Abstract
Introduction: A Necessary Journey?
Among the questions that have to be asked of any book reviewed are: does it make a case not made before, or does it merely repeat what is already known; and is it sufficient to avoid rigorous theoretical interpretation and focus instead on empiricism? Both these questions must be asked of the two volumes reviewed here, since they not only cover what has now become well-trodden ground, but also raise issues concerning the direction taken by transformations in the global labour regime. Each book presents case studies of unfree labour over a period from the 18th century to the present day in almost every region of the globe, extending from Asia (China, Japan, the Philippines, India) and Africa, through the Americas and the Caribbean, to the Middle East. A notable absence is Europe, which features mainly as the colonial power responsible for the presence of coerced workers in many of these contexts; this absence is significant, in that it is now clear that metropolitan capitalist nations are no more immune to the imposition of unfree production relations than countries in the so-called Third World.
It is surprising yet unsurprising to encounter at the outset claims that ‘less consideration’ has been given to the types of unfree production relations – such as sharecropping, debt peonage, indenture, convict workers, attached and/or bonded labour – lying between free and slave labour, a lack which justifies and requires further investigation since ‘they have received little scholarly attention [and] their historiography is only now beginning to emerge’ (van der Linden and Rodríguez García, 2016: 1–2). Surprising in the sense that the claim is quite simply incorrect: if anything, discussions of unfree production relations located between these ‘two extremes’ can be found in many books and almost every social science journal over the last three decades, so much so that concerns have been expressed lest the focus of the development debate may now have shifted too far in the direction of the link between capitalism and these kinds of unfree labour. 1 Unsurprising in that claims about the lack of analysis and investigation serve to justify the appearance of yet another volume covering the same ground as many earlier ones. Hence the equally startling claim by van Melkebeke (2016: 189) that, where colonial labour regimes are concerned, an ‘analysis of the concept of coerced labour … is still lacking’; again, much rather the opposite is the case, in that many continue to analyse unfree work arrangements only in relation to colonial labour regimes.
Notwithstanding a shared desire on the part of the essays in each of the edited collections to go beyond the free/unfree dichotomy that has informed political economic theory about the way production relations change, Tappe and Lindner (2016) start from the premise that non-slave labour is free, while van der Linden (van der Linden, 2016; van der Linden and Rodríguez García, 2016) and van Melkebeke (2016) by contrast maintain that most are unfree. However, all of them concede that, in the end, the free/unfree dichotomy is not transcended. 2 The reasons for this are examined in the four sections which follow, the first of which sets out the parameters of the debate about unfree labour, while claims that this discussion has been transcended are considered in the second. Identified in the third section are the theoretical difficulties at the root of these claims, and the resulting focus on empiricism is outlined in the fourth.
The Debate
Unfree labor re-emerged as an issue in the debate about rural development during the years following the end of the 1939–45 war, when a political concern of Keynesian theory was not just economic reconstruction (mainly in Europe and Asia) but also planning (in the Third World). A crucial aspect of the ensuing discussion concerned the extent to which different relational forms constituted obstacles to capitalist development, and why. During the 1960s and 1970s unfree labour was regarded as incompatible with capitalist accumulation, and thus an obstacle to economic growth, an interpretation advanced by exponents of the then-dominant semi-feudal thesis. 3 According to the latter, unfree labour was a pre-capitalist relation, destined to be replaced by a workforce that was free as capitalism spread throughout the agrarian sector of Third World nations. Like much non-Marxist theory, this variant of Marxism saw unfree labour as incompatible not just with capitalism but also with advanced productive forces, economic efficiency, skilled workers, and market expansion.
The corollary of the inefficiency argument is that capital is seen as opposed to using unfree labour, and in contexts where the latter relational form is found, invariably strives to replace it with free labour-power. Not the least difficulty facing those who advocated the semi-feudal approach is that it resulted in an indefinite postponement of a socialist transition, while everyone waited until free wage labour was systemically ubiquitous. An inevitable consequence of rigidly-defined unilinear stages, therefore, was – and is still – political stasis (= alliances with a ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie) incurred by the long wait for the arrival (or return) of a ‘nice’ capitalism that everywhere uses only free wage labour. Downgraded or ignored thereby is a central tenet of Marxism: namely, the dialectical interplay between free and unfree labour-power generated by capitalist class struggle, waged ‘from above’ by – among others – the ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie.
From the 1980s onwards, however, another and very different view emerged, arguing that evidence from Latin America and India suggested agribusiness enterprises, commercial farmers and rich peasants reproduced, introduced or reintroduced unfree relations. Conceptualized as ‘deproletarianization’, this approach to the debate restored the sale/purchase of labour-power by its owner to definitions of work arrangements that were not free. 4 In contexts/periods where/when further accumulation is blocked by overproduction, therefore, economic crisis may force capital to restructure its labour process in one of two ways: either by replacing free workers with unfree equivalents, or by converting the former into the latter. Generated as a result of class struggle, both these kinds of transformation correspond to deproletarianization, or the economic and politico-ideological decommodification of labour-power.
This dynamic is missing from those who interpret history as an unproblematic and irreversible progression from unfree to free production relations. What the ‘deproletarianization’ approach maintains is not that somehow free labour has ceased to exist, and consequently Marx was wrong to regard it as the defining characteristic of capitalism, but rather that, in the course of class struggle, employers on occasion attempt to claw back the advantages – economic, political, ideological – that being free confers on their workers. 5 It is precisely this element of ownership, exercised personally by workers over their labour-power, that an employer has to deprive them of so as to exert, in turn, full control over production. Deproletarianization captures this fact by underlining the extent to which it is necessary for capital to close off even this limited economic autonomy. It recognizes conceptually that what has happened to workers is that, finally, they have become what Marx said they would: men and women of no property. Capital has taken from them their sole remaining property, the ownership by workers of their own labour-power. It signals the completeness both of the subordination of the worker to the employer, and thus also of the class inequality between capital and labour.
Consequently, it could be argued that in this debate the epistemological break, shifting the paradigm from on the one hand unfree-relations-incompatible-with-capitalism together with unfreedom-as-obstacle-to-accumulation to, on the other, capitalism-compatible-with-unfree-relations and accumulation-thrives-on-unfreedom, occurred long ago, back in the 1980s. Most of what has been published since then merely confirms the extent and economic impact of this shift. Contributions to the debate about the meaning and causes of unfree labour have on occasion either questioned or attempted to exclude deproletarianization from the discussion, while others have changed their minds, and espoused its arguments. Despite initial objections to the concept deproletarianization, therefore, some have clearly been influenced by what has been written about this theoretical approach, to the extent of adopting not just its arguments about unfreedom (definition, causes, incidence), but also taking issue with others who have failed to spot its relevance. 6
Although this paradigm shift is now broadly accepted by most of those who study development from the viewpoint of political economy, it has not gone unchallenged. A number of those who now accept the epistemological validity of the capitalism/unfreedom link nevertheless insist wrongly that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link was needed. 7 For their part, some advocates of the semi-feudal thesis still adhere to a form of stages theory, privileging the ubiquity of free labour and denying the presence of unfree relations. Neoclassical economists and postmodernists similarly revise the meaning of debt bondage, and continue to argue that, far from being a disempowering coercive/oppressive relation, it was and remains much rather an empowering outcome of worker ‘choice’.
The Debate Transcended?
One would never guess from the current near unanimity among those writing about the acceptability to capitalism of unfree production relations that it is a view which – as the above section underlines – has in the recent past had to be fought for, vigorously and against the grain. A symptom of this is a tendency by some analyses simply to make the same point as has been made before, without realizing (and thus acknowledging) its provenance. Thus, for example, in support of the claim that the free/unfree distinction does not hold, Rodríguez García (2016: 13–14, 18) maintains that every kind of working arrangement involves some form of coercion, a situation faced as much by notionally-free highly-paid professionals employed by large urban corporations as by debt-bonded agricultural labour.
Without realizing it, Rodríguez García repeats the argument first made during the 1970s by a revisionist historian, who posited an equivalence between on the one hand wealthy executives ‘tied’ to a company by bonus payments and pension schemes, and on the other impoverished labourers compelled to work for long hours in poor conditions in order to repay a loan borrowed from a landowner or labour contractor. 8 Criticisms made of this revisionist claim at that conjuncture pointed out that, unlike bonded labour, corporate executives are not dependent on cash advances for subsistence, nor are they required to repay debts such as bank overdrafts in the form of low-wage hard manual labour on rural properties or construction sites owned by the bank at a low wage fixed by the latter. To regard the situations as the same, and therefore as evidence for the non-existence of a difference between free and unfree production relations, is quite simply incorrect, a point conceded subsequently by Rodríguez García. Quite why this comparison, made and dismissed long ago, appears in a volume reviewed here is something of a mystery.
Unfamiliarity with what was said in this earlier debate also leads to frequent error, a result either of misinterpreting sources, or of being unaware that issues were raised and disputes resolved previously. In support of the view that the Pacific Island labour trade was ‘contract slavery’, therefore, Zeuske (2016: 36–37) cites the work of Munro and Moore, seemingly unaware of the fact that both the latter deny it was based on coercion, and therefore composed of unfree migrants, being much rather in their opinion voluntary, and hence for the contract worker empowering. In short, the opposite of what Zeuske maintains is the case. 9 A particular source of confusion is the connection between family labour and wage labour, since this distinction does not always hold true: this is especially the case when kin are deployed to work for others in order to repay loans incurred by the household head.
Although he accepts that women and children in the peasant household are unfree – they work for the household head – van der Linden (2016: 296) regards the household head himself as free (‘the work of the patriarch is free, since it is autonomous’). 10 This ignores cases – frequent in Latin America and Asia – where the household head not only has to work to pay off a debt owed to his employer, but is also required to contribute the labour-power of family members who work alongside him under the direction of the employer. In short, the household head is no more ‘autonomous’ than his kinfolk. By contrast, Rodríguez García (2016: 13–14) categorizes the enforcement of unfreedom by pressure exercised from within the kinship domain as ‘non-material’, which ignores the material dimension to this kind of compulsion, in the form of denying access to or disinheritance of economic resources (such as land).
Much the same difficulty confronts Tappe and Lindner (2016: 25–26) who advocate replacing terms like ‘new slavery’ and ‘modern slavery’ with ‘new coolies’ on the grounds that conceptually the latter – unlike both the former – include no ‘idea of property’. The inference is that slaves are owned, but coolies are not. What Tappe and Lindner miss thereby – oddly, since they follow the deproletarianization approach and subscribe to unfreedom as a ‘class-based phenomenon’ – is that there is a property element involved, one that dissolves the distinction they claim separates coolies from slaves. Like other workers, the coolie does indeed have property: as pointed out by Marx, this takes the form of labour-power, the only commodity which s/he is either able personally to sell, or prevented from so doing. Where a worker has been deprived of this ability, as is the case with coolies, s/he has lost the capacity personally to commodify (or not commodify) his/her own labour-power. As noted above, in a capitalist system this process of separating workers from ownership of their sole commodity is for employers both a necessary and, in many instances, a last step in gaining control over the accumulation project.
Another consequence of the non-reading or misreading of these prefiguring contributions to the debate is a tendency to repetition, attributing only to recent publications arguments that have long been known about. Thus, for example, both Zeuske and van der Linden are mistakenly credited by Tappe and Lindner (2016: 17, 18) with the ‘discovery’ that unfree labour did not actually end with slave abolition, but continued long after because it contributed to capitalist profitability. 11 Because Tappe and Lindner assume that, with the exception of slavery, labour is free, they are surprised by the fact that many post-slave relational forms are unfree, to the extent of presenting this too as a ‘discovery’. Hence the many references throughout the volume edited by Damir-Geilsdorf et al. (2016: 12, 17, 25–6, 50–51) to the existence of ‘blurred boundaries’ between slave and non-slave labour. Had they not made this assumption, and accepted the free/unfree dichotomy, Tappe and Lindner (and others) might have avoided this mistake.
Problems with Theory
Both van Melkebeke (2016: 188) and Rodríguez García (2016: 11, 27) endorse the view that all those who work for others are subject to coercion, a position attributed to van der Linden who in turn attempts unsuccessfully to invoke the authority of Marx himself for the same view: namely, that ‘anyone who works as an agent for a principal is unfree’. For van Melkebeke, Rodríguez García, and van der Linden, therefore, the distinction between free and unfree labour-power does not hold. This is problematic, for four reasons. First, it ignores the many affirmative references throughout the work of Marx not just to the existence of the free/unfree distinction but also to its crucial role in the class struggle. 12 Second, elsewhere van der Linden (Roth and van der Linden, 2014: 445–85) strongly rejects Marxist theory, insisting that it no longer has any explanatory role in the social sciences. Third, in criticizing Marxism for privileging free wage labour as the capitalist relation of choice, it fails to distinguish between the semi-feudal thesis (which does) and the deproletarianization approach (which doesn’t). And fourth, a result of epistemologically dissolving the free/unfree distinction is that – by declaring everyone a ‘subaltern worker’, regardless of whether those included in this category are free or unfree labour, or own/control means of production – politically it clears the way for the construction of multi-class alliances.
Like van der Linden, therefore, van Melkebeke advocates locating petty commodity producers within the ranks of the proletariat, thereby considering an undifferentiated peasantry as part of the working class. Because they ignore longstanding and still relevant debates between populists and Marxists about the socio-economic differentiation of rural community and its political effects, both of them unwittingly reproduce the views of populists. Whereas the latter maintained that undifferentiated peasant economy was an innate organizational form (= peasant essentialism), Marxists by contrast, argued that in the course of economic development the peasantry was differentiated along class lines, its top stratum (= rich peasants) consolidating means of production and becoming small capitalists, while its increasingly landless bottom stratum (= poor peasants) joined the ranks of the proletariat. The Subaltern Studies approach replaces class difference with an opposition between on the one hand the ‘elite’ and its ‘state’, and on the other the ‘masses’/‘popular masses’. The politically and sociologically problematic nature of the ‘subaltern’ is evident from its all-embracing social composition: among its ranks, therefore, are to be found ‘the lesser rural gentry, impoverished landlords, rich peasants and upper middle peasants’. 13 The fact that it includes those whose class position and interest correspond to those of an agrarian petty-bourgeoisie, opposed historically only to certain kinds of capital (financial, foreign) and not – as in the case of the proletariat – to capital per se, rightly identifies the ‘subaltern’ as an agrarian populist category.
Significantly, the category ‘subaltern worker’ also contains employers who oppress/coerce/underpay labour which is unfree. Although family and kinfolk deployed by the household head as substitute workers on coffee plantations in the Congo are labelled as ‘non-wage labour’ by van Melkebeke (2016: 189, 193, 197), it turns out that these replacements were in fact compelled to meet labour-rent payments owed by peasant tenants. As is clear from what happens in other coffee-growing areas, it is at this grassroots level where coercion/unfreedom occurs, generated and enforced not by the state – which is where he locates the relational impetus – but from within the peasant household or kin group itself. Despite van Melkebeke (2016: 201, 204–05) arguing that rural families willingly chose such arrangements, and their preference for subsistence agriculture was the reason for low plantation wages, it transpires that there existed a strong demand for labour-power from local plantations, mines and urban enterprises.
Employer competition for workers in the Congo noted in passing by van Melkebeke suggests that, had the labour-power of peasant family/kin been free, wages would have been much higher. It is precisely in such circumstances that commercial producers – among them better-off peasants growing cash crops for export – resort to unfree labour relations, not to bring a labour market into being but much rather to prevent it from developing. This dynamic is missed by van Melkebeke, because – like populist theory – he thinks of the rural family as composed entirely of ‘natural’ peasants; in short, he fails to differentiate the peasantry, and consequently subscribes to what is an essentialist view of smallholding agriculture. The latter reproduces the familiar trope – shared with agrarian populist, imperialist and NGO discourse – that all indigenous rural inhabitants throughout Africa are basically peasants, an identity which determines their ideology, economic strategies and political agency. That some form of worker consciousness and identity – however tentative – may have been emerging at the start of the 19th century in the Congo, even then, is not considered. 14
Also not considered is the distinction between different Marxist approaches to the capitalism/unfreedom link, the result being that Rodríguez García (2016: 11, 21–22, 23–24) dismisses Marxism tout court, both for equating free labour with the accumulation process and concluding that only such workers are able to organize in order to transcend capitalism. On the grounds that free labour is ‘rare’, the efficacy of current anti-slavery and/or human rights campaigns and legislation is also dismissed, for two reasons in particular: because definitions of coerced labour ‘have no legal standing’ and consequently do not comprehend that ‘trafficking is not a form of exploitation [but] a process’; and by virtue of the fact that current abolitionist discourse interprets unfreedom as a specifically non-Western phenomenon, confined to less developed countries. 15 The difficulties confronting these views are easily discerned.
To begin with, by dismissing Marxism for not recognizing that unfree production relations are compatible with accumulation, Rodríguez García follows van der Linden and van Melkebeke in ignoring the opposite Marxist view associated with deproletarianization. The claim that all opposition to unfree labour fits it into a colonial framework, thereby defining coercion as a non-Western phenomenon, overlooks the fact that many Marxists – starting with Marx himself – have long argued that unfree labour-power is as much a feature of metropolitan capitalist nations as in so-called Third World nations, for the simple reason that it arises precisely where economic competition and class struggle are at their most acute. Again, the objection levelled at human rights legislative ordinances – that it targets individuals rather than the economic system – is yet another critique made during the earlier debate about unfree labour.
Privileging empiricism over theory, Rodríguez García (2016: 28–29) advocates even more research into grassroots conditions because ‘a micro-level approach … can provide more reliable … experiences of the persons concerned’. This, she maintains, would ‘lead to a new legal framework that is based on a proper theory of coercion in labour relations rather than on pseudo-universalist discourses’ that exclude ‘cultural realities’. Not the least problematic aspect of this view is the inference that Marxism and what is termed ‘pse udo-universalist discourses’ are not themselves based on ‘a proper theory of coercion in labour relations’ derived in part from (and thus supported by) fieldwork at the grassroots. However, championing empiricism in this manner avoids engaging with the central question – the extent to which issues like unfreedom and exploitation can be ‘solved’ in a capitalist system – and simultaneously reveals the target of such an approach. The latter is not just Marxism but ‘pseudo-universalist discourses’, by which is meant political economy that addresses the very systemic processes reproducing coerced labour. In short, the framework espoused by Rodríguez García is – like the subalternism of van der Linden and Melkebeke – a ‘new’ populist postmodern one.
In keeping with this postmodern approach, Tappe and Lindner (2016: 16) endorse the conceptualization by Müller and Abel (2016: 221) of ‘coolitude’ – a positive interpretation of unfree labour – recommending the epistemology of ‘cultural studies’ and ‘postcolonial theory’ for providing ‘cultural representations’ of the coolie as a way of arriving at ‘a new dimension in understanding’ unfree labour. This amounts to shifting the debate from unfreedom-as-a-disempowering-economic-relation to unfreedom-as-an-empowering-cultural-relation, or the displacement/downgrading of class analysis in favour of a postmodern one that focuses on ‘from below’ culture. Because unfree workers have a culture, they are deemed to be empowered, a familiar revisionist trope. From this it is but a short step to the claim made by cliometric historiography: namely, that because slaves and/or indentured workers had a culture, life on the plantation could not have been that bad, and consequently what existed there was a form of free labour, chosen by the working subject him/herself. Indeed, Tappe and Lindner (2016: 25) accept that this focus on the culture of ‘coolitude’ is ‘to promote a more self-conscious and affirmative stance towards this historically laden concept’.
Butterfly Collecting
Dismissing what is termed ‘standard definitions’ of coerced labour as ‘inconsistent’, and because discussion of unfree relations is ‘inevitably contentious’, van der Linden (2016: 293–94) asserts that consequently it is necessary ‘to go beyond that’ and look at all the empirical evidence – ‘all forms of coerced labour’ – in minute detail. In keeping with this, Tappe and Lindner (2016: 10) announce an intention to focus on ‘diverse empirical cases’ so as ‘to avoid the dichotomy of free and unfree labour’. Privileging empiricism in this manner, in the process downgrading or dispensing with theory, invites the same riposte as that made by the Thorners about the flawed methodology used by the First Agricultural Labour Enquiry in India, to the effect that ‘if it is not clear what constitutes an attached labourer it does not matter whether [one] says that in a given state there are 1.3 per cent or 78 per cent of them’ (Thorner and Thorner, 1962: 187).
In his well-known critique of the proliferating taxonomies that bedevilled anthropological theory, Edmund Leach termed this empiricist trend as ‘butterfly collecting’, a process having ‘no logical limits’, leading as it did to never-ending compilations of ever more patterns and sub-types. 16 According to Leach, therefore, what he described as a tendency to ‘butterfly collecting’ had become an end in itself, leading inevitably to the labelling of each particular instance as yet another ethnographic variant, different from all the rest in terms of inception, operation and effect. It is a critique that is particularly relevant to the attempt by each of the edited volumes to identify specific forms of bonded/coerced labour. For Tappe and Lindner (2016: 10–11), therefore, the object is to search out and catalogue ‘historical variants of bonded labour’, while van der Linden (2016: 298ff.) similarly dedicates himself to generating multiple taxonomies, in the process compiling numerous lists featuring many variables.
Thus each of the ‘three moments of coercion’ pinpointed by van der Linden, consisting of entry-into, period-of, and exit-from work, subdivide into a plethora of mutant forms. Entry-into work gives rise to no less than 10, of which only one is ‘actually voluntary’. Among the conditions leading to unfreedom, therefore, are: the hiring-out by an owner of slaves; self-sale or birth into slavery; debt, capture, and taxation. Once in work, a labourer toils according to ‘compensation, conditional force and commitment’. Exit-from a work relation splits into seven variables, extending from obstacles imposed by an employer (debt repayment), via conditional discharge (age-related manumission), to unconditional cessation, such as casual work, flight (desertion) or death. The difficulty with these taxonomies is simply put: they are either factually incorrect or – as van der Linden himself agrees – overlapping.
Where casual workers are bonded labour because of loans taken from their employer, their capacity to exit from the production relation is conditional or blocked, and not unconditional, as categorized by van der Linden. Nor as he supposes is death ‘the final and irrevocable termination of a labour relationship’, since any outstanding debts owed by a deceased worker can be passed on to his kinfolk (sons, daughters) who then have to continue debt-servicing labour obligations. Almost immediately, moreover, van der Linden (2016: 304–05) backtracks, accepting that ‘the distinction between these variants … is not always as clear-cut as it might seem’, that there are ‘many combinations and hybrid forms’, and that ‘my classification is more indicative than complete’. Similarly, where the ‘three moments of coercion’ are concerned, he admits that the ‘imprecise nature of our … classification is evident from the fact that, often, multiple combinations … are given the same label’ (van der Linden, 2016: 314).
In the end, van der Linden concedes the fact that attempting to identify multiple variants always returns to a basic dichotomy – the free/unfree distinction – long known about and underlying the many forms composing his taxonomies. 17 What matters in terms of definition, therefore, is not the variants themselves but the manner in which workers enter into and exit from production relations. Accordingly, generating multiple variants is at the root of his empiricist approach, itself a form of butterfly collecting. Acknowledging that his taxonomies are ‘still rudimentary’, van der Linden nevertheless asserts that ‘coerced labour is a more complex phenomenon than is often thought’, attempting thereby to justify the applicability of this empiricist methodology. What he fails to recognize is that ‘still rudimentary’ is not the problem, which is the attempt to see distinctions where none exist (along the lines of ‘is a relation that is unfree at 9 in the morning still unfree at 9.05 a.m.?’). From the viewpoint of political economy, both the definition and effects of the free/unfree dichotomy are not ‘more complex than is often thought’: much rather, the empiricist approach used by van der Linden runs the risk of attaching a different label to each specific instance of unfree labour encountered, the epitome of ‘butterfly collecting’.
Conclusion
A common trope encountered in social science disputes is the way earlier arguments are subsequently taken up in seemingly antithetical ways, combining a process of recycling with misinterpretation. Paradoxically, therefore, this kind of overlooking/misunderstanding – both of the debates themselves and their sources – can involve either taking for granted interpretations that have previously had to be fought for, alternatively downgrading their significance, or else ignoring them altogether. Where unfree production relations are concerned, discussion about their meaning, causes and systemic effects is of course necessary and continues, but this is not what each of these volumes does, adding not to existing interpretations and theory but only to the number of variants.
Ironically, therefore, and assertions by its exponents to the contrary notwithstanding, the empiricist categorization of production relations ends up conceding what it starts out by denying. Namely, that what structures both the definition and effects of all the variants identified is the simple polarity entry-into/exit-from the work arrangements concerned, a dichotomy which in turn informs the difference between labour-power that is free and that which is unfree. Consequently, all attempts to define production relations in terms of multiple variants and causes in the end prove fruitless, and epistemologically fail to advance the debate about systemic change.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.