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This paper invites a conversation between world-systems perspective and radical criminology to contribute to a more robust materialist, historical, and global understanding of policing, prisons, and carceral power. We trace the genealogy of these two approaches to the larger transformations of global capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s, including ruling class responses to capitalist crises vis a vis neoliberal restructuring as well as the social struggles waged by antisystemic movements. Both world-systems and radical criminology brought a critical and Marxist perspective to the liberal social sciences, yet dialogue between them has been lacking. On the one hand, worldsystems analysis offers a structural explanation of capitalism but often side steps the role that carceral power plays to manage the system's deepening contradictions. On the other hand, radical criminology focuses on carceral power but often limits its analysis to advanced core countries and not to the entire capitalist system. We argue that bringing these two critical approaches together can offer us a renewed Marxist perspective to the interrelated issues of capitalist crisis and carceral power and thus make possible new lines of inquiry and research best suited for grappling with the major contradictions of capitalism in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper invites a conversation between world-systems perspective and radical criminology to contribute to a more robust materialist, historical, and global understanding of policing, prisons, and carceral power. We trace the genealogy of these two approaches to the larger transformations of global capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s, including ruling class responses to capitalist crises vis a vis neoliberal restructuring as well as the social struggles waged by antisystemic movements. Both world-systems and radical criminology brought a critical and Marxist perspective to the liberal social sciences, yet dialogue between them has been lacking. On the one hand, world-systems analysis offers a structural explanation of capitalism but often side steps the role that carceral power plays to manage the system’s deepening contradictions. On the other hand, radical criminology focuses on carceral power but often limits its analysis to advanced core countries and not to the entire capitalist system. We argue that bringing these two critical approaches together can offer us a renewed Marxist perspective to the interrelated issues of capitalist crisis and carceral power and thus make possible new lines of inquiry and research best suited for grappling with the major contradictions of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

In this article, I seek to explore the political and epistemological implications of European Union developmental funds in settings of policymaking in Greece. Building on fieldwork with specialized technocrats in Athens and with political personnel in Evros, I initially posit that the discourse on European funds has functioned as a recurrent argument for the justification of a coherent liberal idealist paradigm starting in the 1980s. Notwithstanding the ideological usage of European funds, I suggest that its increasing relevance in the practices and worldview of these social agents also pertains to a broader relocation of political and analytical focus onto the ethical conduct and qualitative features of dominated classes. Most evidently, the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis in Greece reactualized the precept of moral and cultural introspection as well as its interrelation with the discourse of past benefaction. In this sense, the recent crisis also made evident the pertinence of Michel Foucault's "hermeneutics of the self" to understand the delineation of class hegemony in capitalism. I argue that the discourse of European funds has been conducive to the consolidation of the "hermeneutics of the self" as an overarching political imperative in Greek society over the last decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this essay is to deconstruct, from an openly Marxist and politically engaged perspective, the false progressive image that many on the left ascribe to the European Union. I argue that the EU has been from the very beginning and continued to be a project of the capitalist elites in Western Europe, as reflected by its the entire institutional architecture. Moreover, contrary to a widely-held perception, the EU has not been acting as a bastion of the "European social model" against the neoliberal counter-reform but has in fact led that counter-reform in Europe. Indeed, even the seemingly progressive aspects of the EU are mere concessions that either serve capitalist interests too or are simply ineffective. I conclude by showing why the EU cannot be realistically reformed and why the left needs to urgently oppose it in the current context of the crisis of capitalism and the growing popular disillusionment with this system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages in the ongoing anthropological discussion on the concept of ‘moral economy’ and opts for its multileveled use. It affirms the concept’s suitability for grasping class-specific sets of moral values and considerations on the economy, as well as universalized moral frameworks through which the economy is commonly addressed by both dominated and dominant classes. In dealing with such universalized moral economies, it is suggested that our analysis should critically address the symbolic construction of the economy as an essentially moral process. The value of such a focus lies in analyzing and historicizing the recurrence of epistemologies that deny the centrality of structural oppositions in capitalism and, rather, place emphasis on moral categories, such as fairness, intentionality, and obligation. This multileveled understanding and use of the concept of moral economy can help us to further comprehend the delineation of neoliberalism in European space and the moral reformulation of the political economy of capitalism-in-crisis. The article is based on ethnographic material addressing the course of action taken by Greek technocrats specialized in the policies and cohesion funds of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is as dubious for Marx's critics to claim that Marxism and socialism are dead as it is for Marxists to claim that Marxism and socialism are historically inevitable. Three developments in world capitalism, however, considerably enhance Marxism's standing as a theory of contemporary affairs: capitalism's world ascendancy, as personified in the world market; the waning ideological dominance of neoliberalism; and the retrenchment of one of capitalism's oldest and most effective answers to socialism, the welfare state. When world capitalism and neoliberalism advance and when the shield of the welfare state recedes, capitalism and its contradictions become more transparent. In the past, greater transparency was necessary for greater resistance, which is one reason why Marxism and socialism have an annoying tendency (for Marx's critics) to defy efforts to keep them down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global financial and economic crisis has prompted some scholars to suggest that a fundamental regulatory shift away from neoliberalism will take place – both in general and in the field of EU competition regulation. This paper shows that so far no radical break with the neoliberal type of competition regulation is heaving into sight. It sets out to explain this from the vantage point of a critical political economy perspective, which identifies the circumstances under which a crisis can result in a regulatory paradigm shift. Contrasting the current situation with the shift in EC/EU competition regulation after the crisis in the 1970s, the paper argues that the preconditions for a fundamental shift in this issue area are not present this time around. Several reasons account for this: the current crisis has been construed by economic and political elites as a crisis within and not of neoliberal capitalism; the social power configuration underpinning the neoliberal order remains unaltered; no clear counter-project has surfaced; the European Commission has been (and remains) in a position to oppose radical changes; and finally, there are no signs of a wider paradigm shift in the EU's regulatory architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the round of collective bargaining that took place between the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW), Canada’s largest private-sector union, and the ‘Big Three’ auto manufacturers (Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors) during the most recent crisis of capitalism (sometimes popularly referred to as the ‘Great Recession’). During this round of bargaining, the union made concessions in order to secure production; the article argues what while this may have represented a short-term success, in the long run the union has implicitly bought into the logics of neoliberalism, which will have disastrous consequences for both the union and the larger labour movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The unraveling of the Washington Consensus in Latin America is part of a broader decline of US hegemony in the region and beyond. Four distinct approaches by Latin American analysts from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Cuba are introduced that examine different aspects of this decline. It is argued that any serious analysis of regional hegemony must include consideration of the interrelationship between economic and military factors; the emergent modalities of exercising hegemony such as free trade agreements; the power structure of the hegemonic state; and the broader context of the global political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imperialism is a useful analytical tool that must be further developed to comprehend the present day contradictions of a multi-polar, capitalist system and its implications for Latin American social struggles. A critical look at the contributions of Wallerstein and Arrighi are taken as a point of departure for suggesting how imperialism in the context of its sharpening contradictions can help inform oppositional forces to think in terms of social transformation. A critical look at provisions within the general framework of regional and bilateral free trade agreements reveals their tactical relationship to recent attempts to maintain and further consolidate U.S. hegemony. The "total market utopia" of imperialist projects such as the FTAA can be usefully understood when conceptualised against the backdrop of neoliberal and imperialist crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]