A comparative historical perspective shows how globalization and the specificities of China’s rapid growth era limit its hegemonic potential in the twenty-first century global economy. Although state capitalism and openness to foreign capital facilitated China’s economic transformation, interactions among three forms of capital—state, private, and foreign—have produced developmental dynamics that constrain China’s capacity to assume the position of the world’s economic hegemon. These include the compromised competitiveness of China’s corporate sector due to the domination of state-owned enterprises, limits on the (...) ability of Chinese firms to develop leading transnational corporations, and early openness to and continued dependence on foreign capital. Moreover, the party-state’s efforts to ameliorate these constraints arouse external suspicion rather than support a Chinese-led hegemonic order based on consent and shared interests. These historically conditioned realities should temper expectations that China is converging teleologically toward a familiar hegemonic role in the international economy. (shrink)

This article carries out a critical analysis of the discourse/practice of Business Ethics that has developed to an unprecedented extent in the last decade or so. It argues that in the late-modern global political economy (GPE) there develops a form of a Gramscian hegemony of transnational capital and the discourse/practice of Business Ethics can be seen as a form of moral leadership in the context of the emerging hegemonic order.

This article examines the relationship between global poverty and terrorism. The approach is built around a concept of ‘social bandit’ developed by Eric Hobsbawm. By social bandits, Hobsbawm refers to those outlaws in pre-capitalist societies who robbed the rich, and gave to the poor. What was common to social bandits is a myth that surrounded their activity, and a strong popular sympathy and support. This article uses Hobsbawm's notion of social bandit to deal with the fact that in today's international (...) setting, particularly in the context of huge international inequality and widespread poverty in the non-western world, violence against western states, particularly the United States, enjoys significant sympathy elsewhere. This is not only an outcome of inequality and has to do with other factors, particularly certain political or military actions of the USA and other western states, but what is important to note here is that violence perpetrated by terrorists is directed at those who are seen as beneficiaries of the existing order, of international inequalities and injustices. In short, the operation of the international order, its asymmetries and inequalities, riches and wealth in developed countries and poverty and misery elsewhere, seems to play a role in the creation of such social bandits, and in providing them with support and legitimacy which they otherwise would not have had. (shrink)

The paper functions as a contribution to feminist analyses that are methodologically based on Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of political economy and her understanding of capital accumulation, but also as a contribution to contemporary social-reproduction theory which aims to integrate Luxemburg’s legacy alongside that of Marx. The essay offers a sketch for a ‘Luxemburgian feminism’ consisting of an overview of Luxemburg’s critique of bourgeois feminism and a preliminary application of Luxemburg’s ‘dialectics of spatiality’ to contemporary social-reproduction theory. With Luxemburg’sThe Accumulation of (...) Capitalin mind and her several essays on the so-called ‘women’s question’, we shall attempt to relate Luxemburg’s explanation of the dynamic link between capitalist and non-capitalist spatialities with the commodification of women’s reproductive labour. (shrink)