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Conquest of Economics

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Summary

Patrick Wolfe’s generalisation, in the title argument of Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, of the Conquest of Labour: an all-encompassing subversion of market rationality, enabled by diaspora capital that required no profit, under which it mattered more that labour be Hebrew than that it be productive — and which Wolfe calls “a Nakba-in-waiting” (Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, PDF p.21, p.28 / printed p.153, p.160).

Details

  • The conquest was enabled by Zionism’s diffusely integrated metropole: donors who funded the world Zionist project did not require a return on their investment, so subsidised settlers were unencumbered by the obligation to return a profit, a confounding of capitalist rationality that overwhelmed the limited resources available to Native Palestinians (PDF p.1, p.8 / printed p.133, p.140).
  • Without freedom from the discipline of the bottom line, Wolfe argues, there could have been no Conquest of Labour, no kibbutzim and ultimately no Jewish state; the Jewish National Fund could run up large debts and the yishuv could prioritise ethnicity over efficiency (PDF p.20-21 / printed p.152-153).
  • Its institutional form was economic segregation — Arthur Ruppin’s term — a closed, protected and autonomously reproduced circuit of Jewish-only production, consumption and exchange, which the Mandate administration abetted by treating the Jewish economy’s absorptive capacity as if it were Palestine’s as a whole, ignoring the zero-sum relationship in which Jewish-sector growth took place at the Indigenous sector’s expense (PDF p.15, p.19 / printed p.147, p.151).
  • Its territorial form was purchase directed to contiguity and irreversibility rather than to agricultural value or individual profit: collectively owned land removed from general alienability, never to return to gentile ownership (PDF p.22 / printed p.154).
  • Wolfe’s summary judgment: “The conquest of economics was a Nakba-in-waiting”, because the Nakba changed only the means, not the ends, accelerating the slow-motion dispossession the conquest had conducted for over half a century (PDF p.27-28 / printed p.159-160).

Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, Conquest of Labour, Preaccumulation, Patrick Wolfe, Jewish National Fund, Arthur Ruppin

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