Anti-racist debate today remains polarised between ‘class reductionist’ (any attempt to address racial disparities reinforces capitalist class relations) and ‘liberal identity’ (disparities in racial representation can be resolved without questioning class inequality) politics. Both positions share a common perspective – racial oppression and class exploitation are the products of distinctive social dynamics whose relationship is historically contingent. This essay is an initial step toward characterising a structurally necessary relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. The essay draws upon Anwar Shaikh (...) and Howard Botwinick’s elaboration of Marx’s political economy, and Ellen Wood’s analysis of the specificity of capitalist imperialism. (shrink)

Theory as History brings together twelve essays by Jarius Banaji addressing the nature of modes of production, the forms of historical capitalism and the varieties of pre-capitalist modes of production. Problematic formulations concerning the relationship of social-property relations and the laws of motion of different modes of production and his notion of merchant and slave-holding capitalism undermines Banaji’s project of constructing a non-unilinear, non-Eurocentric Marxism.

This essay argues that Knafo and Teschke fundamentally misread Brenner’s original contribution to the transition debate. They equate his rejection of trans-historical or trans-modal laws of motion with the notion that social-property relations do not have strong rules of reproduction that structure the actions of agents and give rise to ‘developmental patterns’ specific to each form of social labour. Knafo and Teschke’s critique of Brenner’s analysis of capitalist expansion and crisis is also theoretically and empirically questionable.

The problem of commerce in pre-capitalist societies has been an issue debated among historians, both Marxian and non-Marxian, for over a century. Martha Howell’s book provides new historical data on the economic impact and cultural meaning of commerce in feudal Europe, without, however, addressing key theoretical and interpretive issues.

Daniel Gaido’s The Formative Period of American Capitalism provides a thorough accounting of classical Marxist writing on the history of US capitalism. He combines insights from the classical Marxist and US Trotskyist traditions with an engagement with a selection of recent historical research to produce a provocative interpretation of the origins and rise of capitalism in the US. However, his failure to critically interrogate the classical Marxist and US Trotskyist traditions on the US or engage with the (...) growing historical research on the origins and trajectory of US capitalism weakens his contribution. (shrink)

Aneivas and Nişancıoğlu’s provocative book,How the West Came to Rule, attempts to provide an alternative account of the origins of capitalism to both ‘Political Marxism’ and ‘World-Systems Theory’. By making uneven and combined development a universal dynamic of human history and by utilising a flawed concept of ‘Eurocentrism’, however, they introduce a high degree of causal pluralism into their analysis. Despite important insights into the specific dynamics of different pre-capitalist forms of social labour, their account of the origins of (...) capitalism inHow the West Came to Rulesuffers from causal indeterminacy and historical inaccuracies. (shrink)

Plantation slavery in the New World, in particular its relationship to the emergence of capitalism in Europe and North America, has long been a subject of debate and discussion among historians and social scientists. While there are literally thousands of monographs studying various aspects of chattel slavery in the US South, the Caribbean and Brazil, only a handful of works attempt to provide a synthetic account of its rise and decline from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Few scholars, on (...) the Left or Right, have made as profound a contribution to such a history as Robin Blackburn. Blackburn’s latest work, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights, does not simply summarise and update his earlier work, but extends his analysis to the rise and decline of ‘second slavery’ in nineteenth-century Cuba, Brazil and the US South. The American Crucible provides a multi-causal explanation of the origins and abolition of New World plantation slavery, examining the complex interactions between the rise of capitalism, political crises in the metropolitan countries, the transformation of popular and elite attitudes toward slavery, and the struggles of the slaves themselves. However, Blackburn’s inability to grapple with the specific structure and dynamics of capitalist and slave social-property relations, and their changing historical relationship, weakens key elements of his analysis. (shrink)

The article develops the idea of forming postcapitalist social relations as a social revolution of an individual, which consists in the fact that popularity becomes a key advantage, the “possession” of which is a desired goal and a significant resource of political influence. At the same time, it is shown that this process leads to forming a new dominant stratum — personalities (“people with personality”): celebrities, popular bloggers, social media influencers, micro- and nanosignature. It is substantiated that the personaliat domination (...) is a consequence of contradictory social relations between the new aristocracy represented by the representatives of the personaliat and many people who do not “possess” a popular personality - the impersonaliat (“extra people”, “lower” precariat, those who turn out to be outsiders in the world of social platforms). This contradiction is associated with the rooting of a celebrity’s culture, which encourages a lot of people to fight for popularity and focus on finding advantageous differences from others in the process of self-realization. However, this struggle in the end for the overwhelming majority turns into an increase in creative competition and subtraction. Various new forms of subtraction that appear in situations of widespread self-realization are revealed. Accordingly, arguments are given in favor of the fact that in the context of the “personality revolution”, the truly left will be rather an alternative that will call into question the ways of solving social problems formulated by popular personalities. In other words, it will be possible to oppose the total pursuit of popularity with the projects of society, in which the person is relied not as someone who rises above the others, but as an involved person who values life in harmony with others higher than his own “I”. (shrink)

Through the examination of anti-psychiatric theory and literary texts, this timely and thought-provoking volume explores the possibilities of liberating our habitual patterns of perception and consciousness beyond the confines of a capitalist era. In Post-Capitalist Subjectivity in Literature and Anti-Psychiatry, Skott-Myhre asks the question, how might we be different if we didn't live in a capitalist society? By drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and conducting nuanced analysis of the professional writings of anti-psychiatrists including Basaglia and Laing, and (...) the work of fiction writers Kafka and Garcia Marquez, the text identifies alternative conceptualizations of the self. Focusing in particular on portrayals of institutions and the family, Skott-Myhre proposes that these social systems offer new modes of reading the world and ourselves which will transform social organization and free subjectivity from dominant capitalist structures. This transdisciplinary text responds to a revitalized interest in alternatives to traditional psychology, an interest in life beyond capitalism, and the crisis in the traditional family. Post-Capitalist Subjectivity in Literature and Anti-Psychiatry will offer timely reading for graduate students, researchers, and scholars in the fields of cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, family studies, and interdisciplinary studies. (shrink)

This contribution to economic philosophy considers Marx's pronouncements on the organization of future society, and in this context re-examines the long-lasting debate triggered by Mises's argument that modern industrial production requires a system of spontaneously-formed market prices. In an undogmatic, non-technical treatment, Steele contends that both the Marxian conception of future society and the Misesian argument against its feasibility have frequently been misunderstood. The work scrutinizes the replies to Mises, and explores some of the wider issues raised by the economic (...) calculation debate. (shrink)

The dominance of capitalism, through the hegemony of neoliberal ideology, is maintained as an illusion through the use of four main strategies. In order to obtain the consent of the population, mass schooling tends to produce graduates who accept this illusion because they are vulnerable to these strategies and cannot imagine a post-capitalist world. However, through education, people can better appreciate the problematic reality of unbridled capitalism, such as the degradation of the global ecosystem. It is argued (...) here that programs which are designed to address these problems, such as Education for Sustainable Development, are dependent upon citizens developing a critical consciousness. This consciousness is firstly able to confront the four strategies maintaining capitalism’s dominance. It is argued that an education which engages with spiritual ideals and values regarding how a good life is understood in an aspirational sense, enables people to engage with the dominance of capitalism and to envision other possibilities for society in which capitalism is harnessed to serve the greater public good. This requires education’s ontology – as the character of students – to critically read the world, imagine possibilities which can constitute a good life, and are courageous to enact the social actions required to make these ideals a reality. This is made possible by an education which returns to the spiritual roots of ideals. (shrink)

Organised around the themes of economy and politics; critical theory; and culture in order to offer an impressive range of thematic perspectives and critical angles, the book delves into the most pressing of today’s quandaries by combining stringent critical analysis with creative foresight. A rigorous examination of the current crisis of late-capitalist society, States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist scenarios develops paradigms that promise to rekindle the desire to move beyond capitalism towards a different social order.

Worldwide and certainly in the EU, we are silently rather advanced in a new economic logic, a new economic paradigm. This is a huge transformation of the very tool of production, comparable to the shift from agriculture towards industry, last century. And at least in the positive scenario, this post capitalist logic represents a huge shift towards human and nature centred economic logic. Our society is exposed to radical changes in basic paradigms, dealing with challenges that were unknown few (...) decades ago. E.g.: The negative scenario of manipulation of human body and mind is also prospering and very active today. The widely discussed topic is sustainability of current quantitative growth and the shift into qualitative character of economic growth. The valuation of capital is influencing both micro and macro levels. The value of human capital is becoming primary and machines are becoming secondary. Advancements toward the knowledge society lead to fundamental changes in the nature of power, trade, economy, money, and management. The paper introduces positive role of competent human beings, who produces knowledge from knowledge, their opportunities and their achievements. The paper deals with the new definition of economy, new way of understanding of a value – adding a special value to objects composed of raw materials. Accepting a complexity of a creation process, most observers now agree that humans use their bodies, their minds and their souls, to create. The importance of abstract values rises in importance. We are shifting from the machine and factory towards the human person. Under the trial and error approach, we are supposed to allow errors and cover them. The innovative management must respect the body mind and souls of his personnel. (shrink)

Over the last decades, the proliferation of ICTs and capitalist markets has created a new social-historical reality for communication, production and societal organisation, while social inequality has deepened. In this context, alternative forms of organisation based on the commons have emerged, challenging the core values of capitalism. Within this new form of egalitarian and transnational collaborative networks, a new concept of social coexistence has been proposed: cosmolocalism. This article presents the genealogy of cosmolocalism and compares it to previous conceptual (...) universalist reconfigurations, namely cosmopolitanism and internationalism. While the current discourse on cosmolocalism focuses on production and distribution, its political dynamics and limitations remain unexplored. Our ultimate goal is to open a path of inquiry for further reflection and deliberation. (shrink)

In this article, we draw on established views of CSR dysfunctionalities to show how and why CSR is regularly observed to be both shaped by and supportive of capitalism. We proceed to show that these dysfunctionalities are maintained by both the pro- and anticapitalist approaches to CSR, both of which imply an ill-defined separation of the economy and society as well an overly strong problem or solution focus on political and economic issues. Finally, we present a post-capitalist approach (...) to CSR that overcomes (1) the ill-defined separation of the economy and society, (2) the capitalist bias towards economic rationalities, and (3) the overidentification of society with its political system; this approach thus helps to manage the abovementioned CSR dysfunctionalities. (shrink)

The environmental crisis is the most prominent challenge humanity has ever had to battle with, and humanity is currently failing. The Anthropocene—or so called ‘age of humans’—is indeed a period when the survival of humanity has never been so much at risk. This book locates itself in the field of critical green political theory. Fremaux's analysis of the current environmental crisis calls for us to embrace radical shifts in our modes of being; or, in other words, socially progressive innovations that (...) will be described within the unique framework of "Green Republicanism." In offering a constructive and emancipatory delineation of what could be considered an ecological civilization that is respectful of its natural environment and social differences, this book describes how to shift from an ‘arrogant speciesism’ and materialistic lifestyle to a post-anthropocentric ecological humanism focusing on the ‘good life’ within ecological limits. This new political regime calls for a radical reinvention of our societies, a decentering of the humans within our metaphysical worldview, and a withdrawal of the capitalist technosphere at the benefit of the biosphere. It will require a new economic paradigm that replaces the unsustainable capitalist logic of growth by sustainable degrowth and steady economics. Rooted in ethical thinking and political philosophy, this book seeks to offer a concrete roadmap of how sustainable societies can be fostered. (shrink)

_Post-Postmodernism_ begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an _intensification_ of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, (...) "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era. _Post-Postmodernism_ surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation. (shrink)

The hypothesis of this article is that industrial capitalism, as conceptualized by a series of authors from Smith and Marx to Weber and Sombart, and then to Galbraith and Chandler, is outdated. We are entering a new era of information or ‘post-industrial capitalism’. The term used in the article is post-industrial capitalism. This is mainly because the notion of information capitalism does not define explicitly what is really new regarding the history of capitalism. (...) Information capitalism can be either post-Fordist, or post-industrial, or even a transition period towards a post-capitalist society. The argument of the article is developed in two parts. The first offers a systematic comparison between the basic features of industrial and post-industrial capitalism. The second explores three main contradictions of post-industrial capitalism. The general idea behind this exploration is that the future of post-industrial capitalism remains open. It depends on how the contradictions of this new form of capitalism will be resolved. This, in turn, implies a critical position towards approaches that either extrapolate the economic patterns of the last two decades into the 21st century, or, by adopting sophisticated versions of technological determinism, propose a monistic scenario for the future. (shrink)

In recent years the science of what is to be, futurology, has become one of the most popular branches of knowledge in the West. A fever to prognosticate, the desire to penetrate the barriers of time, to predict or at least sense the central direction of history, possesses philosophers and historians, economists and sociologists, politicians and preachers, public figures, and the heads of scientific institutions and of the largest industrial firms. In the United States, England, France, and Italy, committees to (...) study the shape of the future organization of society appear one after the other. Journals of futurology are founded. Special conferences, seminars, colloquiums and even religious meetings are convened, which produce a veritable squall of prognoses, projects both abstract and narrowly practical, spiritualist prophecies, and predictions positive and irrational. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the issue of surveillance in capitalism (surveillance capitalism), a phenomenon which has spread in that socio-economic system since the beginning of the 21st century. We attempt to point out the harmfulness of information technologies developing in the wrong direction, carrying the ideas of dataism and post-truth, which increasingly colonize human living space. It turns out that the information (traces) that people leave while operating on the Internet is a source of predicting human (...) behavior in the future (behavioral futures markets). Thus, for the most developed Internet enterprises in the world, they become a motive for violating what seem to be basic political rights, mainly freedom, property and security. As a result, under the influence of the disinformation often present on the Internet, people’s behavior may take the most socially undesirable forms, but desirable in the virtual world. The considerations in the paper are primarily theoretical. The descriptive method was used with elements of the conceptual analysis of surveillance capitalism in the context of dataism and post-truth. (shrink)

This volume looks at how accumulation in postcolonial capitalism blurs the boundaries of space, institutions, forms, financial regimes, labour processes, and economic segments on one hand, and creates zones and corridors on the other. It draws our attention to the peculiar but structurally necessary coexistence of both primitive and virtual modes of accumulation in the postcolony. From these two major inquiries it develops a new understanding of postcolonial capitalism. The case studies from India and Sri Lanka discuss the (...) production of urban spaces of capital extraction, institutionalization of postcolonial finance capital, gendering of work forms, establishment of new forms of labour, formation of and changes in caste and racial identities and networks, and securitization-and thereby confirm that no study of contemporary capitalism is complete without thoroughly addressing the postcolonial condition. By challenging the established dualities between citizenship-based civil society and welfare-based political society, exploring critically the question of colonial and postcolonial difference, and foregrounding the material processes of accumulation against the culturalism of postcolonial studies, this volume redefines postcolonial studies in South Asia and beyond. It is invaluable reading for students and scholars of South Asian studies, sociology, cultural and critical anthropology, critical and praxis studies, and political science. (shrink)

The last 15 years have seen a remarkable set of changes in the global business environment. Established companies and start-ups alike have been subjected to some fundamental shifts in the very way that we conceptualize business. Together with some generational challenges we have seen myriad calls for a new narrative about business. And, even more recently, the COVID pandemic has reinforced a number of these shifts and led to even more fundamental change. The purpose of this essay is to outline (...) these challenges to the dominant narrative about business and to suggest that it is no longer a useful way to think about value creation and trade (business). (shrink)

How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide-but what if their strategy is not only flawed, but dangerous? The Truth about Nature follows environmental actors as they turn to the internet to save nature. It documents how conservation efforts are transformed through (...) the political economy of platforms and the algorithmic feeds that have been instrumental to the rise of post-truth politics. Developing a novel account of post-truth as an expression of power under platform capitalism, Bram Büscher shows how environmental actors attempt to mediate between structural forms of platform power and the contingent histories and contexts of particular environmental issues. Bringing efforts at wildlife protection in Southern Africa into dialogue with a sweeping analysis of truth and power in the twenty-first century, Büscher makes the case for a new environmental politics: one that radically reignites the art of speaking truth to power. (shrink)

According to Rorty, philosophy is most of time the result of a contest between an entrenched vocabulary, which has become a nuisance, and half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things. In this paper, I will explore the contest between the entrenched vocabulary of imagination (and ‘the imaginary’ as its necessary counterpart) and a half-formed vocabulary that promises a lot of interesting things: the vocabulary of the ‘the imaginal’. After introducing the concept of the imaginal, I will move on to (...) show its force and, in particular, the role it plays in contemporary politics and in so-called post-Fordist capitalism. (shrink)

This essay aims to continue to develop the thesis that the welter of political-economic, social, technological, and subjective transformations that characterized the final decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st necessitate a re-thinking of the relationship between social criticism and the critique of political economy. Herein the focus is directed towards the critique of reification and industrial rationalization as developed in the works of Georg Lukács and Cornelius Castoriadis. Drawing on recent phenomenological and psychological analyses (...) of work within contemporary capitalism, I argue for both the historical obsolescence of the critique of reification as it has been traditionally understood and, consequently, the need for novel conceptual responses to the pressing needs of our time. (shrink)

The four books under review form part of a resurgent social science interest in elites as obligatory entry points in understanding changing relations of power and growing inequalities in a post-organized capitalism. All four books demonstrate, in differing but often complementary ways, that in an age of formal meritocracy, rising powers, government outsourcing, weightless information economies, financial deregulation, and increasingly dense digitized networked information and communication systems, elites have changed. Their mobile lives, their ability to feel at ease (...) in almost any situation, and their role as intermediaries connecting different spheres of cultural, economic and political life are defining features of the new, truly global elites. The four books demonstrate the enduring influence of Bourdieu as a theorist of elites and showcase methodological and conceptual innovations to further develop comparative research. (shrink)

Interest in the relationship between race and the expanded reproduction of capitalism has exploded across the social sciences and humanities over the past several years. Despite this widespread appreciation and interest, profound disagreement, debate, and analytical impression persists, not least regarding the relationship between race and the necessary ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist society. This article begins by tracing the core approaches to the race and capitalism conversation, paying particular attention to their understanding of the necessity/contingency distinction. It (...) then proceeds to make the case for race as a contingent – which, emphatically, does not mean local or insignificant – relatively autonomous, and historically path-dependent terrain of struggle in capitalist society, which has largely functioned to maintain capital’s necessary disequilibrium between the value form and its value relations, but need not do so. It closes by exploring the implications of this claim in relation to recent historical-geographical research on post-1898 US imperialism. (shrink)

Social Justice and Political Change, involves the collaboration of thirty social scientists in twelve countries, and represents broad-ranging comparative ...