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This article explores the implications of uneven and combined development for how system-change is conceptualised. The current moment has featured extensive discussions of how technological transformation is altering the nature of our economy, labour force and environment. Postcapitalists argue that zero cost production undermines the price mechanism in capitalism and opens up new emancipatory possibilities for the construction of the commons. This powerful critique and political vision is let down, however, by a failure to incorporate 'the international' dimension into the theory of change. UCD provides a vitally needed correction to this unilinear thinking. To recover an understanding of how societal multiplicity affects the nature of system-change, this article makes the until-recently unusual step of turning to fictional literature. Specifically, it investigates the dynamics of uneven and combined development within the imagined universe brought to life by Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction odyssey the Marstrilogy. Despite the events Robinson describes existing wholly in the realm of imagined fantasy, I argue the three books contain five images of uneven and combined development relevant to real world social struggles. Drawing these out can start to develop a normative, political conception of uneven and combined development for the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To determine patterns of mental health service use before and after VA disability compensation awards for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).Data Sources: A 10 percent random sample of VHA-enrolled Veterans with new or increased PTSD service connection between 2012 and 2014 (n = 22,249).Study Design: We used latent trajectory analysis to identify utilization patterns and multinomial logistic regression to assess associations between Veteran characteristics and trajectory membership.Data Extraction Methods: We assessed receipt of VHA mental health encounters in each of the 52 weeks prior to and following PTSD disability rating or rating increase.Principal Findings: The best fitting model had five groups: No Use (36.6 percent), Low Use (37.7 percent), Increasing Use (9.4 percent), Decreasing Use (11.2 percent), and High Use (5.1 percent). Adjusting for demographic characteristics and compared with the No Use group, Veterans in the other groups were more likely to reside closer to a VHA facility, receive a higher PTSD disability rating, and screen positive for military sexual trauma.Conclusions: Service use remained stable (80 percent) or increased (9 percent) for the vast majority of Veterans. Service utilization declined for only 11 percent. Data did not indicate substantial service discontinuation following rating. Low VHA service utilization suggests opportunities to enhance outreach for Veterans with PTSD-related disability benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of popular resistance to dam building in the Narmada Valley, India. Like Indian dam projects more generally, the Narmada projects are characterized by a distributional bias in favor of India's “dominant proprietary classes” and, it is argued, must be understood in terms of the political economy of postcolonial capitalism in India. The article then traces the emergence of popular resistance to dispossession in the form of “militant particularisms” struggling for resettlement and rehabilitation in the dam-affected communities in the riparian state, the transition toward a pan-state antidam campaign—the Narmada Bachao Andolan—embedded in a multiscalar infrastructure of contention, and, finally, the embedding of this struggle in a wider social movement project for alternative development. In conclusion, the author reflects on the strategic lessons that can be drawn from the trajectory of popular resistance to dispossession in the Narmada Valley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discursive-constructivist accounts of identity have made a significant contribution to our understanding of how national identities change. Unfortunately, they have also turned our attention away from the role that the global economic system plays in the constitution and transformation of collective identities. This article draws attention to the shortcomings of discursive-constructivist approaches by scrutinizing the identity transformations that took place within the Turkish-Cypriot community in Northern Cyprus in the last decade. It suggests that within the context of contemporary globalization and EUropeanization, the (trans-)formation of national identities cannot be fully understood without taking the functioning of the global capitalist system into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to explain the constitutive role that space-time plays in the dynamics of capital accumulation. Through a close reading of David Harvey's work, I show that time and space work together in ways particular to the capitalist mode of producing, distributing, selling, consuming and disposing of commodities. This does not, I argue, mean that space-time is reducible to capital accumulation - there are, to be sure, other forms of space-time that are relatively autonomous from the now dominant mode of production. My aim is not to provide a definitive account of space-time tout court but, instead, to show both the organic connection between space and time within capitalism specifically as well as the necessary - rather than simply contingent - role that space-time plays in the dynamics of accumulation. My argument is that capitalist space is inconceivable in abstraction from capitalism's temporal compulsions, and that space-time functions as a concrete abstraction that internalizes the whole gamut of contradictions that Marx identified over a century ago. The essay makes its analytical contribution by surveying previous Marxist and non-Marxist contributions to understanding space and time in the social sciences, en route to a close reading of Harvey's Limits to Capital. The political implications of paying careful attention to capitalist space-time are explored by counterposing Harvey's work with Doreen Massey's recent writings about spatio-temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth-century Southern racial political order is conventionally seen as a product of tenant farming and economic stagnation. This article argues that class and racial struggles in agriculture had a variety of effects, some enhancing white political advantage while others undermined it, and that these effects differed depending on the racial composition of county populations. These results shed new light on the politics of black land loss and the trajectory of southern political development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the role of property ownership and the importance of male patriarchy on family farms. I critique here the role of property and family and its role in State formation. I am interested in local and regional sites where I argue that identity and conduct was determined. This approach indicates how the cultural values of farming were reflected in the culture of the State through its administrative apparatuses of power. Through an explanation of the role of ‘family’ and ‘property’, I show how different discourse and techniques involved with rural life received endorsement and support, within legal and non-legal forms of power. I outline the direction my argument will take. Firstly, I show the importance of the family in State policy and how the family was imbedded in ideas of property. Secondly, I show the role of economics as a form of governance. Economics, I argue formed a discipline of productivity through which the family governed the individual and the State governed the family. Thirdly, I show how property, the family and economics were linked within other administrative agencies involved in the ‘governmentalisation of society’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream economics conceives power to be incompatible with perfect competition. This conception, I argue, derives from its deductivist method and the 'empirical realist' ontology that it presupposes. Following Marx, I show that capitalism constantly reproduces asymmetrical constraints on classes of individuals, independent of the market form. My ontological argument is rooted in the philosophy of 'critical realism'. My conclusion is that the dichotomy 'power-competition' is ontologically untenable. If capitalist relations necessarily involve power, it is not simply because neoclassical competition does not exist in reality, as radical mainstream economists suggest, but rather because capitalism altogether is a 'system of power'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic thesis of this paper is that Ben Fine and Grahame Thompson's 1999 exchange on economics imperialism illustrates two positions that talk across each other. Fine's approach to understanding the field of mainstream economics combines methodological analysis of theoretical innovation and a broad critical sociology. Thompson's response to Fine combines methodological analysis of practical and theoretical problems that currently inhibit the mainstream with a broad pluralist/pragmatist philosophical position. Analysing each position provides a useful way to develop the issues at stake in the debate - specifically, what are the potentials and ramifications of mainstream economics? We argue that mainstream economics does have real tendencies conducive to expansion. Its discursive constitution is dualistic (defining its limits but with an insignificant outside) and knows no genuine boundary. It has also been engaged in a process of eliminating alternatives within economics that have traditionally emphasized the very concepts that seemingly form the basis of current innovation. This implies that the basis of innovation cannot simply be one of a realization of explanatory failure resulting in a positive transformation of the field that also happens to be conducive to imperialism in an even more effective way than prior imperialist tendencies have afforded. At the same time, whether mainstream economics and its imperial tendencies are negative remains an open yet determinable issue, one we illustrate through an analysis of information-theoretic economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the late 19th-century analytic context in which classical sociology emerged was constituted in substantial part by a discourse of political economy, the subsequent development of the discipline has been characterized by a growing analytic distance between sociology and economics. With increasing specialization in the field of knowledge in the course of the 20th century there was a neglect of social institutions in orthodox economic analysis and a parallel relative neglect of economic phenomena within sociological analysis. The latter condition has been exacerbated by the 'cultural turn' in social thought that took place towards the close of the century, ironically a period marked by the growing prominence of economic matters in social and political life. This paper presents an argument for a return to the analytic concern with economic life that lies at the heart of classical sociology, for an 'economic turn' in contemporary sociological thought. This is achieved through a discussion of the work of J.K. Galbraith on economics and the transformation of capitalism; private affluence and public provision; and the consequences of a culture of contentment, work that suggests an affinity with the analytic preoccupations of the classical sociologists. The paper demonstrates the sociological relevance of the social and institutional analyses of J.K. Galbraith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at a critical stage in the forcible anglicisation of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and argues that the set of cultural images which provided the moral energy for English imperialism first emerged in the twelfth century, i.e. about four centuries earlier than is commonly supposed. By early twelfth century profound economic, social, military and cultural developments had so transformed England as to mean that the English and Celtic worlds were now sufficiently far apart for the differences between them to be visible to contemporaries, notably to William of Malmesbury, the first to articulate this 'significant otherness" in terms of the classical contrast between civilisation and barbarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Poverty of Theory E.P. Thompson makes the heretical claim that Marx's 'mature' writings, for all their grandeur, in some ways mark a retreat from his pathbreaking works of the 1840s. The Grundrisse in particular, and to a lesser but still significant extent Capital, are trapped within the analytic and conceptual framework of the very political economy Marx was criticising. Two features of this framework particularly concern Thompson. First, the notion that it is possible to isolate 'the economic' from political, religious, legal, moral or cultural activities as an independent or first order object of study; second, the static and a historical character of political economy's propositions and methodology. These, he charges, are substantially reproduced in Grundrisse and only partially overcome in Capital.[1] I do not wholly endorse Thompson's view. But I do think his argument important, if at times overstated. Marx did, in the 1840s -- and not just in overtly 'philosophical' works like the 1844 Manuscripts, but above all in The German Ideology - initiate an extremely wide-ranging critique of bourgeois civilisation as a whole, which went far beyond the obvious concerns of Grundrisse and Capital. He did not return to these themes again in anything like the same detail. And part of what Marx showed in these works was precisely the impossibility of abstracting 'the economic' in the way Thompson objects to -- in Marx's writings of the 1840s, the development of capitalism is apprehended as intimately bound up with wider social changes, in politics, law, culture, morality. Moreover, Marx exhibited an eminently historical grasp of these interlinked changes. In sum, his writings of this period provide the basis of a panoramic historical sociology. Commentary has tended to neglect this: the 1840s writings have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an external account of the demise of the `old' Marxist educational theory flowing from social reproductionism/resistance theory. Five developments are explored in terms of how they have undercut the 'old' educational Marxism, hyper-academicism, dislocations/disfuncions between theory and practice, the postmodern challenge; the new liberal `Left' challenge, and, the `death of Marxism' syndrome. The first two elements from the basis of some important `lessons' for the revitalisation of Marxist perspectives on education. It is also argued that, although the five bends and developments have posed a serious challenge fir the `old' Marxist educational theory, nevertheless, it will probably circulate for some time-given revival revisits, and as a source of easy critisism for anti-Marxists Finally, there has been a recent flowering of new approaches to theorising education from a Marxist perspective, which this paper maps out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The philosophy of liberalism has been the subject of a vast but frustrating literature. Too much is oriented to the philosophy of liberalism, not enough to liberalism as it played [...]

Abstract This article reconstructs the role that fetishistic concrete abstraction plays in Henri Lefebvre's writings on everyday life, cities and space. I begin by distinguishing between Lefebvre's theories of alienation [...]

Introduction This bibliography is divided into three parts: 1) works that deal with or use Marx's philosophy of internal relations; 2) works that present non-Marxist versions of this philosophy; and [...]

This paper attempts to clarify how the internal relation and the concrete universal are both crucial canons of interpretation at play in Marx's mature method of dialectical explanation, which moves from the abstract to the concrete-in-thought. The paper argues that just as Marx's notion of the commodity is the master conceptual knot for Marx's elaboration of Capital via a movement from the abstract to the concrete-in-thought, so praxis is the master conceptual knot for integrating the humanism of the early Marx with the theory of historical materialism, and with Marx's later work, via a movement from the abstract to the concrete-in-thought. Keywords Abstract universal, canons of interpretation, commodity, concrete universal, external relation, historical materialism, internal relation, Marx's dialectical method of explanation, praxis, Introduction When is a Marxist a Marxist? And when is a Marxist not a Marxist? Clearly even Marx himself had concerns about what 'Marxism' is construed to be, as is [...]

Marx's method of critique via several philosophy of science categories reveals logical problems, as well as political biases, within different competing approaches of his period. Some principles subject to Marx's criticism include: metaphysics, ahistoricism, false universalisation, inversion, reductionism, idealism, obscurantism, incommensurability, and tautology. This paper examines these categories and their logical bases, the competing approaches Marx targets as politically biased because of their failure to either respect such principles or their violation of them, and the way in which, by extension, several traditions in modern social discourse reveal parallel political biases because of similar logical failures. Keywords Method of critique, politics, philosophy of science, internal relations, Introduction It is a mistake to assume that Marx's political criticism of other theorists of his period stems from subjective, private, and/or personal criteria he imposes from the outside. Instead, [...]

Historical archaeology is defined as the study of capitalism, even though it has seldom confronted capitalism head on. A philosophy of internal relations provides powerful tools with which to confront capitalism. In this paper, I present a range of historical archaeological case studies to explore larger themes relevant to a philosophy of internal relations, including methodological implications, understanding capitalism's 'laws of motion', and their relevance for the dialectical integration of present, past and future. Historical archaeology can help in understanding capitalist dispossession: by fleshing out how capitalism has unfolded, humanising these processes, and emphasising how contested and contingent the history of capitalism was. Keywords Historical archaeology, internal relations, dialectics, dispossession, Introduction Archaeology, if it is thought of at all, is typically seen as an esoteric and elite discipline, perhaps tainted by its colonial roots and long history of service to [...]

A number of scholars have criticised the methodological nationalism of the mainstream study of capitalist diversity for ignoring a global convergence trend triggered by global competition. This contribution agrees with this criticism but insists on the need to take the diversities into account in order to understand the dependence of capital on the geographical concreteness of living labour and its social context. At the same time, the paper outlines an analytical framework that sheds light on the process that makes this dependency invisible, hidden behind the convergence trend. This framework further develops Karl Marx's and Evgeny Pashukanis's notion of fetishism by drawing on accounts of state theory and economic sociology with a view to outlining the complex interplay of economic and extra-economic processes enabling this disguising. It assigns this process relative autonomy, and thus highlights another type of dependence of capital in its drive towards the realisation of surplus value. Keywords Marx, Pashukanis, fetishism, economic sociology, economic imaginary, Introduction After the prolonged triumph of free-market dogma, reinforced by the end of the Cold War, the awareness that markets require regulation has gained considerable currency, especially since the start [...]

Whilst terms like 'law of the tendency', 'tendency law' and 'tendential law' appear in Marxist political economy, they are unclear. This paper identifies the main conceptions of laws and tendencies and disambiguates them. Part 1 differentiates between law as (i) event regularity; (ii) event regularity/tendency; and (iii) tendency. Part 2 focuses on (ii) identifying five interpretations: tendency as a trend, cyclical variation, stochastically specified law, counterfactual event and a deliberately imprecise concept. Part 3 introduces tendency as the (transfactual) way of acting of a thing with properties. Part 4 explains why this conception of tendency is impossible to mathematise. Keywords Tendency, law, regularity law, tendential law, ontology, aetiology, critical realism, Introduction It is well known that Marx conceives of laws in terms of tendencies. In discussing the tendency for profit rates to equalise, for example, he suggests that this equalisation [...]

In this paper, we explore Marxism and critical realism by addressing Ben Fine's Addressing the Critical and the Real in Critical Realism. We outline and address Fine's main arguments--that critical realism is insufficiently critical, and that it is insufficiently realistic--before turning to analyse the relation between critical realism and Marxism. Taking Fine's argument as a starting point gives us the opportunity to clearly define the parameters of the Cambridge-based critique of mainstream economics, and to highlight some of the problems particular to that critique. It also provides an opportunity to interrogate the significance of the formation of discursive boundaries for the way we challenge conceptual credentials and claims., To understand and to evaluate realistically one's adversary's position and his reasons (and sometimes one's adversary is the whole of past thought) means precisely to be liberated from the prison [...]

In this paper the author provides a sympathetic critique of open Marxism. In particular the author suggests that while open Marxists successfully show how social forms reflect the contradiction between capital and labour, they do not at present demonstrate with equal insight how social forms also refract this contradiction in their own unique and qualitative way. This leads the author to insist that a genuinely open approach to Marxist theory must seek to develop dialectical categories in a manner that can account for the refracted nature of each social form. His argument is developed through the concepts of abstraction, social form, crisis, regulation and discourse., Introduction While it is true to say that the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) rejects any one distinctive school of Marxism, it is equally true to say that in recent [...]

Edited by Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Pp.xii + 361. [pounds]40/$50 and [pounds] 14.95/$20. ISBN 0 520 20956 7 These are strange times [...]

By Gilbert Rist. London: Zed Books, 1997. Pp.vi + 276. [pounds]42.50/$65 and [pounds]14.95/$25. ISBN 1 85649 491 8 and 492 6 These are strange times in development studies. There are [...]

By Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash. London: Zed Books, 1998. Pp.223. [pounds]45/$62.50 and [pounds]14.95/$22.50. ISBN 1 85649 545 0 and 546 9 These are strange times in development studies. [...]

Four books looked into the historical and social aspects of international economic development. The dismal global social order of today has led to a skeptic view of progress and of undertakings done in the name of development. The books assessed the correlation among knowledge, power and desire in development studies and discussed the damaging effects of technology on people. The books are classified as post-development-as-advocacy literature., These are strange times in development studies. There are few takers now for a socialist alternative to capitalism, and the Right, suitably encouraged by the impasse in radical development thinking, [...]

Edited by Majid Rahnema with Victoria Bawtree. London: Zed Books, 1997. [pounds]45.00/$65 and [pounds]15.95/$25. ISBN 1 85649 473 X and 474 8 These are strange times in development studies. There [...]

Isabelle Garo Marx et I'invention historique, Syllepse: Paris, 2012, 188 pp: 9782849503300, 10 (pbk) The thirst for 'post-' theories with a Parisian twist seems unquenchable, and Anglophone readers are faced [...]