Search

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 article discusses three primary ideas that effectively tie the history of conquest, colonialism, and imperialist domination to the global structure of capitalist reproduction. I argue that capitalist reproduction on a global scale requires ongoing original accumulation (conquest, slavery, and war) and a global racialized stratification of labor as the foundation of imperialist transfer that together result in economic crisis. These crises in the global economic structure become apparent in the imperialist world but require forms of domination perfected in the colonial world (fascist repression, intensified racism, super-exploitation etc) to recover and stabilize. The argument rests on the work of anti-Apartheid political theorist and revolutionary, Hosea Jaffe, who has demonstrated how the South African Apartheid economic structure is a microcosm of the global world-system. [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.

This paper proposes a critical reflection on social protection in the context of a contemporary capitalist crisis on the context of trends and disputes regarding the State's role in mediating existing needs in childcare institutions and for teenagers. It starts with a bibliographical analysis and that in the current situation, we live within the process of modernization of the State for the market and globalization of capital, presenting the State with another character in the face of social demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global police state refers to three interrelated developments. First are the ever more omnipresent systems of mass social control, repression, and warfare promoted by the ruling groups to contain the real and the potential rebellion of the global working class and surplus humanity. Second is how the global economy is itself based more and more on the development and deployment of these systems of warfare, social control, and repression simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of stagnation – what I term militarized accumulation, or accumulation by repression – and that now goes well beyond military Keynesianism. And third is the increasing move towards political systems that can be characterized as 21st century fascism, or even in a broader sense, as totalitarian. Digitalization makes possible the creation of a global police state. The mounting crisis appears to cement the emerging digital economy with the global police state. There is a triangulation of far-right, authoritarian, and neo-fascist forces in civil society, reactionary political power in the state, and transnational corporate capital, especially speculative finance capital, the military–industrial–security complex, and the extractive industries – all three interwoven with high-tech or digital capital.

This paper analyses the right‐wing populist rule of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) in Turkey, focusing on the crisis of capitalism, emerging discontent in the rural populations, and opportunities for and obstacles to a successful left‐wing populist mobilisation. We put forward three arguments. First, through an examination of the historical evolution, class‐based and social‐demographic foundations of the ruling right‐wing populist alliance between the AKP and the Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP), we argue that the MHP is a more classical case of far‐right populism, whereas the AKP is a "heterodox" case that borrows several elements from the left. These "heterodox" features of the AKP, together with the interlinked crisis of the 1990s, played a significant part in the support the AKP received from the subordinate majority. Second, we argue that the success of the AKP's hegemonic right‐wing populism from 2002 to 2013 was linked to an unusually favourable macro‐political‐economic climate that helped the AKP counterbalance its neoliberal policies with pragmatic social assistance programmes. However, together with the disappearance of this macro‐political‐economic climate in the second decade of its rule (2013‐present), the disastrous consequences of the AKP's neoliberal policies became more explicit, and the AKP's populism moved from a hegemonic to an authoritarian right‐wing populist type. Third, we claim that today, due to the deepening of the current economic crisis (further exacerbated by the Covid19 pandemic), the AKP's cross‐class alliance began to break down, and the rural movements in the Turkish countryside have been playing a major role in unmaking the AKP's hegemony. However, in the absence of a strong left‐wing populist movement with a stronghold in the Turkish countryside, emergent possibilities for a radical progressive transformation are not utilised. Instead, the groundwork is being laid for another wave of right‐wing populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, the succession of financial crisis, neoliberal reform processes, and emergence of anti-establishment and far-right political forces has become a familiar pattern across Europe. But in few countries has it been as striking as in Italy. After the 2018 national elections, the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement (M5S) and the far-right League joined forces to form a government characterised by its rejection of past neoliberalising reforms and by its defiant stance towards European Union fiscal rules. The League's victory in the latest European elections confirmed its ascendance and its centrality in the Italian political landscape. This article examines these developments in light of the recent trajectory of the Italian political economy and investigates whether the rise of these parties, and particularly the League, marked a break with the post-2011 neoliberalisation process. Analysis of the M5S-League government's action indicates that these forces can further neoliberalisation processes together with a mix of anti-migration and welfare chauvinist measures. Moreover, an investigation of the political-economic project of the League shows that far-right parties can advance 'nation-based' neoliberalisation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Investigación Económica is the property of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Facultad de Economia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses sociability and labor configurations built by capital in the current phase of its accumulation, highlighting the context of the pandemic, its effects on the labor market and the renewed strategies of management, control, and disciplining of the workforce. It analyzes the general determinations of the capitalist crisis and the mechanisms of recomposition of its domain, through the work mediated by the information and communication technologies and forms of overexploitation of the workforce that combine the modern and the archaic. In this context, it considers that the expansion of informality and precariousness in contemporary society, as well as the ideologies that guide the formation of a new type of worker, constitute the vectors that determine the ways of being, thinking, and acting of the working classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to explain long term restructurations and transformations of the media industry. In order to do so, the article uses theory elements of a critique of the political economy of the media. The paper is a contribution to the development of theoretical approaches that provide a theoretical analysis of the media in capitalism based on Karl Marx’s concepts. The capitalist mode of production is the primary driving force of media corporations‘ strategic action and of the media economy’s structural transformations. Factors that are of particular relevance in such structural transformations include profit orientation, capital accumulation, capitalist crises, state policies, behaviour of producers and consumers, private property, class relations, the antagonism between productive forces and relations of production, the antagonism of variable and constant capitalism, the antagonism of use-value and exchange-value, and competition. Competition, capital’s need to survive, and capitalism’s immanent crisis potentials force corporations try to create innovations such as new digital technologies. Informatisation, which includes the use of the computer as universal machine and the Internet, is the provisionally latest stage in the development of the productive forces that has affected media technologies and the media industry. The capital-driven structural digital transformation of the media industry has resulted in the convergence of production, distribution and consumption, the creation of a variety of non-tangible digital products, digital rationalisation and automation, and the universal real subsumption of labour under capital. These developments have also created the potential potentials for overcoming the capitalist character of the media economy and advancing decommodification based on the emergence of a universal digital media system.

The conception of financialization and the impacts of the oil market will be presented in this work from an alternative perspective. Financialization will not be analyzed as a dominance of finance over industry, as if these two sides of the productive process were dissociated. Financialization will be understood as a moment of expansion of a mechanism of domination, reaching not only the state-form and enterprise, but also the own constitution of the social being as an "individual capitalist," being part of the process of constitution of form-value. Oil, from production to the market, cannot be seen only in a reduced view of its high incomes. Oil must be understood as a social relationship. Oil from the 1980s onwards became one of the central elements of support for the US dollar, therefore, of support for the international monetary system. In addition to this new social role of sustaining the international currency that oil now has, this commodity also incorporates a determined form of social relation through its imposition as an energy source. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to show how both financialization and recent developments in the oil market are part of the actual constellation of the forms of capitalist social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This seminal article analyses the current structural crisis and instability in an ever more polarised world in relation to earlier systemic crises that were resolved through fascism or through Fordist-Keynesian ‘class compromise’ (the 1930s) and the emergence of capitalist globalisation (the 1970s). The authors identify three basic responses to the crisis: popular insurgency from below; reformist stabilisation from above; and, a twenty-first century neo-fascism. Looking specifically at the US, they analyse political and economic developments that demonstrate fascistic characteristics. While no simple replication of the past, the emergence of a Christian Right since the mid-1980s, the growth of certain currents within the Tea Party movement, the sharp increase in violent hate groups, the spread of a vicious anti-immigrant movement, the psychopathology of white decline, sharp militarisation and pervasive policing give some indications of the rise of fascist tendencies. But what is crucial today is the sophistication of such a project, made possible by the ideological domination of media together with new surveillance and social control technologies that allow it to rely more on selective than generalised repression. In calling for a co-ordinated fightback, both in the US and beyond, the authors see the only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism as a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity, along the lines of a twenty-first century democratic socialism.

How do we make sense of the ways in which COVID-19 has developed and been responded to in the United States? How can nondeterminist class analysis help us to understand why the pandemic has impacted the United States so severely compared to other nations? What do these policies and experiences reveal about current capitalist economic and social relations within the United States today? Are there possibilities for interventions through a nonessentialist Marxist analysis and understanding? On a beautiful June afternoon, Rethinking Marxism coeditor Vin Lyon-Callo discussed these questions via zoom with his former professor, long-term RM board member, and host of the quite popular public intervention Economic Update, Richard Wolff (lightly edited for content and clarity). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Direito e Práxis is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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 current restructuring of global capitalism and global labor. Capitalist globalization has undermined earlier redistributive arrangements at the level of the nation-state, unleashing unprecedented global social polarization and also aggravating over-accumulation pressures. The transnational capitalist class has turned to several mechanisms to sustain accumulation in the face of stagnation: financial speculation, the pillaging of public finance, and militarized accumulation. Digitalization is driving new world capitalist restructuring that is resulting in increased precariatization and the expansion of surplus labor or surplus humanity. This precariatization includes cognitive workers who are atomized and isolated as the labor process has become individualized, which poses new challenges for working-class consciousness and solidarity among multilayered members of the global working class. The crisis poses a danger of twenty-first century fascism and a global police state but also new possibilities for emancipatory projects. An emancipatory project must bring together surplus humanity and its struggles in the margins and at points of social reproduction with workers inserted into the circuits of global capital under precarious work arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lutas Sociais is the property of Nucleo de Estudos de Ideolgias e Lutas Sociais (NEILS) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses dimensiones of the relation of bourgeois democracy and political aconomy, having as prime reference of teh analysis the question of greek debt explained in the year 2015. Emphasizes that the problem of the debt is not limited to the experience of Greece and of other Southern Europeam Countries, by contrast, is much more comprehensive ando f other Southern European countries, by contrast, is much more comprehensive and is in the nature of capitalist production, especially in crisis phase. Concludes that the Greek case shows that bourgeois democracy, increasingly, it is reduced to a ritual substantially pointless. Front of the population of Greece, crushed between adherence to the demands of representative institutions of the continent’s capital block and respect for “delegation” given by the electorate, the Greek government is solving the conflitc bowing to blackmail and endorsing at this time, the regime of “suspension” democratic sovereignty.

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]

Copyright of Nova Economia is the property of Nova Economia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper inquires on the causes, the evolution and the perspectives of the economic crisis since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, until the actuality, i.e. the debt crisis of the southern countries of European Union. By means of Marxian theoretical tools the article explains the reasons which this crisis can be considered as a typical capitalistic crisis, once that the overproduction and the relative fall of the profit rate are common factors in the prevalent part of the world. In this way we drastically exclude the interpretation of some researchers sustaining its financial nature assigning the responsibility to the behavior of a few number of capitals (rating agencies). Giving an interpretation of current evolution of the crisis by means of the intra-capitalistic battle, we show how the capital linked to the dollar, overthrew the main consequences of the crisis - originated in the U.S. in the ‘70s, in the twentieth century - on the EU countries.

This paper makes a study about the budgetary execution of the State of Maranhão, the costs of health an d education and spending with public debt service. In this direction, shows the trajectory of recent public and external indebtedness of this state and the increasing commitment of social spending in favor of payment of servicing that debt, whi le public services were transformed into objects of capital appreciation with its progressive commodification. Complementarily reflect on the trajectory of the Federal Government's spending in relation to the service of the Brazilian public debt. In the closing remarks discusses the private enrichment and social impoverishment, therefore, the worsening of social problems.

Copyright of Educacao & Sociedade is the property of Centro de Estudos de Educacao e Sociedade and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the hegemonic crisis that faces the United States, and some tendencies that have been signalling its undoing. The MIC has become the fundamental pillar of a systemic policy in which war appears as a crisis dissolver, and as an invigorator of a new cycle of accumulation. Afterwards, we assess the importance of militarism as a systemic practice that is consubstantial to the unravelling of Capitalism, in order to sustain that the display of MIC has turned out as an ineffective way to recover and provide a lasting economic drive to the World System. The momentous economic and social situation that the U.S. are facing today, constitutes one of the most evident signs of a systemic crisis, thus enabling us to analyse the repercussions that are produced by the deteriorating process of Capital accumulation in the exercise of American hegemony. This crucial conjuncture has very significant impacts for the World System, thus the great relevance of the reflections that state the problem of a transition towards new forms of social organization that surpass the brutality imposed by Capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern Africa is probably the most unevenly developed region on earth, combining the most modern technologies and an advanced working class with the world's extremes of inequality and social militancy. The two most extreme countries, both with settler-colonial populations and accumulation processes that created durable class/race/gender distortions and extreme environmental degradation, are South Africa and Zimbabwe-both of which Neil Smith visited in 1995. His contribution to our understanding of political economy, before and after, was exemplary. We consider in this article how Smith's theory assisted in the understanding of crisis-ridden financial markets within the framework of capital overaccumulation and intensified spatial unevenness; the politics of scale, difference and community; and the ways that class apartheid and durable racism in the two countries together fit within contemporary geopolitical economy. [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]

Apresentamos discussão sobre a complexa relação entre a educação como política pública e a vinculação do Serviço Social a ela, em especial, sua integração à escola pública, neste momento de crise do capital. Trata-se de um debate relevante e crescente que atrai muita atenção por seu aprofundamento recente e pela ampliação de vagas na área.We introduce the debate on the complex relationship between education as a public policy and the Social Service link to it, in particular, its integration into the public school at the current moment of crisis of the capital. It is an important and growing debate which attracts a lot of attention for its recent deepening and expansion of jobs in the area.

This text deals the relationship between the occurrence of the capitalist crisis, the predicament in the reproduction of private property and state intervention as an agent countercyclical deficit and public debt amplification. In other words, we analyze the occurrence of the capitalist crisis of 1929 and the Depression of the 30s, the introduction of Keynesian policy and military spending, which led to capitalist recovery and defined bases of so-called "thirly glorious years" of the postwar period. Then we highlight the return of the crisis in the mid 70s, the introduction of neoliberalism to the occurrence of the global capitalist crisis of 2008 and the return of state intervention in saving large companies and banks. Finally, we affirm that state intervention to try to overcome this crisis ends by amplify it furlher, besides expand the debt, deteriorating more and more the Iiving conditions of the working class. For this reason we defend, neither capitalist restoration or public debt. For an anti-capitalist resort.

This paper intends to analyze the external debt of Maranhão, since 1972, its conversion into public debt, making a connection between the crisis of overproduction in the early '70s and the expansion of a private international monetary system, called Euromarket of currencies, which had in the military regimes in Latin America a fertile field for their actions.

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]

A chorus of activists and intellectuals claim that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation has either ceased to exist or become politically irrelevant for Mexico and the world. In this paper I put forward the rather different thesis that despite the enormity of their task, the Zapatista project continues apace and merits careful consideration. To this end, I first argue that much of the confusion regarding the ‘death’ of the Zapatistas arises from a change in Zapatista strategy in response to the decomposition of Mexican society resulting from the contemporary global crisis of capitalism. Next, I detail how, having foreseen this decomposition, the Zapatistas set out to both theorize the nature of contemporary capitalism and reconceptualize anticapitalist politics accordingly. Since the early 2000s this reconceptualization has led to a shift in Zapatista strategy that, although not easily intelligible to contemporary media or much academic discourse, centers on the construction of ‘other geographies’. Finally, I argue that judging from the events of the past few years, this strategy has allowed the Zapatistas not only to persevere but also to pose a concrete alternative to the dominant strains of left political and spatial strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]