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This article aims to analyse how the map of clothing manufacturing has changed since the 2008 financial crash. In doing so I look at global and intra-regional trade statistics before and after 2008. Here, I challenge the long-standing dominance of Global Commodity Chains and Global Value Chains approaches in debates about the geography of the clothing industry. These approaches fail to explain processes beyond regions and firms directly linked to global production networks, like the rise of ‘local sweatshops’ in large cities in core economies and the deindustrialisation caused by the globalisation of production in peripheral countries not linked to these networks. Here, global production networks are considered as one particular way of organising production, or, in Harvey’s terms, a ‘spatial fix’ coexisting with other spatial fixes developed by capital in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s. Rather inspired by recently reanimated debates on uneven development, I address changes in the map of clothing manufacturing by emphasising broader processes of capital accumulation and circulation. More specifically, I look at the effects of the capitalist crisis, the eastward shift in globalisation – evidenced primarily by the rise of Chinese economy – trade tensions, declining labour supply and rising labour costs across Southern and SE Asia on corporate spatial strategies. The emphasis on meso-level processes and connections, therefore, helps address politically important questions about possible future trajectories of garment manufacturing and supply in and beyond global production networks.

Some of the most decisive moments in the neoliberal era were implanted first as major changes to the United States and world financial system during the early 1980s. As an inside observer at the Federal Reserve briefly during the time, learning a bourgeois mode of economic theory and description—especially applied to the global recession, financial failures, and worsening inequality of that era—was unsatisfying. The ideological and applied power configuration was shifting from Keynesianism to Monetarism and with it came irresponsible banking deregulation. Seeing this from the Fed, and beginning to grasp the formidable implications for low-income people of the Global South—from redlined West Philadelphia to debt-riddled Southern Africa—meant that instead of social-democratic nostalgia, I sought an antidote in Marxist theory and anti-apartheid solidarity activism. With the help of Johns Hopkins University geographers, the financial frothiness that was washing over sites I was learning about in detail, suddenly became explicable in terms of underlying capitalist crisis tendencies. As I saw how they applied to uneven development, race, gender, ecological, and other super-exploitative relations in Zimbabwe and South Africa, especially using Rosa Luxemburg’s capitalist/non-capitalist framing in her theory of imperialism, not only analysis but praxis became all the more urgent. Those overaccumulation tendencies, their spatial and temporal displacement, and accumulation by dispossession have been central categories for analysis and strategy ever since.

In this article, we analyze the strategies, surprises, and sidesteps in the World Bank’s 2020 World Development Report, Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains. Strategically, the Report promotes an expansion of neoliberal globalization couched in the language of global value chains. Curiously detached from the broader academic literature on global value chains in international trade, it promotes a sequentialist vision of global value chain upgrading that evokes the stagism of classic modernization theory. The authors sidestep important issues, such as China's pivotal role in the landscape of global trade, and are largely silent on others, including climate change. Significantly and somewhat surprisingly, given the general endorsement of global value chain integration, the Report acknowledges negative distributional trends associated with the rise of global value chains, including the excessive benefits reaped by “superstar firms” and the now well-documented decline in labor's income share. These observations are not reflected in the document's policy section, however, where the World Development Report largely recapitulates familiar prescriptions, with the threat of nationalist populism and rising protectionism providing a new bottle for this old wine. Drawing on a range of literature including United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's 2018 Trade and Development Report, we highlight not only the limits of the Bank's adherence to an increasingly embattled orthodoxy, but also the necessary starting points for a more useful discussion of the merits, limits, and future of global value chains.

El turismo urbano en sus diversas formas ha experimentado una gran expansión a principios del siglo XXI, pero la turistificación como fenómeno de masas, hegemónico y dominante en las grandes ciudades portuguesas de Lisboa y Oporto es un fenómeno reciente. Antes de la pandemia, Lisboa vivía un pico de proyección internacional como destino turístico, registrando considerables incrementos ininterrumpidos en llegadas de turistas, pernoctaciones e ingresos diarios, así como en número de hoteles, hostales y alojamientos turísticos de alquiler corto, pero la turistificación como un fenómeno de masas, hegemónico y dominante en el centro de la ciudad, con drásticos impactos en el tejido social y económico de los distritos históricos del centro de Lisboa es reciente. Este artículo se centrará en las fuerzas impulsoras del urbanismo de austeridad y el giro neoliberal en la política urbana que genera el proceso de gentrificación turística, en la última década, en los barrios históricos de Lisboa, especialmente la enorme expansión del alojamiento de alquiler a corto plazo para turistas, combinada con la alta rent gap y el elevado número de edificios vacíos en la ciudad., Urban tourism in its various forms has expanded greatly since the beginning of the 21st century, but touristification and overtourism as a mass, hegemonic phenomenon in the large Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Porto is a more recent development. Before the pandemic, Lisbon’s international projection as a tourist destination was at an all-time high, registering considerable uninterrupted growth in tourist arrivals, overnight stays and daily revenues, as well as a rising number of hotels, hostels and short-term tourist accommodation, which has had a drastic impact on the social and economic fabric of the historical districts of central Lisbon. This article examines the driving forces of austerity urbanism and the neoliberal turn in urban politics that has fuelled the process of tourist gentrification in Lisbon’s historic neighbourhoods in the past decade, particularly in relation to the huge expansion of short-term rental accommodation for tourists, combined with the growing rent gap and high number of vacant buildings in the city.

Marx’s method in Capital and some of his formulations in the Grundrisse serve for a reconstructing of the true logic of the constitution of the capitalist state. What is the human essence of the st...

This paper draws upon regulationist perspectives to explore the rationales which inform low-carbon economic development at the city level. This work is developed through a case study of low-carbon policy making in Liverpool, UK. The paper identifies conflict between those who argue for deeper engagement with the emerging low-carbon policy domain, and others who remain committed to maintaining existing patterns of growth. The paper argues that regulationist-inspired perspectives particularly help understand places where the transition to a low-carbon economy can falter in the face of competing agendas such as reigniting growth and coping with austerity.

The escalation of worldwide inequalities reflects a crisis of global capitalism that is as much structural, one of over-accumulation, as it is political, one of hegemony. This article explores the ...

Business tycoon Cyril Ramaphosa, who, according to Forbes, was worth more than $450 million in 2015, has been the president of the ruling African National Congress since December 2017. Despite the change in ruling-party leadership, the residual old-guard politicians from the era of Jacob Zuma’s patrimonial, corrupt regime still retain enormous power.

espanolSera analisada a recente viragem neoliberal na politica urbana em Portugal, responsavel por criar as condicoes para um urbanismo de austeridade e legitimar a ideologia da necessidade "natural" e "inevitavel" da gentrificacao liderada pelo Estado nos bairros historicos de Lisboa, no periodo de capitalismo poscrise de 2008-2009. As realidades economicas, financeiras e orcamentais resultantes da crise de 2008-2009 impuseram a adocao de novos modelos de gestao e desenvolvimento do territorio. Uma dessas reformas foi o novo regime de arrendamento urbano, sujeito a vigoroso protesto social, ja que se alega ter imposto um mecanismo de atualizacao que tornou os alugueis inacessiveis para muitos inquilinos, porque os valores sao estabelecidos sem apoio social adequado e afetando familias de menor status socio-economico, facilitando o despejo e o deslocamento, especialmente da populacao pobre, imigrante e idosa do centro da cidade. O documento reforca a ideia de que a gentrificacao e eficaz no processo de regeneracao urbana, e que esta ultima e uma ferramenta primordial na reestruturacao das cidades portuguesas e e concebida como uma estrategia espacial urbana assistida pelo governo para alcancar a gentrificacao indiretamente. Esse processo desencadeou diversos e inovadores espacos de contestacao e surgimento de novos movimentos sociais urbanos na cidade. Concluimos que os atores nessa luta urbana tem poder limitado sobre as mudancas que iniciam, ou fazem um esforco para infligir, se nao estiverem envolvidos em uma acao concertada e politicamente integrada. EnglishThis article analyses the recent neoliberal turn in urban politics in Portugal, which have resulted in conditions of austerity urbanism and lent legitimacy to the State's gentrification of Lisbon's historical neighborhoods as "natural" and "inevitable" processes during the post-crisis capitalist period of 2008-2009. The economic, financial, and budgetary realities resulting from this period have required the adaptation of new models of management and development of the area. One such adaptation was the new regime of urban rental, subject to vigorous social protest due to its inaccessible rent costs that have effected lower-income families and resulted in the eviction and displacement of the poor, immigrant, and elderly populations from the city centre. The article reinforces the idea that gentrification is effective in the process of urban regeneration, and that the latter is a primary tool in the restructuring of Portuguese cities and is conceived by the government as a urban spatial strategy that can achieve gentrification indirectly. This processs triggered diverse and innovative spaces of contestation, as well as the emergence of new urban social movements in the city. It is concluded that, without involvement in concerted and politcally integrated actions, the actors in this urban struggle have limited power over the changes they initiate or seek to make.

In this chapter, Nakatani and Gomes seek to reveal the privileges achieved by the US economy due to its position in imperialist relations, its reaction to the capitalist crisis and to the threat of the replacement of the dollar as the world currency. Based on empirical evidence on international economic relations, the authors demonstrate how the enforcement of the dollar reserve on most countries end up financing the continuous US external deficits, thereby guaranteeing the fractional reserves model and maintaining US command over the regulation of the speculative race around the world.

This chapter provides an explanation for the rise and fall of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a social movement “from bellow” that dared to “dream dangerously” in the wake of the most devastating economic crisis the United States had experienced since the Great Depression. Scholars and analysts have documented extensively the structural underpinnings of the Great Recession in the United States (December 2007 to June 2009 [official timeline]) and the 2008 financial collapse as consequences of neoliberal political economic policies that have led to some of the most dramatic increases in economic, political, and social inequality since the 1930s. The Occupy Wall Street movement was an outcome of the contradictions of contemporary capitalism and capitalist crisis in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This chapter is a narrative reconstruction of Occupy Wall Street’s online discourse that stems from an inquiry into the origins and development of the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged in 2011. It is a product of a research project that I undertook as the Occupy movement evolved into a full-blown political response to the prevailing neoliberal capitalist order.

Many have argued that the burning of fossil fuels is an essential component of the socionatural metabolism of capitalism as we know it, and that the anthropogenic climate change it is causing may finally bring about capitalism’s end. In this paper, I explore the potential for, instead, a societal shift towards renewable energy sources as the dominant components of global energy supplies to provide a socioecological ‘fix’ to current forms of crisis. In so doing, I develop a notion of an integrated socioecological fix that combines the central elements of Harvey’s ‘spatial fix’ and of neoliberal environmental ‘fixes’ that maintain accumulation by enrolling new elements of nonhuman nature into circuits of capital. I argue, first, that the capital intensiveness and spatial extensiveness of any such transition could provide a global-scale, if temporary, socioecological fix to capitalist crisis tendencies; and, second, that the creation of global scale geographies of renewable energy production, distribution, and consumption would necessarily involve powerful new rounds of investment in, and claims on, rural areas. These impacts would likely fall disproportionately on rural areas, where land values are lowest and existing users often have less power and fewer formal land rights.

If the problem of ideology, as Louis Althusser argues, is about the hailing of interpellation, then ideology can be understood as a problem of the voice. In this essay, I address the politics of the voice by analyzing Emperor Hirohito's so-called surrender speech, which was recorded on August 14, 1945, and broadcast over the radio waves in Japan and its former colonies on August 15, 1945. In the wake of the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never had capitalism in Japan experienced such an acute expression of crisis. This essay explores the relationship between ideology and the voice in a time when the capitalist system and national sovereignty were in shambles. I argue that the recording of the Emperor's voice represents a new expression of imperial power in Japan, one that inaugurates a postwar period of political cynicism and imperial piety.

In his classic 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi traced the roots of capitalist crisis to efforts to create "self-regulating markets" in land, labor, and money. The effect was to turn those three fundamental bases of social life into "fictitious commodities".The inevitable result, Polanyi claimed, was to despoil nature, rupture communities, and destroy livelihoods. This diagnosis has strong echoes in the 21st century: witness the burgeoning markets in carbon emissions and biotechnology; in child-care, schooling, and the care of the old; and in financial derivatives. In this situation, Polanyi's idea of fictitious commodification affords a promising basis for an integrated structural analysis that connects three dimensions of the present crisis, the ecological, the social, and the financial. This paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of Polanyi's idea.

Using Werner Bonefeld’s theorisation of the social constitution of capitalist society in class antagonism, this chapter considers the critique of political economy as a critical theory of society that uncovers the concrete social relations concealed within value’s abstract social form. This centres on Bonefeld’s critique of the conceptualisation of value as a purely abstract unfolding uprooted from ongoing processes of primitive accumulation. The chapter then explores how the ‘real appearance’ of social relations in the value-form is captured in the work of Marx and the Frankfurt School on the commodity fetish. The theorisation of class on which this rests is counterposed to contemporary sociological understandings. Finally, the implications for Marxist theories of crisis are outlined, drawing on the work of Michael Heinrich and Simon Clarke.

In this paper we analyze the social and historical construction process of marketing, and how it is inherently linked to the reproduction of capitalism in times of crisis. Based on Foucauldian discourse theory, we critically interrogate marketing's discursive change from a production- and sales-led to a consumption-led paradigm in the 1960s and 1970s. We use Lacan's (1977, 1998) theory of individual desire as lack, and Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) logic of antagonism to discuss how the modern individual is constituted as desiring subject. Marketing acts both to produce and fulfil this lack aimed at the satisfaction of customers' needs and desires. Based on Boltanski and Chiapello's (2005) analysis, we argue that marketing plays an important role in the way capitalism is able to regenerate and legitimize itself through its capacity to incorporate critique and resistance. This record was migrated from the OpenDepot repository service in June, 2017 before shutting down.

Contents: Preface Introduction: the global capitalist crisis and its aftermath on a world scale, Berch Berberoglu The contours of the Marxist debate on the global capitalist crisis, David Thurston Martin The global capitalist crisis: its origins, dynamics and impact on the United States, Berch Berberoglu 'The Great Recession' of 2008 and the continuing global capitalist crisis, William I. Robinson The global financial crisis: a crisis of capital or for labor?, James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer The global capitalist crisis and the 2008 financial meltdown in the United States, Levin Welch The impact of the global capitalist crisis on the Eurozone, David L. Elliott Japan's long stagnation and the global capitalist crisis: the onset of inter-state rivalry?, Bill Lucarelli The continuing global capitalist crisis and the transition to state-neoliberalism in China, Alvin Y. So Russia and the global capitalist crisis, David M. Kotz Latin America and the epochal crisis of capitalism, Luis Arizmendi and Gordon Welty 'Africa rising' or Africans uprising? The impact of the global capitalist crisis on Africa, Patrick Bond The structural crisis of global capitalism and the prospects for world revolution in the twenty-first century, Chris Chase-Dunn and Anthony Roberts The global capitalist crisis and the end of empire, Martin Orr Conclusion: the global capitalist crisis and class struggle, Berch Berberoglu Select bibliography Index.

Contents: Preface Introduction: the global capitalist crisis and its aftermath, Berch Berberoglu The origins and development of the global capitalist economy and capitalist crises, Alan J. Spector The great recession and the financial crisis in the United States, the epicentre of the global capitalist crisis, Howard J. Sherman The global capitalist crisis and world depression, James Petras The global capitalist crisis and the European Union, with focus on Greece, Mike-Frank G. Epitropoulos The global capitalist crisis and Latin America, Henry Veltmeyer The global capitalist crisis and the rise of China to the world scene, Alvin Y. So The global capitalist crisis and the end of neoliberal capitalist globalization, Martin Orr The collapse of global capitalism and the movement toward socialism in the 21st century: new beginnings, Walda Katz-Fishman and Jerome Scott Conclusion: beyond the global capitalist crisis, Berch Berberoglu Select bibliography Index.

In the fall of 1864, Karl Marx was hard at work in London completing the first volume of Capital when he chose to exit the study and put theory at the service of practice. Marx had done something s...

This essay examines the representational obstacles posed for narrative recognition in the realist novel by crises in capitalism, focusing on Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857). Recognition scenes (Aristotle’s anagnorisis ) in Victorian novels tend to model a form of subjectivity and temporality, of concealment and recovery, while capitalist crisis is radically unknowable through this same narrative epistemology. This incompatibility of recognition with the logic of capitalist representation (reification) is brought out through a comparative close reading of two recognition scenes in the multi-plot Little Dorrit .

Although the global financial crisis started in the USA, Berch Berberoglu and the other contributors to Beyond the Global Capitalist Crisis have shown that, in general terms, as a result of trillio...

Abstract This article is an analysis of the Black liberation struggle in the context of current capitalist crisis. The past forty-plus years since 1968 is the periodization embodied in this framework. The analysis is partially a rumination on the current state of Black America and the Black liberation struggle. Some discussion of an emergent black left and the United States Social Forum as a process for social transformation is considered. It is, as well, a look into Black feminist interventions in the Black freedom struggle. Core here is the feminist demand to center race, class, gender in intersectionality. Finally, some thought is given to the interplay and complexities surrounding class and the Black right in the US with implications for the current period.

Andrew Gamble, a major contemporary figure in political economy research, trained first as an economist and then in political science, a background fully exploited in this concise and neatly constr...

The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the ‘scale jumping’ required from South Africa’s national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interest rates, in turn leading to unpayable levels of consumer debt, and at a time when microfinance is suddenly discredited as a development strategy. Macro- and micro-financial problems fused in the course of the Marikana Massacre of August 2012, reflecting the local and global powers of the Moody’s rating agency and ‘mashonisa’ loan sharks. The over-indebted Marikana mineworkers, who led a strike which catalysed many wildcat strikes elsewhere, confronted the local crisis by displacing it into the national economy. This only heightened the contradictions that...

This chapter develops the conceptual approach used to explain pension marketization. It first discusses how Americans, relative to their counterparts in other advanced capitalist countries, have had their retirement income more greatly exposed to capitalist market processes and pressures. It then reviews the historical evolution of private pension system in the United States since the New Deal. It draws on crisis management theories to understand the development of pensions in the Unites States. Next, it presents three arguments about how the pension system was changed and oriented toward the market. These arguments serve two functions. First, taken together, they explain each of the episodes of change in the private pension system. Second, they also form the conceptual framework for thinking about the structural contingency of welfare state change.

The first part of this article situates the Euro-crisis in the larger context of the world economic crisis 2008/9 and then looks at the imbalances between creditor and debtor countries within the Euro-zone. These imbalances predate the introduction of the Euro, but sharpened massively since the start of European Monetary Union. These imbalances are the economic core of the Euro-crisis. The second part of the article looks at economic policies and argues that the austerity measures prescribed by the EU Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF) deepened the economic crisis and led to the outbreak of an already looming crisis of legitimacy in the Euro-zone and the EU at large. This latter crisis fosters economic nationalism and thus impedes any kind of EU-level response to the Euro-crisis.

Discussions of the relevancy of the tendency of the falling rate of profit to the present crisis have been dominated by how the rate of profit should be calculated, using historical versus replacement prices for invested capital. This essay offers an alternative structure. It takes into account the rate at which aggregate claims to surplus value grow compared with the system's ability to accommodate such claims. As such, it transcends the typical manner of measuring the rate of profit against investment in fixed capital alone and extends the discussion to an examination of balance sheet performance. This allows the crisis dynamic to be recast in terms of a balance sheet recession. Finally, it brings to bear some insights gleaned from modern monetary theory into account as a basis for socialist fight back.

Introduction The Canadian Auto Workers union (CAW) is Canada's largest private-sector union. The CAW has a proud tradition of union militancy dating back from its forming in 1985, when the Canadian wing of the United Auto Workers split from its parent union over the issue of concessionary bargaining. While the UAW was prepared to accept a collective agreement with major concessions in order to ensure long-term production, the Canadian wing was not. Since that split, the CAW has argued that 'fighting back matters', and has positioned itself as a militant anti-concession union. These characteristics were challenged, however, in a round of bargaining between the CAW and the 'Big Three' US auto manufacturers (General Motors [GM], Chrysler and Ford) that took place at the height of the Great Recession. The Big Three demanded concessions in order to secure their ongoing presence in Canada, and after a bitter round of collective bargaining, the union acquiesced. The acceptance of concessions by the CAW cannot be treated as an isolated event. The union has been struggling in an increasingly hostile political and economic environment. Neoliberalism, globalisation and deindustrialisation have all taken a toll on the way the CAW conducts itself. The CAW has been forced to adapt to a political economy that is openly hostile to trade unions and their aims. In some ways, the CAW has been able to successfully fight back; in other ways, it has not. This article uses the case of the round of collective bargaining between the CAW and the Big Three during the Great Recession to highlight the struggles of the CAW in this hostile environment. The article argues that while the CAW has been successful in the short term, a dangerous precedent has been set, in that by accepting concessions in order to secure production (which the union did), the union has implicitly bought into the logic of neoliberalism, which, in the long run, has disastrous consequences for the union and the wider labour movement. The article is organised into five parts. The first uses critical literature to provide an overview of neoliberalism and trade union rights under neoliberalism. The second section provides a short review of the literature on union revitalisation and union responses to contemporary challenges, which will couch the discussion of the CAW. The third section provides a short background to the case study, looking at how the CAW has changed in recent years. The fourth section presents the case: the round of collective bargaining between the CAW and Big Three during the Great Recession. The final section concludes, suggesting that neoliberalism has made 'fighting back' quite difficult, and also argues that the CAW is on the path towards internalising neoliberalism. Neoliberalism and trade unions Neoliberalism, Gamble argues, 'first made its appearance in the form of political economy as a critique of Keynesianism and a wider critique of state involvement in the economy' (2001: 128). The neoliberal response to Keynesianism meant a restructuring of capitalism to 'provide a means by which capital could begin to disengage from many of the positions and commitments which had been taken up during the Keynesian era' (2001: 131). The neoliberal critique of Keynesianism contained an implicit critique of trade union rights: whereas unions had a legitimate role within the Fordist-Keynesian mode of regulation, neoliberalism sees unions as barriers to flexible accumulation. Neoliberal theory also criticises state involvement in the market. Neoliberals hope to shrink the state, as they argue that state involvement in markets distorts markets, which leads to an inefficient allocation of resources and, subsequently, reduced levels of profit. Hence, neoliberals have sought to dismantle the Keynesian welfare state, and replace it, in theory, with some version of a nightwatchman state. Neoliberalism entails the deregulation and liberalisation of national economies. …

The Sixth Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE) was held 27–29 May 2011 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. It was co-sponsored by the Union for Radical Political...