Subjects Archives: Capitalism

  • Schumpter

    Schumpeter’s two theories of imperialism

    Schumpeter’s theory is interesting for several reasons. It was formulated at the same time as Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s and clearly with the knowledge of the two. It reacts to the exactly the same events as theirs. It is different though and it was held by Schumpeter throughout his life. The key text for Schumpeter’s theory is “The sociology of imperialisms” (note the  plural) published in 1918-19.

  • Amsterdam's Red Light District

    The new Mafia capitalism

    MISHA GLENNY’S new series McMafia was launched on BBC TV on New Year’s Day. It is an appropriate if depressing opener for the new year.

  • Alain Badiou

    Alain Badiou: “The alleged power of capitalism … today is merely a reflection of the weakness of its opponent.”

    My father was a socialist, who participated in the Resistance against the Nazis. My mother leaned more towards anarchism. My first philosophy teacher, Jean Paul Sartre, was a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party. When I was a teenager, there was a terrible colonial war in Algeria and I stood up against it. When I was 30, May ‘68 happened, a huge movement of young people and workers. In short, my entire education led me towards politics in its revolutionary and communist form.

  • C is for Capitalism

    Capitalism? Yes, let’s have a trial

    In announcing his long-avoided royal commission into banking, Malcolm Turnbull said that “it will not put capitalism on trial”. What a shame!

  • US-based socialist Tithi Bhattacharya responds to questions from rs21 on her new book about social reproduction theory.

    Capitalism’s life source: the domestic and social basis for exploitation

    Social reproduction theory (SRT) sounds quite intimidating, but the (rather grandiose) anthology of big words masks a relatively simple question: if capitalist production is fundamentally the production of commodities, and it is workers who produce such commodities, who ‘produces’ the worker?

  • Evgeny Pashukanis

    Evgeny Pashukanis: Commodity-form theory of law

    Whether one believes that law is provided by God (Natural Law), is created by human intellect (Positivism), a gendered institution perpetuating patriarchy (Feminism) or the maintainer of the status quo against marginalised groups (Critical Legal Studies), undergirding those beliefs is the assumption that law is autonomous.

  • Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Boston: Brill, 2015)

    Review of Art and Value by Dr. Nizan Shaked

    Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics reveals the irreconcilable differences between the Marxist economic definition of the term ‘value’ and its other uses in relation to the art object. It corrects the faulty assumption that rare or historical objects bear intrinsic value, symptomatic of capitalist worldview. Beech’s analysis of art’s value-form is critical to unpacking the double ontological condition of art as both an object of collective symbolic value and a hoard of monetary value, since the two operate in mutually exclusive spheres, yet function to constitute one another. The book can help us understand the capitalist sleight of hand that allows art to flicker between two forms of being, making profit appear as value, and value appear as significance (and vice versa), the toggling between the two facilitating the transfer of commonly held symbolic value in support of the individual accumulation of wealth.

  • How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System by Wolfgang Streeck, New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2017; pp 272, ₹499 (paperback).

    The future of capitalism

    Looking at the present and future system of capitalism, there is a vital crisis at the heart of it all. Democratic capitalism, starting out in the 18th century, has had its ups and downs but even Marx, Keynes, Rosa Luxemberg, and Kondratieff have all failed to establish theories to break out of the capitalist system.

  • Capitalism and punishment. Figure 1.

    Capitalism and punishment

    David Russio takes a look into the punishments (deaths) that come from capitalism. For is it really bringing balance to the destruction that it causes. That seems to be the loaded question we all know the answer to.

  • Robin D. G. Kelley

    What is racial capitalism and why does it matter?

    Talk by Robin D. G. Kelley on “What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?” recorded November 7, 2017 at Kane Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Sponsored by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities.

  • Capitalism by Sergej Bag

    Capitalism unhinged: crisis of legitimacy in the United States

    This is expanded and updated from an article first published in German in Das Argument: Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften, no. 323 (2017/3); republished with the kind permission of its editors; originally presented in a panel “The Crisis of the Political,” Institut für kritische Theorie, Berlin, June 9, 2017. For their comments and suggestions, I […]

  • Originally published in Puck magazine in 1883, “The Protectors of Our Industries” shows Cyrus Field, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Russell Sage. (Photo credit: ProMarket.org)

    The precariat under rentier capitalism

    The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism Guy Standing We are in the midst of a Global Transformation, analogous to Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation described in his seminal 1944 book. Whereas Polanyi’s Transformation was about constructing national market systems, today’s is about the painful construction of a global market system. To use Polanyi’s term, the ‘dis-embedded’ phase has been dominated by an ideology of market liberalisation, commodification and privatisation, orchestrated by financial interests, as in his model. The similarities also extend to today’s fundamental challenge, how to construct a ‘re-embedded’ phase, with new systems of regulation, distribution and social protection.

  • Capitalism

    Not with a bang but with a (prolonged) Whimper

    It is probably obvious to everyone that global capitalism is in dire straits, notwithstanding the brave talking up of output recovery that now characterises almost every meeting of the international governing elite. Even so, discussions of the end of capitalism still typically seem overstated and futile, not least because those hoping and mobilising for bringing in an alternative system are everywhere so scattered, weak and demoralised

  • Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said that "default" will never come to Venezuela. | Photo: Reuters

    Step by step: How to fabricate news about the ‘default’ in Venezuela

    Let us not forget that Standard & Poor, Moody and Fitch rating services are financed by the banks and therefore have no real independence.

  • Ladies holding signs against sexual harassment.

    How capitalism uses gender oppression to rule

    Following is the text of a talk delivered by the author on Nov. 4 at the “The Solution is Socialism” educational conference in Connecticut. The conference was hosted by the Youth for Socialist Action chapter at Central Connecticut State University, where the sessions were held.

  • Precarious Work! The Reserve Army of Labour (Mexie)

    Precarious Work! The Reserve Army of Labor

    The Reserve Army of Labor

  • The South produces epistemologically-based theory—it’s not just a provider of native experimentation

    A century after the Bolshevik Revolution

    In the world we’re living in, it’s not enough to solve the tension between capital and work, the ongoing crisis of civilization urgently demands that we address the tension between capital and nature, which is currently compromising the existence of life in our planet.

  • An image allegedly taken after the destruction of Monument to the Victory of the people of Slavonia in Croatia, 1992.

    Only intelligent planning can save us

    Universalism is not an innocent concept. In “The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism,” published shortly after the fall of historical communism, Ágnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, former Marxist philosophers and disciples of Georg Lukács, accused Marx and his followers of turning the Hegelian concept of universalism into a philosophy of praxis, a “predictive and action-orienting device” applied to change the world.

  • The queen has been implicated in the revelations (Pic: DurhamDundee/Flickr)

    Paradise Papers: Tax havens show the hypocrisy of the rich

    Another glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous has come to light.

  • Paul Ryan speaks at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council meeting in Washington

    Tax cuts: It’s all about capitalism

    Powerful corporations and the rich in the United States continue their winning ways. By narrow margins, both the House of Representatives and Senate have agreed on a budget proposal that calls for an increase in the federal deficit of $1.5 trillion dollars in order to fund a major reform of the U.S. tax system that will make the rich and powerful even more so.