition, and food riots across the world must be laid squarely at the feet of the Wall Street moneybaggers.

This is an opportune moment for all progressive and radical social movements and activists. We have an opportunity to use this crisis to deal a fatal blow to neoliberalism and the unregulated trading in risk and death that it has unleashed. The struggle to restore viable, just, and resilient local food systems can become a major force in moving toward a definitive defeat of necro-capitalism. We have an opportunity to de-commodify our bodies and our food. We have an opening for a new anti-economics of the commonwealth based on self-reliance, mutual aid, and cooperative forms of labor to generate and reclaim the social wealth created by our exploited communities.

Don't just think locally and act globally; eat and act locally! Refuse to consume any food produced beyond the 100 miles that comprise your own foodshed. This great refusal of consumption of foods ensnared in global commodity chains will be as important as the great refusal of work that captured the imagination of the Italian working class when it challenged necro-capitalism in the 1960s and 70s.