Each of the two papers in this session explores a distinct alternative or challenge to capitalism. One expounds on Indonesian independence leader Mohammad Hatta's vision of humanizing cooperatives, in conversation with du Bois and Polanyi. The other explicates a "working-class sacred" in Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," reading it with Heidegger and Weil. Taken together, the papers show the importance of theorizing class and anti-capitalism in plural geographic-cultural contexts, with interventions at plural structural positions, using plural methods, and drawing on plural theoretical streams.
What kind of alternative political economy can liberate us from the contemporary violent, dehumanizing, and totalizing capitalistic world? I argue that Mohammad Hatta's vision for humanizing cooperatives might be one of the most efficacious models. Like Franz Fanon, Hatta was a postcolonial thinker in the post-World War 2. Being a key political economist in the Indonesian independence movement, he served as the Indonesian first vice president. Like Fanon, Hatta sees the sociogenic psychological contortion that colonized subjects endured in their humanity. However, unlike Fanon, Hatta sees socio-economic relationships in cooperatives as the most effective humanizing agent in postcolonial nation-building projects. Addressing both communal and individual dignity, active membership in cooperatives heals dehumanized victims of the violent extractive colonial world. This presentation will argue for the importance of Hatta's vision in the contemporary global political economy.
This paper analyzes Robert Frost's canonical poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in relation to two competing forces: capitalism and the sacred. Frost's poetry criticizes the destructive rituals of capitalism, both for workers and ecologies, and moreover, explores how moments of radical possibility emerge unexpectedly in the form of the sacred, a sacred I specify as the "working-class sacred." This paper reads Frost's poem in dialogue with Heidegger's contemporaneous Being and Time and the theology of Simone Weil. As these disparate thinkers disclose, the sacred becomes an important force and form in revealing class inequalities and moreover, in gesturing towards futures delinked from such class-based violences.