What justice requires

Greetings everyone.

As you know, I am reading Quinn Slobodian’s book Crack-Up Capitalism. It is already forming the vision or outline for my ongoing project, which involves the “zonification” of Indian Country in the US. The most relevant chapter of the book is the one I reading now, on “libertarian Bantustan,” which examines the creation of small fake states within South Africa, in part as an experiment in the creation of a kind of inverted Singapore, that is, as a Zone at the opposite end of the chain of so-called value creation. For it seems it’s not enough for neoliberals to have Special Economic Zones to produce and refine and sell their products without taxes, they must also have Zones for the intensified extraction of raw materials and labor. Also (and here is where Indigenous nations fit into the picture) “sacrifice zones” are necessary for wastelanding processes, where products can be deposited once the value creation cycle is over and all we have left are externalities or pollution.

Writing about the transition from Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to Sacrificial Wastelanding Zones (a neologism: SWZs) will take some time and require a scholarly agenda. As part of that agenda, I am specifically interested in the way governmental power is always present in neoliberal projects. For example, as Slobodian points out, in the neoliberal Bantustans, a perverse sort of land reform had to be carried out whereby communal understandings were replaced by laws imposing and protecting private property. In the US context, this kind of experimentation also happened on Indian land, for example with the Dawes Act, where by federal law Native Americans were newly constituted as individual property owners (and so-called “surplus lands” were sold to white speculators). A working hypothesis I have is that these forms of liberalization-by-law were crucially important to later neoliberal civilizational projects in the US, and perhaps as well in the global reach of neoliberalism.

---

My intention, however, was to talk about something different today. Slobodian spends some time profiling Leon Louw, an influential white South African who envisioned the neoliberal enclaves. Louw was present at the Mt Pelerin Society early meetings, and he co-wrote a book in the 1980s called South Africa: The Solution, which envisioned a future state which looked something like Switzerland, made up of small and diverse cantons. Here the neoliberal zonification process brings forth an unacknowledged product, namely a means of addressing the injustice of apartheid. This is the way that Slobodian discusses it:

Louw and Kendall hoped the re-parcellization of land into many cantons and the decentralization of control over natural resources would safeguard against policies of racialized revenge. Louw left no doubt about this implication when he told Time magazine, “We want to make it possible to let the tiger — the Black majority — out of the cage without whites being eaten.” (pg. 90)

I point to this passage in order to illuminate two or three things. First, with a possible hiatus to the Zionist genocide on the horizon, it’s clear that we need to start thinking about a political world post-Israeli apartheid. Second, we need to ensure that the language of “never again” is forever removed from liberals like Blinken and Samantha Power: the term and its attendant concepts and practices — for example the “Right to Protect” — need to be fully rejected and reconceptualized by Palestinian scholars addressing their own post-genocidal condition. Part of this rejection means being aware of attempts at co-opting the language of humanism to “protect” racist genocidaires from the justice that is coming for them. Louw shows us that in some cases even territorial boundaries are used in this process of co-optation. Surely Israel will attempt various forms of zonification in service to Zionism, in whatever post-apartheid order emerges: various perimeters, “safety zones” and settler compounds will sound very similar to Louw’s South African context. This is just one more way that settler-colonial studies is relevant to the contemporary condition.