Drop everything and rush straight to pop singer Dua Lipa's Instagram. The 28-year-old has declared that she “feels so beyond lucky to end my year here in India.” Dua Lipa, who is in Rajasthan with her family for the holiday season, has also shared a series of stunning pictures and videos from the travel album. From safari rides to offering prayers, Dupa Lipa's album is all things fun. Expressing her gratitude, she said, “I feel so beyond lucky to end my year here in India. Thank you to all the wonderful people here who have shown us so much love, kindness, hospitality and generosity. This experience has been deeply meaningful. I feel lucky to be in and within the magic with my family where we have had the time to explore, regroup, recharge and restart. Ready for the year ahead. What a joy!!!” Replying to the post, Smriti Khanna wrote, "Aaye na mazze?" Actress Neha Dhupia replied with red heart, fire and applause emojis.
Before this, Dua Lipa dropped a set of mesmerising pictures from her Rajasthan album on Instagram and wished her fans and online family "Happy Holidays". Along with the snippets, the singer wrote, “Happy Holidays from me to youuuuu sending love light health and happiness for the year ahead,” with a red heart emoji.
Dua Lipa and her family also paid a visit to some of the historical monuments in New Delhi. Take a look:
Wait, there is more. It is time to look at Dua Lipa's "2023 highlights." Sharing her best of bests, Dua Lipa said, “Some of my 2023 highlights!!! Thank you to all of you for making this year so unbelievably special. Counting my lucky stars every day. Excited for more more more in 2024!!”
This is not the first time Dua Lipa has visited India. The three-time Grammy Award winner was last seen in India in November 2019 for the OnePlus Music Festival in Mumbai.
Drop everything and rush straight to pop singer Dua Lipa's Instagram. The 28-year-old has declared that she “feels so beyond lucky to end my year here in India.” Dua Lipa, who is in Rajasthan with her family for the holiday season, has also shared a series of stunning pictures and videos from the travel album. From safari rides to offering prayers, Dupa Lipa's album is all things fun. Expressing her gratitude, she said, “I feel so beyond lucky to end my year here in India. Thank you to all the wonderful people here who have shown us so much love, kindness, hospitality and generosity. This experience has been deeply meaningful. I feel lucky to be in and within the magic with my family where we have had the time to explore, regroup, recharge and restart. Ready for the year ahead. What a joy!!!” Replying to the post, Smriti Khanna wrote, "Aaye na mazze?" Actress Neha Dhupia replied with red heart, fire and applause emojis.
Before this, Dua Lipa dropped a set of mesmerising pictures from her Rajasthan album on Instagram and wished her fans and online family "Happy Holidays". Along with the snippets, the singer wrote, “Happy Holidays from me to youuuuu sending love light health and happiness for the year ahead,” with a red heart emoji.
Dua Lipa and her family also paid a visit to some of the historical monuments in New Delhi. Take a look:
Wait, there is more. It is time to look at Dua Lipa's "2023 highlights." Sharing her best of bests, Dua Lipa said, “Some of my 2023 highlights!!! Thank you to all of you for making this year so unbelievably special. Counting my lucky stars every day. Excited for more more more in 2024!!”
This is not the first time Dua Lipa has visited India. The three-time Grammy Award winner was last seen in India in November 2019 for the OnePlus Music Festival in Mumbai.
The “Damn B*tch, You Live Like This?” meme is an exploitable comic panel that features the characters Max and Roxanne from “The Goofy Movie,” drawn by Instagram user @eboni._. This meme actually evolved from the “Wow Queen, You’re so Beautiful” meme, also spawned by the same drawing.
Let’s explore the story behind this hilarious way to call someone out for the way they are living.
Birth of the ‘Damn B*tch, You Live Like This’ meme
Instagram user @eboni._ posted the original drawing to her account on April 13, 2016. Titling the post, “Quick sketch of Max and Roxanne,” @eboni._ showed Max telling Roxanne, “Wow queen, you’re so beautiful.”
The “Damn B*tch, You Live Like This?” meme emerged in November 2016, when another user remixed the drawing to depict Max and Roxanne in a messy apartment. Against the background of the filthy apartment, Max asks Roxanne, “Damn, bitch, you live like this?” This version, attributed to Facebook user Travis Cuomo, struck a chord online, and quickly turned into a viral sensation.
Exploitable comic and viral spread
The meme gained traction as way to highlight the messy living conditions or poor life choices of others. It soon became a popular reaction image on platforms like Twitter, where users paired the meme’s characters with images of untidy rooms or other messy scenarios. Its appeal lay in its ability to humorously call out less-than-ideal situations, often with a mix of shock and mock disgust.
The popularity of the “Damn B*tch, You Live Like This” meme can be partially attributed to its roots in the sentimentality associated with childhood cartoons. Max and Roxanne, remembered fondly by many, were suddenly recast in a modern scenario and the juxtaposition of an artifact of childhood nostalgia with adult realities resonated deeply with a broad audience.
The meme also speaks to a common experience in the internet age: the sometimes inadvertent revelation of personal living spaces in the background of selfies or videos. It humorously addresses the often startling reality of how people live behind the scenes—an authenticity that’s often concealed in the curated world of social media. As a result, the phrase “Damn B*tch, You Live Like This?” became shorthand for calling out these moments of objective truth.
Beyond its use as a reaction meme, “Damn B*tch, You Live Like This” also serves as a call for self-reflection. Per Kathryn Winn of Meme Forum, it invites people to take a candid look at their living conditions and personal habits, and hopefully inspire them to do better. In this sense, the meme transcends its comedic origins as a tool for personal awareness and improvement.
The evolution of this meme highlights the significant impact that internet culture can have on personal behavior and societal norms. Memes like “Damn B*tch, You Live Like This?” not only entertain but also provoke thought and self-awareness.
Damn, bitch, you live like this? Max asking Roxanne messy nasty room house with stuff trash on the ground soda cans dirty clothes Goofy junior movie meme pic.twitter.com/CaNUp5AjBU
As it becomes further enmeshed in our collective digital language, this meme stands as a testament to the enduring appeal of humor rooted in everyday realities. It encapsulates a blend of nostalgia, comedy, and societal commentary that characterizes much of modern meme culture. As it continues to be used, the meme remains a relevant and amusing mirror to our personal and collective lives.
Kahron Spearman is the community manager for the Daily Dot and Nautilus magazine. He’s also a journalist, copywriter, and host of “Discovery with Kahron Spearman” on KAZI 88.7.
"There's still a full trading day left in the week, but both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are on pace for their ninth straight positive week, something they haven't done in unison since late 1985," Bespoke said on X on Friday.
In 1985, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 posted 11-week win streaks, according to data going back to 1971.
Advertisement
Bespoke
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 need to close above 4,754 and 16,777 respectively on Friday for the weekly win streaks to stay alive. As of Friday morning, they were just slightly above their closing levels from last week.
What's particularly striking about the ongoing rally in stocks is how strong it has been. Since October 30, the S&P 500 and Dow Jones have risen about 15%, while the Nasdaq 100 has jumped about 17%.
"The S&P 500 is now within 1% of the all-time high of 4,801 but has not yet exceeded this level. Since 1950, there are 11 instances where the S&P 500 fell 20% and then climbed to within 1% of its prior all-time high. 11 of 11 times, the S&P 500 quickly made an all-time high. Median time is 7 days and as long as 20 trading days, meaning new highs by January 2024," Lee said.
For just a few seconds, I was wondering whether there would be another hour, another day, another weekend.
It was while my wife and I were on vacation, celebrating 40 years of marriage, remembering how we said through thick and thin, through good health and sickness, through ups and downs, through years with no kids and years with our one son. It's been a journey fersure.
We discussed many things before we said "I do" in the chapel at Fort Dix in New Jersey in May 1983. Other things came along that we didn't expect, things for which we didn't plan, and we faced them with determination — together.
We shared many adventures along the way, right from the start. There were the initial, hello-nice-to-meet-you greetings at house parties in Camden, New Jersey when one of us had absolutely no sparks flying. There was drama planning our wedding day, with great emphasis on a rocking-good reception. There was drama the day of the wedding. Thunderstorms intensified as the appointed hour drew near. The Lord looked down on us, though. When the church doors opened, my beautiful bride was standing in bright sunshine.
After the wedding, it got darker and darker. Clouds burst open. Thunder and lightning struck. Heck of a start for a honeymoon night.
It was already an adventure.
After four decades, we've grown used to planning and adjusting, little or no adventure as well as planned adventure. There have been unexpected adventures, like the time we went on an overnight Cub Scout family camping trip, heartened by a good weather forecast.
Unfortunately, no one told Mother Nature. That night inside the tent was one of the most miserable nights of my life — and it's the reason my wife never went camping again.
That was one of many unplanned, unexpected adventures.
Courtesy of the Fuego Latin Orchestra Hawaii band
After four decades of twists and turns, we decided this would be a great time for a planned adventure — a trip to see our grandchildren in California, then head to the "Big Island" of Hawaii.
What an adventure! Most of it planned.
The first day, we sunned ourselves at the Royal Kona Resort lagoon with Pacific waters crashing onto the black rocks. We sipped happy hour drinks overlooking the ocean. Then an oceanside dinner.
The plan started well.
One day we put ourselves in the hands of Chris at Wasabi Tours. I hesitated when I heard the start and end times of this "tour." Pickup: 7:50 a.m. Return: "You should be back before 8."
"P.M.," I asked?
"Yes."
We agreed, in the name of adventure.
In that single day, we saw mongoose dashing in front of cars and trucks. We saw goats grazing. We saw a large Hawai'ian sea turtle and a huge Hawai'ian monk seal. We saw volcano steam vents, volcano tubes and lava. We tasted fresh Kona coffee and Hawai'ian sweet bread. We saw a light brown sand beach and a black sand beach.
On other days, we saw an olive green sand beach, one of only four in the world, and Kona's annual downtown Christmas parade. We ate fresh poke. Heck of a thing in a place where McDonald's has spam on the menu.
As boomers who like to try new things, especially finding aspects of Black culture and small but unexpected parts of local culture, we went one night to see Fuego Latin Orchestra, a fabulous, eight-piece Latin band, at Honu's On The Beach, King Kamehameha Kona Beach Resort in Kailua-Kona.
All Spanish. No English — unless you order a drink.
The joint was jumping. I had no idea what they were singing and saying, but I recognized some salsa, bachata, cumbia and merengue moves. I was impressed.
Band leader Yumbel Marassi told me later that he knew there was "an earth movement" toward the end of the show. "We like to make the ground vibrate with a groove — but not as much as an earthquake," added Marsssi, an Argentinian who lives in North Kohala.
The band was grooving. "Tu Amor me hace bien." "Ven devorame otra vez." "Cuarto de tula."
I was bopping and rocking.
Then my wife and I began shaking.
I saw tables, chairs and people shake — and they all quickly got down on the dance floor.
NBA star Nikola Jokic has shared his thoughts on being famous.
The Denver Nuggets center revealed his wish is to live a private life when his career is over, admitting that he doesn’t like being in the public eye.
“I really don’t like this life, at the end of the day, we are just basketball players,” he told the Curious Mike podcast.
“The media is something that is around us, and of course, we’re getting paid because of the media, because of popularity. Being famous, I think some people like it. I don’t, really.”
It's rare to see a 27-inch 1440p 165Hz gaming monitor for £200 or less, but that's exactly what you can get from X= on Amazon UK at the moment. This alphabet-soup-inspired model, the X= XRGB27WQ, uses an IPS panel to deliver its spec point of choice, with FreeSync/G-Sync support, a 2ms GtG response time and a clean, RGB-optional design.
This particular model hasn't made it to the review archives of RPS just yet, but I've tested it for Eurogamer and found it most agreeable, mostly on account of that spec sheet for the price. The actual design isn't bad, but the metal stand isn't height-adjustable and the styling isn't as impressive as more mainstream options. Still, there's a 100x100 VESA mount so you mount this on a monitor arm for an ergonomically superior option anyway.
The actual panel quality is solid though, with the only meaningful upgrade available being the LG Fast IPS panels available on more premium models, which boast a grey-to-grey response time of 1ms rather than 2ms. Unless you're a hugely competitive esportster (that would be better served with a 1080p 240Hz alternative), the motion clarity is easily good enough here so the spec difference isn't hugely influential for most uses.
The death toll rises to seven after flash flooding in Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal.
Facebook / IPSS S&R
Floods in Ladysmith, in northern KwaZulu-Natal, have even left seasoned rescuers shocked at the extent of the damage, destruction and death that rained down on the small town since Christmas Day.
With 11 people still missing and seven dead, rescuers have worked around the clock to search for the missing, and bring closure to concerned families.
Torrential showers swept across much of the province on Christmas Day, with rain first hitting Ladysmith on Christmas Eve.
South Africans need to be in the know if we want to create a prosperous future. News24 has kept the country informed for 25 years, and we're about to enter a new chapter of fearless journalism. Join our free subscription trial to unlock this story and a world of news aimed to inform, empower, and inspire.
By Stephanie HegartyPopulation correspondent, BBC World Service
Paul Harris / BBC
Oliveira Tikuna says this year's drought has been a wake up call
The Amazon rainforest experienced its worst drought on record in 2023. Many villages became unreachable by river, wildfires raged and wildlife died. Some scientists worry events like these are a sign that the world's biggest forest is fast approaching a point of no return.
As the cracked and baking river bank towers up on either side of us, Oliveira Tikuna is starting to have doubts about this journey. He's trying to get to his village, in a metal canoe built to navigate the smallest creeks of the Amazon.
Bom Jesus de Igapo Grande is a community of 40 families in the middle of the forest and has been badly affected by the worst drought recorded in the region.
There was no water to shower. Bananas, cassava, chestnuts and acai crops spoiled because they can't get to the city fast enough.
And the head of the village, Oliveira's father, warned anyone elderly or unwell to move closer to town, because they are dangerously far from a hospital.
Oliveira wanted to show us what was happening. He warned it would be a long trip.
But as we turn from the broad Solimões river into the creek that winds towards his village, even he is taken aback. In parts it's reduced to a trickle no more than 1m (3.3ft) wide. Before long, the boat is lodged in the river bed. It's time to get out and pull.
Paul Harris / BBC
"I'm 49 years old, we've never seen anything like this before," Oliveira says. "I've never even heard of a drought as bad as this."
After three hours of trudging up the drying stream, we give up and turn back.
"If it dries out any more than that, my family will be isolated there," Oliveira says.
To get in or out they'll have to walk across a lakebed on the other side of the village. But that's dangerous - there are snakes and alligators there.
The rainy season in the Amazon should have started in October but it was still dry and hot until late November. This is an effect of the cyclical El Niño weather pattern, amplified by climate change.
El Niño causes water to warm in the Pacific Ocean, which pushes heated air over the Americas. This year the water in the North Atlantic has also been abnormally warm, and hot, dry air has enveloped the Amazon.
Paul Harris / BBC
Flávia Costa says her team has found many plants that show signs of dying
"When it was my first drought I thought, 'Wow, this is awful. How can this happen to the rainforest?'" says Flávia Costa, a plant ecologist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research, who has been living and working in the rainforest for 26 years.
"And then, year after year, it was record-breaking. Each drought was stronger than before."
She says it's too soon to assess how much damage this year's drought has done, but her team has found many plants "showing signs of being dead".
Past dry seasons give an indication of the harm that could be done. By some estimates the 2015 "Godzilla drought" killed 2.5bn trees and plants in just one small part of the forest - and it was less severe than this latest drought.
"On average, the Amazon stopped functioning as a carbon sink," Dr Costa says. "And we mostly expect the same now, which is sad."
As well as being home to a stunning array of biodiversity, the Amazon is estimated to store around 150bn tonnes of carbon.
Many scientists fear the forest is racing towards a theoretical tipping point - a point where it dries, breaks apart and becomes a savannah.
As it stands, the Amazon creates a weather system of its own. In the vast rainforest, water evaporates from the trees to form rain clouds which travel over the tree canopy, recycling this moisture five or six times. This keeps the forest cool and hydrated, feeding it the water it needs to sustain life.
But if swathes of the forest die, that mechanism could be broken. And once this happens there may be no going back.
Brazilian climatologist Carlos Nobre first put forward this theory in 2018. The paper he co-authored says that if the Amazon is deforested by 25% and the global temperature hits between 2C and 2.5C above pre-industrial levels, the tipping point will be hit.
Andre Coelho
When the forest is dry, small fires set to clear land for planting crops burn out of control
"I'm even more worried now than I was in 2018," he says. "I just came back from COP28 and I'm not optimistic that greenhouse gases will be reduced by the agreement targets. If we exceed 2.5C, the risks to the Amazon are horrendous."
Currently 17% of the Amazon has been deforested and the global temperature is 1.1C to 1.2C above pre-industrial levels.
But Dr Nobre finds some hope in the fact that deforestation fell in all countries of the Amazon this year and that all are committed to getting it to zero by 2030. He believes Brazil can get there even sooner.
Not all scientists agree the forest will be transformed completely if Dr Nobre's tipping-point conditions occur. Dr Flávia Costa's research indicates that parts of the forest will survive - particularly those with easy access to groundwater, such as valleys.
But there are worrying signs of degradation everywhere. In Coari, a city in the heart of the Amazon, the air was thick with smoke as we headed off for Oliveira's village.
When the forest is dry, small fires set to clear land for planting crops burn out of control. Usually they burn in already degraded or deforested parts of the Amazon but this year has seen more fires in untouched or primary forest.
And there are other signs that the ecosystem is struggling. In two lakes in the region hundreds of dolphins have been found dead.
Lucas Amorelli / Sea Shepherd
Amazon dolphins died after lake water temperatures reached 40.9C in places
"It was just devastating," says Dr Miriam Marmontel, from the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development. "We were dealing with live animals, beautiful specimens and then five days later, we had 70 carcasses."
In a matter of weeks they found 276 dead dolphins. Dr Marmontel believes it's the temperature of the water that is killing them. It reached 40.9C in places, nearly 4C higher than dolphin - and human - body temperature.
"You can imagine, the animal that has its whole body immersed in that water for so many hours," Dr Marmontel says. "What do you do? That's where you live, then all of a sudden, you're in the middle of this soup and you can't get away."
In her 30 years living in the Amazon, Dr Marmontel never imagined she would see it so dry. She is shocked by how quickly the climate is changing.
"It was like a slap in the face. Because it's the first time that I see and I feel what's happening to the Amazon," she says.
Lucas Amorelli / Sea Shepherd
Transport by canoe became impossible in some places at the height of the drought
"We always say these animals are sentinels because they feel first what's going to come to us. It's happening to them, it's going to happen to us."
For Oliveira, too, this year has been a wake up call.
"We know that we are very much to blame for this, we haven't been paying attention, we haven't been defending our mother Earth. She is screaming for help," he says.
WW Rostow:The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960)
One of the key questions in development is, can all countries become rich, and if so, how? Rostow, a US academic and adviser to JFK, rising to national security adviser to President Lyndon Johnson in the mid 1960s, said they can.
Openness to world markets and investment, state investments in infrastructure and new technologies, and ploughing profits back into industry, Rostow argued, would generate a self-sustaining growth, leading developing countries towards a US-style age of mass consumption. They would just have to modernise by overcoming tradition and custom, and embrace continuous growth.
Rostow saw modernisation’s complications, warning that the sense of loss among some of the population could be a dangerous moment. Communists could, he argued, try to hijack the process to impose their own form of development.
Rostow alluded to communists as “scavengers” and to communism as a “disease of the transition”. The US, he argued, had to establish alliances with developing country elites to facilitate modernisation, while eliminating this threat.
Rostow played a significant role in escalating the US war in Vietnam, which he saw as a necessity to eliminate the communist menace. Mass death was a price worth paying for the country’s modernisation.
Thirty years after Rostow’s book, the communist threat ceased to exist and capitalist globalisation now extends to every corner of the globe. Yet about half of the world’s population still live below the World Bank’s poverty threshold.
Rostow’s affirmative answer to whether or not all countries can become rich was, in hindsight, more pro-American ideology than a convincing explanation of the complexities of modern development.
Vandana Shiva:The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (1991)
By 2050, the world’s population is estimated to reach almost 10 billion. So how do we feed ourselves?
The answer proposed by, among others, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, is through technology – large-scale irrigation, new seed varieties, improved machinery and chemical inputs – to raise agricultural productivity.
It is expected that this rural development will reduce hunger and the conflicts arising from it and will strengthen rural labour markets and social peace.
This is the green revolution model of agriculture, first rolled out in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, and then across parts of Asia and Latin American from the 1960s onwards. Today, international institutions want to apply it across sub-Saharan Africa.
Vandana Shiva – an Indian scholar and environmentalist – is warning about the dangers of technologically-based development from the top down. Her book is a study of the green revolution in India’s northern state of Punjab. By the 1980s, Punjab was India’s most prosperous state, but also home to the largest number of killings in independent India. Why?
In the 1970s, Punjab invested heavily in massive regional irrigation systems. It subsidised farmers’ switch from traditional to high-yield new grain varieties. Production rose and the region became a net grain exporter – but at a cost. Shiva says “control over nature and control over people were essential elements of the centralised and centralising strategy of the Green Revolution”.
Farmers became dependent upon the state and on agrochemical companies. Compared with traditional grains, high-yield varieties demand increasing amounts of fertilisers and water.
Increased fertiliser application reduced soil quality, requiring yet more fertiliser. Production costs increased, and when the central government withdrew subsidies, profits fell. Small farmers were marginalised by high and rising capital investment costs. Rural workers lost their jobs to new technologies.
Shiva documents how resource conflicts grew. Punjabi (predominantly) Sikh communities pitted against the central (predominantly) Hindu state, whom the former accused of unequally distributing water rights. It gave rise to a separatist movement.
Far from generating social peace and stronger labour markets, the green revolution in Punjab contributed to rural unemployment and violent conflicts.
Shiva’s book provides a stark warning of the dangers of placing our faith in new technologies that centralise power in the hands of states and agrochemical giants.
Karl Marx:Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867)
Over the past three years, £34tn of new wealth has been created. Its spread has been far from equal. Approximately £22tn, almost two-thirds of that wealth, has gone to the richest 1% of the world’s population, while the remaining 37%, about £13tn, has been distributed among the bottom 99%.
Marx, a German exile, lived in London during Britain’s Industrial Revolution and saw the simultaneous accumulation of great wealth and widespread poverty across Britain’s empire. He wanted to explain the world in order to change it to one without such inequalities.
Best known for the Communist Manifesto, written with Friedrich Engels, Marx portrayed capitalism’s novel economic dynamism and its generation of extreme inequalities. They called for a proletarian revolution.
In Capital, Marx explains how capitalism is rooted in the ever-greater polarisation between the haves and have-nots.
Marx makes two insights. While it is common to hear that capitalism represents an outgrowth of human nature, Marx detailed how it emerged through land theft, population displacement and the authoritarian subordination of these populations.
In England, land theft took place between the 15th and 17th centuries when an agrarian capitalist class arose by pushing peasants off the land. In the colonies of Africa, Asia and North and South America, populations were exterminated, enslaved, and land seized by new ruling classes.
This was the first act in establishing a grossly unequal world – where a small minority own the means of production, while the majority have nothing to sell but their labour.
The dominant bourgeois thought (of his time and ours) portrays the employment contract as a voluntary, mutually beneficial buying and selling of labour power. In Capital’s second insight, Marx shows capitalists use workers’ labour power to generate more value than its initial cost, and how powerful capitalists are then able to wrest much of that surplus value from less powerful capitalists through technological innovations.
These dynamics are an essential part of the inequality story.
Sylvia Federici:Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
But why are women so heavily excluded from business activity in richer and poorer countries alike? And what could a book about medieval witch-hunts in Europe explain?
Federici, an Italian-American academic, feminist and founder of the international Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, provides a radical answer.
First published in 2004, her book explains how European witch-hunts were a way of excluding women from public life, while contributing to the rise of the modern wage-based economy.
Federici shows how primitive accumulation had different impacts on men and women. Previously, peasants worked the land as family units, exploited by local lords – handing him some of their produce or sometimes working for nothing. But they could pass on land tenure through the generations. Medical care – including contraception and abortion – was provided within and between households, often by older women.
Federici shows how alongside peasant dispossession and the evolution of the labour market, the modern economic order was built on the destruction of solidarity among peasant households. Lords and early modern states started this process by unleashing a wave of misogyny against peasant women.
Women who administered medical care to others – especially of birth-control – were branded witches and tortured to death. Women were increasingly confined to domestic, unpaid duties, and their labour devalued.
Federici documents how European colonialists branded women cannibals and witches to justify land grabs, enslavement and extermination. They enforced notions of women’s work being in the home.
The gruesome pre-history of the modern economic system was, Federici shows, heavily gendered and is part of the reason why divisions of labour exist today and are so disadvantageous to women.
Frantz Fanon:The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
In these disturbing times of social and economic inequalities, of rising violence and racism, Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book has a valuable response.
Fanon provides an explanation for the extreme racist conflict associated with capitalism and colonialism. He envisions a “new humanist” form of development, based on democratic equality and overcoming racism, patriarchy and inequality.
A Frenchman from Martinique, a radical psychiatrist and political philosopher, Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth during the closing stages of the Algerian revolution against French colonialism. From 1954, great numbers of poor Algerians fought the French settler state for which the murder of civilians, torture and the use of concentration camps was virtually official policy.
Fanon placed French colonial violence in a broader context of racist capitalism, describing how “deportations, massacres, forced labour and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to … establish its wealth and power”. For Fanon, racism was not only about exclusion from economic opportunities, it was about dehumanisation.
Fanon argued that the revolting Algerian peasantry could usher in a new humanist phase of development, but highlighted how national liberation movements were often captured by a new elite.
One reason for Fanon’s popularity among those seeking an alternative to top-down development is his insistence that, rather than attempting to emulate richer countries, “the underdeveloped countries must endeavour to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them”. While formal colonialism is gone, he shows how huge inequalities and racial and gender oppression persist.
His notion of development entailed overcoming class, gender and racial oppression. That “[w]omen shall be given equal importance to men, not in the articles of the constitution, but in daily life, at the factory, in the schools, and in assemblies”.
Fanon argued against aid. Rather, just as the post-Nazi German state was at that time paying reparations to Israel for the crimes of the Holocaust, so too he argued, should former colonial powers compensate their former subjects.
His book is about how racist violence was inherent to colonial capitalism and remains prescient, a vision of a new humanist form of development speaking loud and clear to our troubled times.
Alice Amsden:Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (1989)
During the 1980s, economists said free trade would deliver rapid development. Privatising state-owned enterprises and banks, liberalising foreign trade and eliminating subsidies to domestic firms were all promoted.
Amsden – a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor – helped shift thinking and policy towards recognising the importance of the state.
Asia’s Next Giant is an account of how, between the 1950s and 1980s, South Korea transformed its economy from an agrarian to a hi-tech industrial one.
The state exerted a high degree of control over private business to meet targets. Policies included import tariffs, subsidies and the provision of state assistance to selected firms, and control of bank-based finance, all commonplace across much of the world during the decades after the second world war.
What distinguished South Korea was the state’s ability to force firms to hit ambitious performance targets.
In Amsden’s phrase, the state “picked winners”. Firms that received subsidies had to export or their funds were cut off.
Few today have heard of Taihan group – an early electronics producer. When it failed to expand, the government transferred ownership to the now world-renowned Daewoo Electronics.
The state used industrial licences to control which firms entered new industries, and controlled financing through ownership of commercial banks.
It controlled prices for electricity, steel, chemicals, gas and synthetic fibres. Keeping prices of inputs low helped companies plough more of their revenues into research and development.
In terms of industrial transformation, it was a great success. But it was delivered under dictatorship, with minimal labour rights and some of the world’s longest working hours.
Does this mean we need to throw out the industrial policy baby with the dictatorial anti-labour bathwater? It needn’t, but the challenge instead is to combine industrial policy with enhanced democracy that favours the majority.
Naila Kabeer:Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought (1994)
In a world where 252 men have more wealth than one billion women in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa combined, is gender equality possible?
London School of Economics professor of gender, Kabeer argues against the assumption of “smart economics” that women can and should be like men. She argues for win-win solutions to economic growth and empowering women.
Smart economics holds that gender equality is good for women, and boosts economic growth. These two “wins” are self-reinforcing. In Reversed Realities, Kabeer provides reasons why this is not that smart.
She argues that the assumption that, freed from sexist cultural and legal norms, women can participate as equals to men in the economic market, ignores biological differences. Giving birth and nursing babies has significant implications in a modern economy.
So, too, the notion of the modern man (homo economicus), which women are supposed to aspire to, is a fiction. Men’s ability to act as rational, individual economic actors – choosing what work to undertake and how to use their income – is not self-supporting.
Kabeer says women’s home labour “relieves men of the tasks associated with maintaining both their own bodies and the domestic locations where such maintenance takes place, thereby freeing them to behave ‘as if’ they were indeed the disembodied rational agents of liberal theory”.
As long as most “care work” – which underpins men’s ability to “go out to work” to earn money – is unpaid and undertaken by women, there can be no gender equality.
As women enter the labour force in developing countries in increasing numbers, men don’t do greater amounts of care work. Women just endure a “double-burden”.
If the objective is for women becoming more like men, through legal reform and greater labour market participation, why, this book asks, is men being “as good as women” not “an important consideration”?
Amartya Sen:Development as Freedom (1999)
One of the most powerful truisms that politicians, policymakers and academics buy into is that development depends upon economic growth.
Sen – an Indian economist and Nobel prizewinner – makes a compelling argument about why that narrative is wrong.
Many countries achieved rapid growth and industrial transformation during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The most prominent – Brazil and South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary China – under authoritarian regimes.
Authoritarianism is justified by some as necessary for an ultra-hardworking labour force to catch up with developed countries. Sen argues that human development could and should be “a process of expanding the real freedoms” people enjoy.
Democracy, political participation and freedom of speech ensure that the poor cannot simply be ignored or exploited in the name of growth, he argues.
Core essential freedoms include a life free from the threat of starvation, undernourishment and premature mortality, alongside literacy and numeracy.
People’s freedoms are intrinsically important and enhance economic participation, generating further freedom-enhancing values.
States and public institutions have a crucial role to play. Sen’s thinking about development is evident in his understanding of poverty. He opposes metrics that count poverty based on income but focuses on ways in which poverty restricts freedom, and how it is expanded by anti-poverty measures.
Sen welcomed India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme of the early 2000s, which provided at least 100 days of unskilled wage employment a year to at least one member of every household, contributing significantly to poverty reduction.
The scheme enhanced its recipients’ “self-respect and participation in life and community” and he argues that women’s empowerment – through education, healthcare, changes to sexist laws – is key to women’s ability to advance social change.
“Nothing, arguably, is as important today in the political economy of development as an adequate recognition of political, economic and social participation and leadership of women,” he concludes.
