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Since the 1980s, a particular definition of the United States and the global economy as being “capitalist” has become hegemonic. In this view, a capitalist economy is autonomous and coherent, and it needs to be regulated by its own internal laws. This view is an illusion. The reality is that economies organized around the pursuit of private profit are contradictory, incoherent, and heavily intertwined with politics and governmental action. But the illusion remains hugely consequential, because it has been embraced by political and economic elites who are convinced that they are powerless to change this system. The reality is that the continuing vitality of the United States and the world economy requires a new period of major reforms on the scale of the New Deal and the building of new global institutions after World War II.

New and exciting forms of food activism are emerging as supporters of sustainable agriculture increasingly recognize the need for a broader, more strategic and more politicized food politics that engages with questions of social, racial and economic justice. This book highlights examples of campaigns to restrict industrial agriculture’s use of pesticides and other harmful technologies, struggles to improve the pay and conditions of workers throughout the food system and alternative projects that seek to de-emphasize notions of individualism and private ownership. Grounded in over a decade of scholarly critique of food activism, this volume seeks to answer the question of “what next,” inspiring scholars, students and activists toward collective, cooperative and oppositional struggles for change.

On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South portrays the workplace conditions, social relations, and intergroup attitudes of Latino migrants and African Americans in the contemporary American South, a region that has undergone a dramatic transformation since the late 1980s, as a result of immigration. The book is an ethnography of a large meatpacking plant in rural North Carolina, where I held a job as a production worker for sixteen months, totaling more than 3,500 hours of participant observation between August 2009 and December 2010. My objective was to understand how Latinos are becoming incorporated into the shifting social fabric of a new American South. In contrast to the fears of some scholars and pundits, African American workers do not talk or behave as if they are especially threatened by economic, political, or cultural competition from Latinos or other migrants. On the other hand, Latinos’ orientation to African Americans is profoundly racialized in ways that reflect and reinforce ethnoracial boundaries between Latinos and African Americans, express their determination to achieve incorporation as nonblacks, and may bolster the dominance of whites and whiteness in the emerging order. How these groups differently experience and respond to oppressive exploitation in the workplace is a fundamental—indeed, constitutive—aspect of this story. As such, an important policy implication of my findings is that a fundamental basis for conflict between Latinos and African Americans can be neutralized by ensuring and extending the workplace rights and protections of all workers—regardless of employment authorization status.

What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? The author draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporation's Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, the book shows how people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor, auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat. Rather than assuming that corporations are monolithic, profit-maximizing subjects, the author turns to anthropological theories of personhood to develop an analytic model of the corporation as an unstable collective subject with multiple authors, boundaries, and interests. This book demonstrates that corporations are constituted through continuous struggles over relations with—and responsibilities to—local communities, workers, activists, governments, contractors, and shareholders.