The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial (...) services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. (shrink)

The continuing ramifications of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 have forced social scientists to raise fundamental questions about the relationship between capitalism, democracy and inequality. In particular, Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time focus on, respectively, the economic and the political contradictions of capitalistic societies. Piketty argues that capitalism naturally tends towards the exacerbation of rent-based wealth inequality, whereas Streeck suggests that capitalism and democracy are ultimately incompatible. A striking feature of these two contributions is that their authors (...) are social democrats, not Marxists or radical anti-capitalist thinkers. In this review article, I illustrate how the combination of social democratic convictions and the acknowledgment that capitalism cannot be tamed generates interesting tensions between the diagnosis offered by the two monographs and the solutions that are proposed. I end the piece by raising two remarks on the implications that this tension might have for normative political theory. On the one hand, it is time for theory to do more work on political action and agency. On the other, liberal egalitarian theorists might have to acknowledge that they are in the same predicament as Piketty and Streeck: social democracy is their ideal, yet it is perhaps unattainable. If this is the case, liberal egalitarians might be committed to adopt a more confrontational attitude towards capitalism: they might have to become reluctant radicals. (shrink)

Prior research has showed that the subjective perception of objective wealth might be affected by various individual difference variables, such as one’s love of money, level of desires, or materialistic inclinations. This paper examines an impact of attitudes towards money on the relation between personal net income and household income, and its subjective evaluation, measured as financial satisfaction and subjective economic well-being. The results of two studies revealed that the affective dimension of money attitudes partially mediated the relationship (...) between income and financial satisfaction. Moreover, the instrumental dimension of attitude towards money moderated this relationship: The relationship between the two was stronger for individuals highly concentrated on money management than for those with low scores on this factor. (shrink)

This volume analyses contemporary capitalism and its crises based on a theory of capitalist evolution known as the social structure of accumulation theory. It applies this theory to explain the severe financial and economic crisis that broke out in 2008 and the kind of changes required to resolve it. The editors and contributors make available new work within this school of thought on such issues as the rise and persistence of the 'neoliberal' or 'free-market' form of capitalism since 1980 and (...) the growing globalization and financialization of the world economy. The collection includes analyses of the US economy as well as that of several parts of the developing world. (shrink)

To grasp current trends within capitalism without abandoning the framework of Marx’sCapitalwe need to return to the category of ‘fictitious capital’ and make it central to our explanations. Based on the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Lecture, this essay combines reflections on Marx’s account of ‘fictitious capital’; an investigation of the role of bills of exchange; and an analysis of the recent turmoil in British and US banking. It looks at the way the opium trade, financed through the London (...) bill market, integrated a constellation of interests in the City with the labour of peasant households in India as parts of a unified accumulation process. Opium was vital to the fortunes of British capitalism for most of the nineteenth century. The merchant banks that were the mainstay of Britain’s form of capitalism were also the key element in the re-emergence of global finance in the postwar period. The concluding part of the paper deals with the current banking crisis and follows Hilferding in arguing that by providing liquidity to the markets for fictitious capital, speculation plays a crucial role in sustaining profitability for the bigger capitals. (shrink)

This book discusses the relationship between democracy and the financial order from various legal perspectives. Each of the nine contributions adopts a unique perspective on the legal and political challenges brought to the fore by the Global Financial Crisis. This crisis and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis in Europe are only the latest in a long series of financial crises around the globe in recent decades. By their very existence, but also as a result of the political turmoil they have (...) created, these financial crises testify to the well-known tensions between democracy and a market-based economic and financial order. However, what is missing in this debate is an analysis of the role of law for reconciling democracy with a market-based financial order. To fill this lacuna, the book focuses on the controversy surrounding the concept of law, thereby adding another variable to the debate on the relation between democracy and capitalism. Each chapter addresses the concept of law from a particular theoretical angle, be it a full-grown legal theory or an approach in political economy that has a particular view of the law. (shrink)

The current post-workerist analyses of the crisis of financial capitalism are rooted in the declaration of inconvertibility of the Dollar in 1971 and the consequent collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. The experience of ‘Primo Maggio’, the magazine on militant history directed by Sergio Bologna, was determinant in developing a consistent explanation of the relationship between ‘money as capital’ and working class struggles. The transition from Fordism to Post-fordism, which begun in those years, coincides on the one hand with (...) the crisis of the labour value theory and, on the other, with the emergence of the financialization of capital. The advent of the debt economy, which led to the present crisis, reflects the destruction of the wage relationship and the de-substantialization of money. Beyond any objective measure of value, what is necessary is something that points to the subjectivity of struggles and to the forms of life that give them substance. (shrink)

Involvement of industry in academic research is widespread and associated with favorable outcomes for industry. The objective of this study was to review empirical data on the attitudes of researchers toward industry involvement and financial ties in research. A review of the literature for quantitative data from surveys on the attitudes of researchers to financial ties in research, reported in English, resulted in the 17 studies included. Review of these studies revealed that investigators are concerned about the impact (...) of financial ties on choice of research topic, research conduct and publication, but this concern is less among investigators already involved with industry. Researchers approve of industry collaboration and financial ties when the ties are indirectly related to the research, disclosure is upfront, and results and ideas are freely publicized. However, their trust in disclosure as a way to manage conflicts may reveal a lack of awareness of the actual impact of financial incentives on themselves and other researchers. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

British capitalism has from the very beginning entertained an ambivalent relationship with the process of European unification. But that ambivalence has gone through different stages and since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 a new, conflictual, stage in that relationship began. This is the essential backdrop against which the Brexit referendum should be understood and its consequences evaluated.

Political philosophy provides the basis for political praxis; it requires a functional understanding of society in which the economy is an extraordinarily significant component. This is no less true of Marxism than it is of liberalism: it is all at once a political philosophy and an analysis of political economy, both of which are oriented toward and motivated by an agenda of human engagement. Often obscured by the complexities of Marxian analysis is the nature of its critique of liberalism, which (...) preceded it and to which it was intended as both a theoretical and practical response. Beyond Liberalism offers a detailed elaboration of that critique, restoring to a central position the long history of imperialism that has been at the heart of capitalism since its inception and explicating Marxism's relevance to the contemporary era of globalization, in particular financial globalization. The dramatic opposition between the two political theories turns heavily on their differential perspectives on individual freedom. The book provides a corrective to the common misperception that, while liberalism is concerned with such freedom, Marxism and the socialist agenda it advances emphasize instead a contrasting sphere of the collective. Prabhat Patnaik argues that liberalism and Marxism give very different analyses of the status of the individual within capitalism and that the Marxist alternative leads to the conclusion that the freedom of the individual can be realized only by means of an upheaval of capitalism through collective action. It is as relevant to Keynesian social democracy, marked by state intervention to alleviate conditions of unemployment, poverty, and inequality, as it is to classical liberalism. In the latter the functioning of the capitalist system constrains individual freedom; in the former, on the capacity of the state to intervene, which is especially apparent in our era in which finance is globalized but states remain national. Capitalism requires a degree of unemployment, for example, to limit wages and maintain the accrual of surplus value. The system also tends toward the centralization of capital, augmenting the power imbalance of global corporations over nation-states and the coercion of individual agency. It is only through the overturning of the system and the adoption of a socialist system that individual freedom and economic equality can be fostered. (shrink)

This paper analyzes specific situation in Croatia regarding role, development, and perspectives of employee participation in ownership and financial results. The model of enterprise privatization in Croatia resulted with a large involvement of employees in the enterprises' ownership. As the first phase of privatization in Croatia is approaching to its end, new, genuine mechanisms of development of the employee financial participation are beginning to emerge. Among them, ESOP plans and management and employee buyouts (MEBO) seem to be most appealing. Such (...) practices can be found primarily in enterprises where a functional symbiosis between management and employees has been preserved or developed, where assets of the enterprise have also been preserved, and an organizational culture based on identification with enterprise and confidence with management has been developed. It seems that such a mutual reliance between employees and management can be very successful in assuring good operation and financial results of (especially large) enterprises during and after the process of transition. (shrink)

The United States prison system, the largest in the world, operates through both exploitative and rehabilitative modes of discipline. To gain political and public support for the extensive resources expended housing, feeding, and controlling its incarcerated population, the carceral state strategically emphasizes a mix of each mode. Agriculture in prisons is particularly illustrative. With roots in racial capitalism and the carceral state’s criminalization of poverty, plantation convict leasing system, work reform efforts, and punitive and welfarist carceral logics, prison agriculture embodies (...) explicit forms of exploitation and claims of rehabilitation. Accordingly, this article contextualizes and explains results from a nationwide study of state prisons within our framework of the disciplinary matrix. At least 662 adult state prisons have agricultural activities, including an array of animal, food, and plant production. We find that the drivers of these activities are financial, idleness reduction, reparative, and training. Our disciplinary matrix framework departs from conventional assignments of a particular activity to one disciplinary mode or the other and recognizes that any activity may be driven by different prison needs or philosophies. We investigate how different combinations of agricultural activities and drivers rely on discourses of deservingness to naturalize and reproduce structures of racialized, classed, and gendered control inside and outside prison, as well as the legitimacy of the prison system itself. (shrink)

Technology is developing fast - so fast that it threatens to overwhelm the very species whose genius lies in its technological cunning: us. From the metaverse to genetic engineering and mood-altering pharmaceuticals, to cybersex and cyberwar and the widespread automation of work, new technologies are rewriting the terms of our existence, not in a neutral spirit of 'progress' but in line with the priorities of power and profit, and in ways that often work against the grain of our fundamental being.In (...) this timely, provocative book, Richard King argues that we need to evolve a more critical attitude to new technologies if we are to avoid a world in which humans are no different in kind from algorithmic machines. The stakes could not be higher. As science, technology and capitalism fuse into a single system, and activists and entrepreneurs talk of a 'post-human' future in which individuals will transform themselves using powerful computers and biotechnologies, we are entering unchartered territory - a territory marked with the mapmaker's warning, Here Be Dragons... Here Be Monsters. (shrink)

The fall of the Berlin wall was seen by many as the final triumph of liberal democracy over communism. But now, in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, things look a little different. New questions are arising about capitalism and democracy, new social movements are challenging established institutions and new political possibilities are emerging. Is democracy an inevitable hostage of capitalism, or can it reinvent itself to meet the challenge of globalization? In an exclusive, (...) previously unpublished dialogue, Alain Badiou, a key figure of the radical left and a leading advocate of the communist idea, and Marcel Gauchet, a major exponent of anti-totalitarianism and a champion of liberal democracy, confront one another. Together, they take stock of history, interrogate one another s views and defend their respective projects: on the one side, the revival of the communist hypothesis, and on the other, the radical reform of a contested democratic model. (shrink)

Examines climate change, military intervention and financial collapse to reveal how truth is used by competing interests to shape individual behaviour, attitudes and identity.

This paper addresses whether overindebted and non-overindebted consumers differ in their attitude toward money and how this attitude impacts three different financial behavior categories: record keeping, adjusting balance, and monitoring balance. Overindebted consumers were recruited via an NGO for consumer defense and were categorized into two subgroups: consumers who became overindebted due to internal causes and consumers who became overindebted due to external causes. Non-overindebted consumers were a convenience sample. Non-overindebted consumers showed more positive attitudes toward money than both (...) groups of overindebted consumers and overindebted due to external causes showed more positive attitudes than overindebted consumers due to internal causes. All groups share similar financial management behaviors except for monitoring balance, which was more frequent among non-overindebted consumers. Furthermore, a regression analysis indicates that money attitudes helped explain financial behavior differences between consumers above and beyond their indebtedness status. Consumers’ attitude predicted financial behaviors, even when controlling for relevant socioeconomic variables. Further analyses comparing money attitudes and financial behavior for the three subgroups showed no differences. (shrink)

Purpose: To survey the attitudes of the general public in Sweden to biobank research and to discuss the findings in the light of some well-known ethical principles.Methods: A questionnaire was used to survey the opinions of the general public in Sweden, and an ethical analysis (using the principles of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice) was performed to discuss the possible conditions of such research.Findings: Between 3 and 9% answered that they did not want their samples to be collected and (...) stored in a biobank. Many respondents required information about the purpose of the research and wanted to be able to consent or refuse. About one third of the respondents said they would have answered differently if financial gain was involved and those who commented indicated a more negative attitude. The principle of autonomy maintains that the right to self-determination should be respected, and the principles of non-maleficence and beneficence that the probable harms and benefits resulting from a particular project by using samples from a biobank should be balanced. The general public disagree about how these principles are to be balanced. Interpretation: In the light of the findings different interpretations of the situation as well as possible alternatives are discussed in this paper. (shrink)

This article argues that the key crisis that has overtaken today’s global economy is the classical capitalist crisis of over-accumulation. Reaganism and structural adjustment were efforts to overcome this crisis in the 1980s, with little success, followed by globalization in the 1990s. The Clinton administration embraced globalization as the “Grand Strategy” of the United States, its two key prongs being the accelerated integration of markets and production by transnational corporations and the creation of a multilateral system of global governance, the (...) pillars of which were the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The goal of creating a functionally integrated global economy, however, stalled, and the multilateral system began to unravel,thanks among other things to the multiple crises created by the globalization of finance, which was the main trend of the period. In response partly to these crises, partly to increasing competition with traditionally subservient centre economies, and partly to political resistance in the South, Washington under the Bush administration has retreated from the globalist project, adopting a nationalist strategy consisting of disciplining the South through unilateralist military adventures, reverting to methods of primitive accumulation in exploiting the developing world, and making other centre economies bear the brunt of global adjustments necessitated by the crisis of over-accumulation. (shrink)

Antonio Negri’s article explores the relationship between the juridical categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and the political concept of the common through the theme of the ‘material constitution’ defining actual relations of power which defy the crystallization of ‘formal constitutions’. The financial convention shaping the material constitution of contemporary capitalism refers to the rise of what Foucault called biopower, where value is no longer the expression of a mere quantity of commodities but of a set of activities and services, which (...) are immediately cooperative. In this context, any form of measure cannot but be political and hence it must be established through new forms of economic governance. The social relation of capital becomes immediately political once money displaces labour as rule, norm and measure of value. As a result, processes of political subjectivation within the Eurocrisis combine de-stituent and con-stituent movements: requests for insolvencies, social occupations, commoning and mutualization are the means through which social struggles formulate the multitudes’ demands for ‘equality as a condition of freedom’. (shrink)

In the essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Deleuze discusses the differences between nineteenth-century capitalism and contemporary capitalism, characterising the former as the spaces of enclosure and the latter as the open circuits of the bank. In contemporary capitalism, ‘[m]an is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt’. Deleuze claims that under financial capitalism, where the primary use of money is self-generation, economic relations are thought in terms of an asymmetrical power relationship between debtor and creditor, rather than (...) an exchange between commodities. Taking up Deleuze's claim, this paper analyses how time functions in the formation of subjectivity under financial capitalism, by focusing on the temporal structure of debt. The indebted are expected to bind themselves to the past, not only in the moment they make a promise to pay back, but from that moment onwards; in this process, a subject finds himself passively subjected to the temporality determined by the condition of indebtedness, and yet he also actively reproduces and imposes the fact of indebtedness on himself by the feeling of guilt. Guilt, arising from the irreversibility of what has been done and resulting in the inability to proceed into the future, is central both to the indebted and the melancholic. Thus a melancholic subject emerges: a subject conditioned by the dominance of the past and the impossibility of the future. (shrink)

The election of Barack Obama corresponding with the dramatic implosion of the neo-liberal world order of finance, represents a dramatic return of history as attempts are made to forge the new consensus of global capitalism. The financial crisis has come to represent the culmination of Third Way neo-liberalism with Obama signifying the commodity logic and emancipatory potential of the new spirit of capitalism. Obama’s biography has allowed for a self-confident re-articulation of American imperial power, while fetishizing a civil society notion (...) of transformation that has eclipsed the anti-capitalist left. Resistance to Obama’s vision of a reconciled America, leading the moral correction of capitalism, has come in the form of a right wing populist campaign of delegitimization. The Tea Party populists speak to the return of the political and the ontological necessity of antagonism as they present themselves as the only radical alternative to actually existing neo-liberalism. (shrink)

This article argues that the key crisis that has overtaken today’s global economy is the classical capitalist crisis of over-accumulation. Reaganism and structural adjustment were efforts to overcome this crisis in the 1980s, with little success, followed by globalization in the 1990s. The Clinton administration embraced globalization as the “Grand Strategy” of the United States, its two key prongs being the accelerated integration of markets and production by transnational corporations and the creation of a multilateral system of global governance, the (...) pillars of which were the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The goal of creating a functionally integrated global economy, however, stalled, and the multilateral system began to unravel,thanks among other things to the multiple crises created by the globalization of finance, which was the main trend of the period. In response partly to these crises, partly to increasing competition with traditionally subservient centre economies, and partly to political resistance in the South, Washington under the Bush administration has retreated from the globalist project, adopting a nationalist strategy consisting of disciplining the South through unilateralist military adventures, reverting to methods of primitive accumulation in exploiting the developing world, and making other centre economies bear the brunt of global adjustments necessitated by the crisis of over-accumulation. (shrink)

This study attempts to examine the relationship between environment, social, and governance management and financial performance and the role of socially responsible investment in the National Pension Fund, Korea’s largest institutional investor. This study tries to provide evidence for the slack resource hypothesis by verifying whether companies with higher financial performance make more efforts to improve ESG performance. In addition, we tried to validate whether NPF is expanding its investments in corporations with high economic performance and high ESG performance. Based (...) on our analysis, Korean companies with good financial performance actively participate in ESG. When we compared the performance between 2019 and 2020, companies with high ESG performance increased regardless of financial performance level, whereas companies with high financial performance and low ESG performance decreased. This represents that the perception and attitude of Korean companies toward ESG management are evolving. NPF has a high investment ratio for firms having a high ratio in both financial and ESG performance. NPF further invested in companies with high ESG performance, even if the financial performance is not decent. This study provides evidence that Korean companies’ interest in ESG management as well as the behavior of socially responsible investment of NPF are rising. (shrink)

There is an ongoing expert debate with regard to financial incentives in order to increase organ supply. However, there is a lacuna of empirical studies on whether citizens would actually support financial incentives for organ donation.

Financial derivatives have been singled out as the major villain in the latest crisis, particularly through speculative trading by banks. Yet little attention has been paid to the fundamental rôle that derivatives play in modern capitalism. Even less has there been a focus on how the boom in derivatives-trading was prompted by the crisis of profitability and capital-accumulation. This article shows that while derivatives were one means by which speculation took off, the momentum behind this was driven by low profitability. (...) That was why banks turned their mortgage-loans into derivative-driven securities, why pension-funds placed bets on commodity-futures and why countries such as Greece used derivatives to hide the real state of their finances. Derivatives helped determine the form and magnitude of the crisis, but were not its underlying cause. Proposed reforms of the derivatives-market ignore the fundamental determinants of the financial crisis, assuming it to be a failure of regulation. (shrink)

An updated edition of a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis from a postfordist perspective. The 2010 English-language edition of Christian Marazzi's The Violence of Financial Capitalism made a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis available to an expanded readership. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent events, up to and including the G20 summit in July 2010 and the broad consensus to reduce government spending that emerged from it. Marazzi, a leading figure in the European (...) postfordist movement, argues that the processes of financialization are not simply irregularities between the traditional categories of wages, rent, and profit, but rather a new type of accumulation adapted to the processes of social and cognitive production today. The financial crisis, he contends, is a fundamental component of contemporary accumulation and not a classic lack of economic growth. Marazzi shows that individual debt and the management of financial markets are actually techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor, general intellect, and social cooperation. The financial crisis has radically undermined the very concept of unilateral and multilateral economico-political hegemony, and Marazzi discusses efforts toward a new geomonetary order that have emerged around the globe in response. Offering a radically new understanding of the current stage of international economics as well as crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form, The Violence of Financial Capitalism is a valuable addition to the contemporary arsenal of postfordist thought. This edition includes the glossary of the esoteric neolanguage of financial capitalism—”Words in Crisis,” from “AAA” to “toxic asset”—written for the first English-language edition, and offers a new afterword by Marazzi. (shrink)

This article addresses the growing industry of retail socially responsible investment (SRI) profiled mutual funds. Very few previous studies have examined the final consumer of SRI profiled mutual funds. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to, in an exploratory manner, examine the impact of a number of pro-social, financial performance, and socio-demographic variables on SRI behavior in order to explain why investors choose to invest different proportions of their investment portfolio in SRI profiled funds. An ordinal logistic regression analysis (...) on 528 private investors revealed that two of the three pro-social variables had a positive impact on how much the consumer invested in SRI profiled funds. Moreover, there was proof of a non-altruistic motive for investing in SRI as consumers who perceive that financial return of SRI is equal or better than "regular" mutual funds, invested a greater proportion of their portfolio in SRI profiled mutual funds. Furthermore, the results showed that women and better-educated investors were more likely to invest a greater proportion of their investment portfolio in SRI. Overall, the findings indicate that both financial perceptions and pro-social attitudes are connected to consumer investment in SRI. (shrink)

We investigate whether female board representation and firms’ financial performance are related and whether the relationship differs for firms located in more prejudicial environments. As a proxy for prejudicial environment, we use two geographical indicators: whether a firm is headquartered in a conservative “red” state or in a liberal “blue” state and whether the firm is located in regions where residents possess more stereotypical attitudes about gender equality. We find that both financial performance and female board representation are lower (...) for firms headquartered in red states when compared to those in blue states, and we find similar results for firms located in regions where residents hold more gender-stereotypical views. However, financial performance improves when female directors are present regardless of the firm’s location. Evidence also shows that the incremental improvement in performance measured by Tobin’s q is greater in red-state than in blue-state companies and in regions where residents hold more gender-stereotypical views. The overall results imply that gender stereotyping holds back financial performance and that female directors help improve financial performance. (shrink)

The perspectives of genomic citizen scientists on ownership of research outputs are not well understood, yet they are useful for identifying alignment of participant expectations and project practices and can help guide efforts to develop innovative tools and strategies for managing ownership claims. Here, we report findings from 52 interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 to understand genomic citizen science stakeholders’ conceptualizations of, experiences with, and preferences for ownership of research outputs. Interviewees identified four approaches for recognizing genomic citizen scientists’ (...) ownership and related credit interests in research outputs: shared governance via commons models; fractional ownership of benefits; full and creative attribution; and offensive and defensive patenting. Interviewees also agreed that the model selected by any project should at least maximize access to research outputs and, as appropriate and to the extent possible, broadly distribute rights of control and entitlements to research benefits. (shrink)

This article illustrates how racial capitalism can enhance understandings of data, capital, and inequality through an in-depth study of digital platforms used for intervening in gender-based violence. Specifically, we examine an emergent sociotechnical strategy that uses software platforms and artificial intelligence chatbots to offer users emergency assistance, education, and a means to report and build evidence against perpetrators. Our analysis details how two reporting apps construct data to support institutionally legible narratives of violence, highlighting overlooked racialised dimensions of the data (...) capital generated through their use. We draw attention to how they reinforce property relations built on extraction and ownership, capital accumulation that reinforces benefits derived through data property relations and ownership, and the commodification of diversity and inclusion. Recognising these patterns are not unique to anti-violence apps, we reflect on how this example aids in understanding how racial capitalism becomes a constitutive element of digital platforms, which more generally extract information from users, rely on complex financial partnerships, and often sustain problematic relationships with the criminal legal system. We conclude with a discussion of how racial capitalism can advance scholarship at the intersections of data and power. (shrink)

The author identifies the major micro-, meso-, and macro-level financial risk shifting factors that contributed to the Great Global Recession and how the absence of a compelling moral vision of responsible financial risk management perpetuated the economic crisis and undermined the recovery by blind reliance upon insufficiently accountable bailouts. The author offers a new theoretical model of Sustainable Stakeholder Capitalism by exercising moral imagination which inclusively and moderately balances four multi-level factors: types of capitalism, moral theories, human nature drives, and (...) credit risk profiles. Finally, the author recommends micro-, meso-, and macro-level practical reforms to prevent a recurrence of the current economic freefall, to re-create systemic global financial institution integrity, and to promote responsible risk management for sustainable global prosperity for current and future generations. (shrink)

The study draws attention to the transfer of management theories and practices from traditional capitalist countries such as the USA and UK to post-socialist countries that are currently experiencing radical change as they seek to introduce market reforms. It is highlighted that the efficacy of this transfer of management theories and practices is, in part, dependent upon the extent to which work-related attitudes and values vary between traditional capitalist and former socialist contexts. We highlight that practices such as Human (...) Resource Management (HRM) and Organization Development (OD) are inextricably associated with conceptions surrounding culture and society, as well as to variables such as job satisfaction and organisational commitment. The main aim of this study is to compare various attitudes and values of employees in traditional capitalist countries and post-socialist countries. On the basis of the findings of an attitudinal survey of (N = 5914) workers in 15 countries we conclude that certain aspects of the attitudes and values of workers in post-socialist countries and traditional capitalist countries differ significantly. Specifically, these differences were found in respect of context-related and job-related attitudes, and also in relation to the importance that the respondents attached to the subject of ethics more generally. The implications of the study are discussed particularly in relation to the transfer of management theory and practices between traditional capitalist and post-socialist contexts. (shrink)

Some interesting exceptions notwithstanding, the traditional logic of economic efficiency has long favored hierarchical forms of organization and disfavored democracy in business. What does the balance of arguments look like, however, when values besides efficient revenue production are brought into the picture? The question is not hypothetical: In recent years, an ever increasing number of corporations have developed and adopted socially responsible behaviors, thereby hybridizing aspects of corporate businesses and social organizations. We argue that the joint pursuit of financial and (...) social objectives warrants significant rethinking of organizational democracy’s merits compared both to hierarchy and to non-democratic alternatives to hierarchy. In making this argument, we draw on an extensive literature review to document the relative lack of substantive discussion of organizational democracy since 1960. And we draw lessons from political theory, suggesting that the success of political democracy in integrating diverse values offers some grounds for asserting parallel virtues in the business case. (shrink)

The practice of paying prisoners to for their participation in research has long been debated, and the controversy is reflected in the differing policies in the U.S. prison systems. Empirical study of financial payments to inmates who enroll in research has focused on whether this practice is coercive. In this study, we examined whether monetary incentives have the potential to be unduly influential among fifty HIV‐positive prisoners. The majority of prisoners surveyed believed that inmates should receive some compensation for their (...) involvement in research and disagreed with statements suggesting that the offer of payment constitutes undue influence. However, a sense of potentially being susceptible to undue influence was significantly higher among participants who had spent a longer time in prison and had less education. Overall, our findings suggest that most prisoners feel that they would be able to make a decision about research enrollment that is not solely based on an offer of monetary payment. (shrink)

The paper investigates the distinctly Chinese intertwining of expertise and state & financial capital to enrich the current understanding of neoliberalism as a hegemonic governing rationale. Since the summer of 2015, China has been experiencing one of its most severe financial crises since the adoption of a ‘socialist market economy’ in 1978. However, globally circulating narratives have failed to look beyond a Western-centric corollary, rehashing a critique of the Chinese one-party system and its lack of a ‘genuine’ free market. By (...) exploring the specific genealogy of Chinese capitalism, and the distinctive Chinese financial-market structure, the article will show how the scientific authority of experts formulated amongst neoliberal thinkers never permeated the Chinese idea of knowledge. In the Chinese variety of financial capitalism, expertise is seen to lie not so much in the wisdom of individual experts as in their socio-political support, which legitimises their economic interventions. (shrink)

The technological advances in medicine, including prolongation of life, have constituted several dilemmas at the end of life. In the context of the Belgian debates on end-of-life care, the views of Muslim women remain understudied. The aim of this article is fourfold. First, we seek to describe the beliefs and attitudes of middle-aged and elderly Moroccan Muslim women toward withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatments. Second, we aim to identify whether differences are observable among middle-aged and elderly women’s attitudes (...) toward withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatments. Third, we aim to explore the role of religion in their attitudes. Fourth, we seek to document how our results are related to normative Islamic literature. Qualitative empirical research was conducted with a sample of middle-aged and elderly Moroccan Muslim women living in Antwerp and with experts in the field. We found an unconditional belief in God’s sovereign power over the domain of life and death and in God’s almightiness. However, we also found a tolerant attitude, mainly among our middle-aged participants, toward withholding and withdrawing based on theological, eschatological, financial and quality of life arguments. Our study reveals that religious beliefs and worldviews have a great impact on the ethical attitudes toward end-of-life issues. We found divergent positions toward withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatments, reflecting the lines of reasoning found in normative Islamic literature. In our interviews, theological and eschatological notions emerged as well as financial and quality of life arguments. (shrink)

Money markets are at the heart of financialized capitalism, as those markets that provide the funding liquidity needed for credit creation and leveraged trading. How have these markets evolved, grown, and become critical for larger financial flows? To answer this question, I distinguish an early period of financial globalization marked by regulatory arbitrage, offshoring, deregulation, and informal trading practices from a period of regime-consolidation marked by formal institutionalization. Concentrating on repo markets as the key funding sources for market-based banking, I (...) demonstrate that new institutional arrangements for these markets were initiated by private sector associations, but supported and authorized by public authorities. Bond trader groups codified new contractual arrangements and these were validated via reforms of bankruptcy codes and changes in central banks’ policy frameworks in the United States and European Union. Through these modifications and re-articulations in institutional conditions, transactions and large exposures on money markets became routine affairs—for shadow banking actors like money market funds as well as for commercial banks. The article concludes by discussing the continuity of regime-consolidation efforts after the transatlantic financial crisis and hypothesizes that they reveal “neo-patrimonial” features. (shrink)

The 2010 English-language edition of Christian Marazzi's The Violence of Financial Capitalism made a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis available to an expanded readership. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent events, up to and including the G20 summit in July 2010 and the broad consensus to reduce government spending that emerged from it. Marazzi, a leading figure in the European postfordist movement, argues that the processes of financialization are not simply irregularities between the traditional categories (...) of wages, rent, and profit, but rather a new type of accumulation adapted to the processes of social and cognitive production today. The financial crisis, he contends, is a fundamental component of contemporary accumulation and not a classic lack of economic growth. Marazzi shows that individual debt and the management of financial markets are actually techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor, general intellect, and social cooperation. The financial crisis has radically undermined the very concept of unilateral and multilateral economico-political hegemony, and Marazzi discusses efforts toward a new geomonetary order that have emerged around the globe in response. Offering a radically new understanding of the current stage of international economics as well as crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form, The Violence of Financial Capitalism is a valuable addition to the contemporary arsenal of postfordist thought. This edition includes the glossary of the esoteric neolanguage of financial capitalism—"Words in Crisis," from "AAA" to "toxic asset"—written for the first English-language edition, and offers a new afterword by Marazzi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Capitalism:Rhetorical Agency as Communicative LaborRonald Walter GreeneIt is a commonplace to describe rhetorical agency as political action. From such a starting point, rhetorical agency describes a communicative process of inquiry and advocacy on issues of public importance. As political action, rhetorical agency often takes on the characteristics of a normative theory of citizenship; a good citizen persuades and is persuaded by the gentle force of the better (...) argument. More radical visions of argument might include strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts in the rhetorical arsenal of good citizenship, and some might even flirt with violence as rhetorical action. This model of rhetorical agency requires a translation of the conceptual apparatus of rhetoric and its alignment with the problematics of democratic theory and actually existing democratic regimes. Classical models that hoped to harness rhetorical agency to the making of the "orator-statesman" (sic) must reimagine political participation in terms of publics and counterpublics, social movements, electoral campaigns, communication media and technologies, as well as supra- and sub-national institutional settings. As the classical norms of citizenship rub against (post) modern realities, a permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency seems destined to be lodged in the critical imagination of rhetorical studies. If politics today is, in Jodi Dean's words, "a domain of financially mediated and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations, and the means of mass communication," then actually existing rhetorical agency manifests itself in efforts to "raise the money, buy the television time, register the domain names, build the website, and craft the accessible, user-friendly, spectacular message" (2003, 96).If we recognize Dean's description of the political as an accurate description of the rhetorical situation today, rhetorical studies is left with three strategies: It can refashion a deliberative vision of rhetorical agency into a normative ideal for critiquing the structural conditions (capital, media [End Page 188] concentration) of political participation. Second, it can enlarge the field of normatively acceptable ways and means of political participation, for example, by embracing the more spectacular politics associated with visual and body rhetorics. Finally, rhetorical studies can work on the "demand" side and design new strategies and tactics for activating the rhetorical participation of citizens, for example, by encouraging the creation of communicative norms necessary for reinvigorating voluntary and civic organizations. However, while each of these approaches provides a research agenda, none of them gets at the root cause of the anxiety over agency: the attachment of rhetorical agency to a vision of political change. The anxiety over agency pushes rhetorical critics and theorists into becoming moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic to improve the quality and quantity of political participation.The purpose of this paper is to offer an escape route from theorizing rhetorical agency as a model of political communication.1 In opposition to a political-communicative vision of rhetorical agency, this paper suggests a different materialist ontology, one that imagines rhetorical agency as a form of living labor. I will argue that rhetorical agency belongs to the domain of communicative labor, a form of labor increasingly necessary to the workings of contemporary capitalist production. In other words, I want to replace a political-communicative model of rhetorical agency with a materialist-communicative model. To highlight the similarities and differences between the two models, I will focus on how the interface between politics, communication, and economics plays out in the Marxist tradition of rhetorical studies. I will organize this tradition into two sections: the first, represented by James Aune, advocates a hermeneutic approach to rhetorical agency, and the second, represented by Dana Cloud, argues for imagining rhetorical agency as a class-based social movement. By focusing on the work of my comrades, the paper risks being received as a "left sectarian" polemic.2 As I will demonstrate in each section, the problem with these two approaches has less to do with Marxism and more to do with how they turn to hermeneutics and social movements to imagine rhetorical agency in the idiom of communication theory. In the third section of the paper I will resituate rhetorical agency into a materialist ontology of labor and capitalist production. In so... (shrink)

This research applies the theory of planned behavior to corporate managers’ decision making as it relates to fraudulent financial reporting. Specifically, we conducted two studies to examine the effects of attitude, subjective norm and perceived control on managers’ decisions to violate generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) in order to meet an earnings target and receive an annual bonus. The results suggest that the theory of planned behavior predicts whether managers’ decisions are ethical or unethical. These findings are relevant to corporate (...) leaders who seek to improve ethical work climates of organizations and to many regulators, accountants, corporate governance officials and investors. (shrink)

This book examines how legal systems and mechanisms give shape to the capitalist economic system. In this regard, it focuses on the most important of these systems, such as monetary and financial law, company law, fiscality, contract and labour law. Further, the book provides a thorough analysis of the underlying ethical values of said legal systems and mechanisms. It also gives an overview of several potentially devastating related effects, such as poverty, the increasing polarisation between rich and poor, climate change, (...) and mounting debts at both the public and private level. The book concludes by presenting proposals for change. Given its critical analysis of legal systems and mechanisms in connection with the value choices dictated by economic ideologies, the book will be of particular interest to legal and economic academics, researchers and students, but also to policymakers, and, more generally, to anyone with a genuine concern for how the socio-economic order will evolve. (shrink)

Microfinance is the vanguard of financialization today. This is especially true in Colombia, where microfinance rivals any other type of formal credit. Entangled with Colombia’s micro-financialization is the phenomenon of microfinance corporations in joint ventures with Christian organizations that broker their microfinance programs. These faith-based corporations temper the surge in microfinance with ascetic discipline and the infusion of an entrepreneurial spirit. Economic discipline, say the microfinanciers, is required for what is referred to as ‘financial literacy’ and ‘financial inclusion’ programs that (...) instil a distinctly Christian corporate order. This article, based on 2 years of sustained fieldwork in Colombia, focuses on one such microfinance program run by a transnational Christian credit organization. With microfinance, souls are disciplined through debts and ideals of an ascetic prosperity. In the end, the article concludes that there is a Christian morality to financialized capitalism that is exercised at the level of the interior soul. (shrink)

The Islamic finance industry is relatively new and vibrant. It is becoming a mainstream industry in the MENA. The industry is based on a number of Sharia’a maxims and in particular the prohibition of Riba. Islamic law scholars’ emphasis on the ethical dimension of this industry and how it can be seen as a solution to existing capitalism. The current financial crisis presented this industry with an unprecedented test and an opportunity to influence and merge into main stream finance. This (...) paper presents an evaluation of Islamic finance industry in the current financial crisis and whether the governance and ethical foundation of Islamic finance institutions distinguished itself from conventional finance. Thus, this paper begins with an overview of Islamic finance, then it discusses the governance framework structure of Islamic finance institutions and the role of its organs. In addition, this paper will compare between the ethical framework of the Islamic finance institutions and the conventional institutions. Finally, this paper will discover the ethical failure of the current global financial system and its relation with the current financial crisis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The underlying cause of the financial meltdown was much more mundane than a “crisis of capitalism”: The real origins lay in mostly obscure housing, tax, and regulatory policies of the U.S. government. The Community Reinvestment Act, the affordable‐housing “mission” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, penalty‐free refinancing of home loans, penalty‐free defaults on home loans, tax preferences for home‐equity borrowing, and reduced capital requirements for banks that held mortgages and mortgage‐backed securities combined with each other to create the incentives (...) for both subprime lending and the housing bubble that eventually led to the financial collapse. (shrink)

In The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi unfolds a political and clinical diagnosis of contemporary society, stating that the crisis we experience today is a permanent state of absent social autonomy and political agency. This crisis is not solely economic but is caused by semio-capitalism impacting all spheres of human life, affecting sensibility in particular—the linguistic and physical-sensuous link between the individual and the world. Taking up the term sensibility as a bodily basis of experience and as (...) an aesthetic notion, in this article I will explore the relation between individual and collective bodies, the crisis as a suspension of change, and literature, focusing on the Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s 2017 lunatic and fragmented novel of love and economy The Crisis Notebooks, but also with reference to some of her other work. I argue that the bodily experience of crisis, as expressed in this novel, leads to an inhibited social sensibility but also, paradoxically, to a radical openness towards the world. With reference to the Danish literary scholar Anne Fastrup’s interpretation of French vitalism’s idea of sensibility in The Movement of Sensibility, I suggest that a more ambiguous, material notion of both a constructive and a destructive sensibility is crucial for its understanding, and hence—for an understanding of the relationship between body and crisis as expressed in The Crisis Notebooks. Finally, I suggest that an aesthetic notion of sensibility can provide a prism through which relations between today’s financial mechanisms and a sociocultural experience of crisis are rendered visible—if not sensuous—and it is from here that alternatives to the crisis can be found, felt, formulated or fabulated. (shrink)