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The online community of vaporwave music is a cultural development that emerged in the 2010s and therefore fully within the ideological sphere of postindustrialism. Consisting of slowed-down samples from pop songs and advertising jingles from the 1980s and 1990s stitched together with original synthesizer pieces that resemble those used in horror-film scores, vaporwave is an undead, artificial soundscape that floats somewhere between music and sound. Its fake nostalgia for an alternative yet ossified past aims to confront our contemporary social paralysis in the face of postmillennial economic failure and political crisis. This article examines gothic elements of the vaporwave music phenomenon to analyze how vaporwave expresses sociopolitical traumas of late capitalism. Derridean notions of hauntology articulate the individual's self-isolation and objectification under the neoliberal homogenization of culture in vaporwave artist Begotten's contributions to the hushwave subgenre of the scene (2018-19). Vaporwave's cyclical and uncanny sounds embody the spectral haunting of Marx in capitalism's repetitive pronunciation of victory over its vanquished, communist foe in Sunsetcorp's 2009 single "nobody here" and the manifestations of American political trauma after 9/11 in Cat System Corporation's signalwave album, News at 11 (2016). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the weekend of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the Irish Consulate in Chicago memorialised a different occasion: the 86th anniversary of the death of Francis O'Neill (1848–1936), a Cork-born collector of Irish music in the United States. This paper posits that the sociopolitical construction "Irish traditional culture" constitutes an exercise of power over land and bodies, shaping and sustaining the structures of the island's political economy as part of a racial/colonial/imperial project. My argument centres James Byrne (1868–1931), an itinerant piper "discovered" in Kilkenny in 1903. O'Neill's account of Byrne's life demonstrates the development of an ideological narrative of tradition as the foundation of Irish modernity. To deterritorialise land-based practices and construct a White Irish citizen subject to global capital, colonial technologies of governance mobilise resources from "authentic" points of origin, inventing their administrators as the heroic saviours of vanishing culture. James Byrne, in contrast, is situated as a possession containing value to be extracted and as a contaminated body refusing to become a compliant capitalist subject harnessed to empire. By interrogating this narrative, I hope to foster nuanced discussion around the enduring structural interdependence of "Irishness" with transnational political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most of Political Theory 's 50th anniversary issue looks forward to imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it, reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to late night conversations and confabulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her Foreword, Karen J. Alter paints an elaborate picture of the multilayered relationship between law and capitalism, while at the same time offering important insights into recent developments in international law, international relations, and international history. In this brief Afterword, I will take a step back and reflect on the often-unarticulated theoretical assumptions of Alter's conceptualization of both law and capitalism. Situating this account within the broader trend of "law and political economy" and "new histories of capitalism," I argue that understanding the juridical and bureaucratic underpinnings of capitalism does not require us to reduce the latter to the former. In fact, I posit that the centering of lawyers, bureaucrats, and administrators—instead of workers, peasants, or Indigenous peoples—in these new histories of capitalism leads to both theoretical and political impasses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his recent book on Property, Power and Politics, Jean-Philippe Robé makes a strong case for the need to understand the legal foundations of modern capitalism. He also insists that it is important to distinguish between firms and corporations. We agree. But Robé criticizes our definition of firms in terms of legally recognized capacities on the grounds that it does not take the distinction seriously enough. He argues that firms are not legally recognized as such, as the law only knows corporations. This argument, which is capable of different interpretations, leads to the bizarre result that corporations are not firms. Using etymological and other evidence, we show that firms are treated as legally constituted business entities in both common parlance and legal discourse. The way the law defines firms and corporations, while the product of a discourse which is in many ways distinct from everyday language, has such profound implications for the way firms operate in practice that no institutional theory of the firm worthy of the name can afford to ignore it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both the Philippines and Singapore, rapid capitalist development over the last decade combined with intensified inequalities in wealth and income. The conflict this generated resulted in significant – but very different – political responses by elites and popular forces in these countries. In the Philippines, public disenchantment with established elites and institutions fuelled support for populist representation through the authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte. In Singapore, populist sentiments were evident also, but ruling elites were more effective in containing conflict to reinforce prevailing institutions of representation. The explanation for these different outcomes resides not in the intrinsic quality of established institutions, but in the contrasting social foundations on which they rest: technocratic state capitalism in Singapore and private oligarchic capitalism in the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay presents Yugoslav 1968 as a student revolt. Focusing on the developments in Slovenia, the Socialist Federacy's northernmost republic, it shows the uneven development of the student movement in various university centres, while describing its ideological horizon and theoretical background. The essay contends that the economic reform of 1965 strengthened the capitalist processes in Yugoslavia to the extent that later reforms were unable to contain them. The student movement was able to diagnose the critical contradictions (bureaucratic domination and the capitalist subversion of socialist processes), but failed to mobilize a mass socialist movement. While post-1968 theory developed a stronger conceptual apparatus, it remained trapped in the ideological struggle against the domination of political bureaucracy, and consequently failed to confront the restoration of capitalism. This is the main reason, the essay argues, why a Yugoslav theory that was able to hegemonize the global theoretical discourse of the 1990s (as the "Ljubljana Lacanian School") was unable to theorize and intervene in the dissolution that the same decade brought to Yugoslavia itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the quiet politics of informal business-state interaction explains the political determinants of growth regimes. Building on the business power literature within the study of comparative capitalism, it shows that the noisy politics of elections often leads to changes of government but rarely to fundamental changes in the growth regime. Rather, growth models can be traced to the interactions and interests of dominant corporations within a country and its policymaking elites. The argument is developed through a comparative case study research design, using the case of foreign direct investment–led (FDI-led) growth in Ireland and Hungary. FDI-led growth regimes are a universe of cases that rely on state-led industrial and enterprise policies targeting the capital investment of foreign-owned multinational firms. Despite periods of noisy electoral politics challenging basic tenets of the FDI-led growth model in both Hungary and Ireland, the continuity of FDI-oriented growth is traced to the corporate politics of business-state elite deals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We held the 'Revolutions' conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become 'unipolar' and that it would enjoy a 'peace dividend' – remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism's intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on electoral power. Topics include the difference between "state power" and "governing power," the definition of Seizing state power which is a process of change in the balance of class forces and creation of a new hegemonic bloc that moves people away from capitalism; book "State, Power, Socialism" written by Greek theorist Nicos Poulantzas and features that fluid power in a capitalist society; United States' support for coups with socialism or national sovereignty in Latin American countries.

Islamic finance has been surprisingly undertheorized in the international relations literature. In this paper, I fill this gap by investigating the dynamics of mainstreaming within the Islamic finance regime in global markets. Using the norm diffusion literature, I argue that the development and diffusion of Islamic economics, and the corresponding expertise, have followed three distinct steps. First, Islamic economics initially was a critique of capitalism and world markets; second, it was "nationalized" by the political leaders of major Muslim-majority countries; and third, it became an integral part of world markets. By tracing the development of Islamic finance as part of global politics, I situate it within a theoretical framework and show the wider implications of this economic framework for global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the acceptance speech of the Greater London Authority principal economist Alan Freeman, delivered during the 2018 World Marxian Economics Award. The topics discussed include the contributions of economist Karl Marx to global political economy, capitalism, and the interpretation of Marx theory.

Democracy is an open system, while capitalism is a gated one. Yet the dominant global political economy is democratic capitalism. The presence of a gated capitalist core within democracy results in the political prioritisation of capitalist business as usual, thereby resisting substantive changes to the political economy because economic growth is a prerequisite of capitalism. Responses to some of the challenges facing humankind - challenges such as the ecological crisis, which has arisen in part from unrestrained economic growth - cannot occur if economic growth dictates the democratic political agenda. Acknowledging this openclosed problem means acknowledging democratic capitalism's incapacity to deal with some of humanity's current challenges, such as the ecological crisis. A pressing question arises: what does one do? Arguably, if ecological decline is to be slowed or averted, choices must be made that result in ways of thinking and ways of living notably different from those systematised under democratic capitalism. The need for choices incommensurable with democratic capitalism is a sign that a philosophical situation has arisen, because, as explained by Alain Badiou, part of the role of philosophy is to confront incommensurability. In positioning democratic capitalism (and its implications for ecology) against incommensurable alternatives, a full philosophical situation arises. Permaculture is an example of an arena offering such alternatives, and an outline of an implementation of permaculture principles is provided in order to illustrate what a potential remedial candidate entails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conor McPherson’s The Veil (2011) is a play about a haunted house set amidst a climate of economic hardship and socio-political unrest in rural Ireland of 1822. While many critics have located the appeal and force of McPherson’s work in its capacity to inspire metaphysical wonder and curiosity for what exceeds the visible, this article argues that The Veil’s critical potentials arise in its conjuring of what I call, borrowing a term from Fabio Vighi, the ‘really existing ghosts’ of a British-imposed agrarian capitalism. And while this play travels far into the past, I suggest that its significance for twenty-first-century audiences emerges most forcefully through what Andrew Sofer calls ‘spectral reading’, an approach emphasizing the power of theatre’s ‘dark matter’. I argue for McPherson as an eminent playwright of dark matter, not only in the sense of metaphysical presences within, beneath or beyond his drama’s naturalistic world. The socio-economic and socio-political climate of a play’s dramatic world can itself operate powerfully as dark matter, its unseen and disavowed dimensions registering from the wings and threatening to intrude. Indeed, McPherson’s theatre’s most powerful and illuminating dark matter may consist in what is rendered invisible by characters’ and audiences’ attraction to the metaphysical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates seafood in the larger intersection between global environmental governance and the food system. Drawing inspiration from the food regimes approach, we trace the historical unfolding of the seafood system and its management between the 1930s and the 2010s. In doing so, we bridge global environmental politics research that has studied either the politics of fisheries management or seafood sustainability governance, and we bring seafood and the fisheries crisis into food regimes scholarship. Our findings reveal that the seafood system has remained firmly dependent on the historical institutions of national seafood production systems and, particularly, on the state-based regulatory regimes that they promulgated in support of national economic and geopolitical interests. As such, seafood systems contribute to a broader, historicized understanding of the hybrid global environmental governance of food systems in which nonstate actors depend heavily upon, and in fact call for the strengthening of, state-based institutions. Our findings reveal that the contemporary private ordering of seafood governance solidifies the centrality of state-based institutions in the struggle for “sustainable” seafood and enables the continued expansionary, volume-driven extractivist logics that produced the fisheries crisis in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article celebrates the anniversary of Javost—The Public by briefly noting the continuing growth and contribution of the critical study of political economies of media and communication. The discussion includes some of the variations and critiques, of this approach, as well as current trends and directions. The main argument is that critical approaches to understand the political economy of media/communication are still valuable and needed to fully understand issues relating to democracy and the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the debates about the end of dictatorships that pre-occupied this journal in its early years. It is argued that the issues debated then remain of central importance for understanding the role of the media in contemporary societies. Two central arguments that remain extremely influential in the study of the media—that all societies are undergoing necessary evolution towards democracy and that marketisation is a key accompaniment to this process, in the media as much as anywhere else. This article demonstrates that the evidence does not support the claims of this “transitological” perspective. There is no evidence of a uniform development towards democracy and no evidence of a necessary link between political democracy and the market. The contradictory developments that have marked the last 30 years are better understood as various attempts by ruling classes to maintain their power and influence through a range of strategies from the embrace of political democracy through various degrees of authoritarian rule to the continuation of unquestioned Communist Party rule. The fate of the media is dependent upon these broader struggles, but it remains everywhere subservient either to political or economic power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Old and new terminologies in communication studies spin mercantile metaphors of transportation and distribution that cover like a veil the field’s rootedness in a capitalist lexicon and a capitalist history. Its threads bewilder enough to have spurred harmonising and differentiating accounts in communication theory and conceptions of the public—veils of capitalist justifications firmly tethered in the evolution of capitalist society. Thus an industrialising past of commercial interests also knits accounts today of “communication” and “the public.” Woven as a well-conventionalised lexicon, a few threads tether the rest, obdurately, in plain sight. “Message,” “network,” “audience,” “content,” among others, support a capitalist past and a fast-capitalist present. Communication theory thus becomes a useful tool of fast capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ongoing academic debate examines the implications of 'developmental patrimonialism' for African citizens. Rwanda is a key case study in this debate, with proponents of developmental patrimonialism and 'party capitalism' arguing that companies owned by the ruling party or the military play positive roles in economic development. This debate often focuses on macro-level, elite politics. This paper instead uses a Foucauldian lens to examine the micro-level politics of pyrethrum production in Rwanda, which is managed by a military-owned company. The company utilizes incentive-based governmental strategies, in line with state discourses, in addition to punitive, disciplinary regimes. The paper demonstrates that state agricultural strategies depend on multiple factors, including multi-scale political tensions between the ruling party's desire for control and its discourse of 'entrepreneurship'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "The Passions & the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph" by Albert O. Hirschman is presented. It states that the book is about how avarice, which is considered as a deadly sin, was the surest defence against tyranny and warfare during the 17th and 18th centuries. It is stated that Hirschman's arguments for capitalism were not economic, but political; and capitalism was justified because it would lead to a more peaceful world.

Published online in 2013, the "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" declares the need to accelerate through and beyond the hegemonic forces of neoliberal capitalism rather than resist them. By pushing current conditions to their limits, accelerationists suggest that capitalism itself will explode and a post-capitalist future can then be actualized. This paper offers a brief history of accelerationist political thought followed by a critical engagement with the MAP. I argue, using Marx, that accelerationist political strategy is problematic because it enforces a decoupling of accelerationist and critical forces, and thus offers a politically inept theory of the subject. If capitalism is to be overcome, the subject of capitalism must be overcome and a communist or post-capitalist subject must be forged through negation and class struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concepts of of state and politics from the viewpoint of Karl Marx while discussing his ideology regarding the "Critique of the State". The article further discusses Marx's opinion regarding the capitalist economy, modern political reforms and the analysis of the categories of alienation, value and fetishism.

Donald Trump’s election and subsequent presidency reveal important contradictions between the workings of the capitalist state and the capitalist class. While Trump may not have been the choice of the capitalist class, he is now in charge of the capitalist state. Within the context of this contradiction the essay explores the political category of the “white working class” and whether this class was a contributive factor in this unexpected electoral victory for Trump. It concludes by drawing attention to the unhelpful political and analytical fragmentation between exploitation (class) and oppression (gender, race, sexuality) under neoliberalism and urges a more unitary approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conversation explores unschooling through theory and personal experience of Astra Taylor, who examines deschooling alongside the continua of Freedom / Oppression, Personal Control / Personal Autonomy, Solitude / Boredom, Privilege / Social Reproduction, Socialisation / Democracy. Taylor reveals complex relationships between the main strands of her work: filmmaking and activism. She analyses the dual nature of the contemporary university, and defines it as a place of oppression and freedom. Taylor explains own preference for activism over academic work, talks about her involvement in Occupy Wall Street Movement, and describes her experience as one of the founders of the Rolling Jubilee campaign. Taylor moves on to argue that there is a need to augment traditional trade unions in the US, and introduces an alternative organization called the Debt Collective. In her analyses Taylor pays particular attention to digital media, which serve as important vehicles for her activism. It is here that she develops a sophisticated theory of cultural work in the digital context, the rising tensions between amateurs and professionals, market-oriented platforms for social networking, and political economy of digital work including but not limited to personal branding. Finally, Taylor shows that contemporary social movements have a lot to learn from their historical counterparts, links the past and the present of activism, and asserts that the contemporary left is going to have to refight some old battles on the new networked terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guy Standing’s description of the precariat in his 2011 book has revitalized the debate on what the precariat is, and what it is not. Although the book faced criticism from labour studies, Marxist approaches and others, it opened up a new discussion of precarity under neoliberal capitalism. This article draws on understandings that link the notion of the precariat (and processes of precarization) to practices and investigates links between immigration and precarity. It argues that the analysis of what precarity is should be supplemented by an inquiry into what it does. Precarity is here understood as a mode for analysing economy and for rethinking heterogeneous identities and group formations. The article uses two cases, Lampedusa in Hamburg 2013–2015 and the “Freedom Not Frontex” action in June 2014, to illustrate how processes of precarization play out in everyday life situations and the economic, legal and social system for immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to critically discuss the tragedy that occurred between 11 and 16 August 2012 at the Lonmin Mine in Marikana, South Africa. Although the events leading up to the Marikana massacre were complex and not one single factor was responsible for the tragedy we will focus on the philosophical and anthropological aspect that may have influenced the breakdown of engagement between the management of Lonmin and workers. It will be argued that this breakdown may have been the result of reductionist anthropological trends that arise in capitalism. These trends selectively utilize modern economic principles to advance the profit motive of business and dehumanises workers. This dehumanisation is clear in the view of workers by the Lonmin management and breakdown of communication. In order to provide an alternative anthropology the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur with special reference to his work Fallible man (1986) is explored and applied as an alternative anthropology for the reductionist trends related to labour that sporadically arise in capitalism. This offers a balanced view that incorporates the aim of responsible business to make profit with that of a sustainable labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys the scholarship on the countermovement against the diffusion of capitalism and market economy in the Global South. We identify two streams of analysis in the literature. On the one hand, scholars observe contentious politics instances where the spread of capitalist production relations enables the associational capacity and bargaining power of social classes. On the other hand, there are voluminous studies on contentious politics in the Global South where groups such as peasants, shopkeepers, and urban poor resist the intensification of the market economy. We use Beverly Silver's distinction between Marx-type and Polanyi-type protests, which focuses on how globalization makes and unmakes social groups, to unpack the heterogeneity of the impacts and experiences of globalization. We argue that although Silver's distinction is of great analytical value, there are strong warrants for separating the effects of the market economy from capitalism in studying contentious politics against globalization. Such an analytical strategy (i) expands the scope of the distinction between Marxian and Polanyian contention to social groups other than the working class and (ii) emphasizes that the roots of these struggles lie in the interconnected diffusion of capitalism and market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores images and their incipient conflicts in today's global consumer monoculture. Fredric Jameson pointed out that today it would be easier to imagine the end of the world before an alternative to capitalism. As we have moved towards a globalized electronic capitalist economy, the hegemony of the image is concrete as signs and symbols appear to have become universal. Conflict follows in the representations of universality as definitions diverge between publicness, imageability, fear and desire. The global speed of universal representation of the signs and symbols of Euro-America-centric hegemony powers a binary phenomenon: the geographic dislocation of the consumers of our global consumer information society and the drive towards a global homogenized consumer monoculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the question of how to construct modern economic relations as an object of political theorizing by placing Hannah Arendt's and Karl Marx's writings in critical conversation. I contend that the political aspect of capitalism comes into sharpest relief less in relations of economic exploitation than in moments of expropriation that produce and reproduce the conditions of capitalist accumulation. To develop a theoretical handle on expropriation and thereby on the politics of capitalism, I syncretically draw on Marxian and Arendtian concepts by first examining expropriation through the Marxian analytic of "primitive accumulation of capital" and second delineating the political agency behind primitive accumulation through the Arendtian notion of "power." I substantiate these connections around colonial histories of primitive accumulation wherein expropriation emerges as a terrain of political contestation. From this perspective I conclude that such putatively "economic" questions as dispossession, exploitation, and accumulation appear as irreducibly political questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues on the constitutionalization of democracy and capitalism with the foundation of the European Union (EU). It combines the Kantian mind-set of the revolutionary foundation with Kaarlo Touri's managerial reconstruction of structural coupling of law with other social systems. It concludes that the implementation of the Eurozone without political government was the worst possible compromise.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the typical model of government in so-called investor-owned companies remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Renewing with the literature of the 1970s and 1980s on workplace democracy, a few political theorists have started to advocate democratic reforms of the workplace by relying on an analogy between firm and state. To the extent that a firm is an organization comparable to the state, it too ought to be ruled along democratic lines. Our paper tests the robustness of the analogy between firm and state by considering six major objections to it: (1) the objection from a difference in ends, (2) the objection from shareholders’ property rights, (3) the objection from worker’s consent, (4) the objection from workers’ exit opportunities, (5) the objection from workers’ (lack of) expertise, and (6) the objection from the fragility of firms. We find all of these objections wanting. While the paper does not ambition to settle the issue of workplace democracy at once, our goal is to pave the way for a more in-depth study of the ways in which firms and states can be compared and the possible implications this may have for our understanding of the nature of managerial authority and the governance of firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Heartbreak House is not the first play that comes to mind when talking about Shaw's economic criticism, one cannot fail to notice that beneath its multilayered symbolism, this play also tells the story of modern (finance) capitalism at a particular moment in history. Read intertextually with The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism (1928), expanded in 1937 to include Fascism, Heartbreak House reveals not only the pervasive, dehumanizing influence of finance capitalism on society and politics, but also its inherent contradictions, which require unpaid debt, fictitious capital, and profitable bankruptcies. In the play, Boss Mangan, a faceless technocrat who destroys competitors by speculation and ruthless business tactics, epitomizes the capitalist financier and the abstract (power behind him, i.e., the modern corporation). He is completely separated from the actual production process, which is run by a new managerial class, represented by Mazzini Dunn, who-ideologically blinded-believes to be in control. In the real (and figurative) explosion at the end of Heartbreak House, Shaw exposes the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of the modern capitalist system. Economically speaking, the blow up is a boon for the system: while the "two practical men of business" (Boss Mangan and his double, the Burglar) are killed, capitalism prevails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review sets out a recently developed comparative political economy literature on the Eurozone, which has a basis in both varieties of capitalism and modern macroeconomics. It contrasts the export-oriented, northern European, skill-intensive, coordinated market economies with coordinated wage-bargaining, on the one hand, with the southern European, demand-driven economies with strong public sector unions, on the other. It analyzes the Eurozone as an ongoing grouping of sovereign democratic states, each with strong concerns to remain within the Eurozone but in principle with an exit option. It argues that the origins of the Eurozone and its trajectory primarily reflected national economic concerns and not a political drive toward European integration; and its deflationary preference has been the rational choice of the export-oriented members and their bargaining power in the Eurozone, not an irrational rejection of Keynesianism. The Eurozone functioned well (comparably to the advanced economies outside the Eurozone, though with major imbalances in both) during its 'dual growth model' period from inception to the Eurocrisis. The absence of flexible core labor markets suggested by the optimum currency area literature has not impeded its effectiveness; and there has been little Eurozone-generated institution building, except very partially in banking. The only important development, Outright Monetary Transactions, has made the European Central Bank the de facto lender of last resort to fiscally stable member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the political contradictions of capitalism. It references the 1973 book "Legitimation Crisis" by Jürgen Habermas which provides an account of the form of this political contradiction. Other topics discussed include the state-managed capitalism in the post-Word War II era and the ills of democracy as expressions of this political contradiction.

This paper looks into the controversial Buddhist Asoke group generally known as Santi Asoke in Thailand. The group has challenged the state Buddhist hierarchy (Mahatherasamakhom) by ordaining women as sikkhamat. The sikkhamats observe Ten Precepts and are highly respected in the group. In the wider Thai society, they are less known and often confused with visiting Chinese bhiksunis. Santi Asoke has been controversial since its emergence in the 1970s due to its strict vegetarianism and harsh criticism on capitalism, consumerism and monastic corruption. It became highly politicised when their most famous lay member Major-General Chamlong Srimuang was elected as the governor of Bangkok and later on established his own political party Palang Dharma (Power of Dharma or Moral Force) to contest in the national elections in 1988. Palang Dharma failed to change Thai politics, but when in 1998 the former Palang Dharma member, telecom tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra established his nationalistic Thai Rak Thai party (Thais Love Thais) to contest the elections in 2000, many Asoke people enthusiastically supported him until 2006 when they joined street protests to oust him. Asoke group has been widely criticised for their involvement in politics. Asoke movement administers several autonomous self-reliant villages in rural Thailand where it practices sustainable organic agriculture, produces herbal shampoos and medicine and runs primary and secondary schools. The sikkhamats are primarily involved in teaching and preaching but have also participated in the street demonstrations. The purpose of this paper is to look into the role and status of the sikkhamats in the Asoke group; explore social and economic background of Asoke sikkhamats; ask why women choose to become sikkhamats; and why do they not seem to want to be ordained as bhikkhuni. The paper is based on many years of observation and interviews with the Asoke sikkhamats and laywomen in their temples, schools, villages, and on the streets of Bangkok. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the factors of socialist principle on the ethical value of socialism among political philosophers. Topics discussed include the impacts of global financial crises in 2008, the factors contributing to the development of socialism and the challenges of socialist transformation. The article also discusses the normative values about transition of capitalism.

In this article, we explore the evolution of neoliberal development theory and practice, its manifestations and impact on the political economy of the state, domestic classes, and the material conditions of populations in emerging economies. Specifically, the article focuses on the modes of resistance to the rollout of neoliberal development practice by citizens, civil society, and NGOs, and, in turn, the responses of international financial institutions such as the World Bank—a process that we argue has forced the reinvention and transformation of neoliberal development policy. Furthermore, we attempt to situate the evolution of neoliberal development policy and the changing modes of resistance to it within a theoretical framework that explains emergent class and material interests in the context of the increasing functionality of pro-market agendas to modes of accumulation that benefit discrete elite and class interests but which also generate substantial and ongoing contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the aspects of political capitalism as an economic and political system where political leaders and economic elite cooperate with each other for a beneficial relationship. It is noted that the term political capitalism is coined by sociologist Max Weber, Topics include American ideologies in the Progressive Era, progressivism in U.S., comparison between capitalism and socialism, private ownership, interaction between markets and politics, and role of public policies.