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Thomas Piketty is the most politically and economically important participant in the ongoing debate about the deleterious effects of income and wealth inequality. The article analyses his arguments carefully because they give Marxists an opportunity to intervene in a mainstream political-economic debate in which they are generally not taken seriously. As impressive as Piketty’s argument is, and as willing as he is to embrace a socialist solution to capitalist crisis, a non-dogmatic Marxist examination of his texts reveals that his argument does not grasp at the most systematic level the connections between the driving forces of the capitalist economy and the undemocratic implications of widening inequality. This article will argue that although his critique acknowledges the structural inequality of power between workers and capitalists upon which capitalist society depends, his argument points towards an organic link between the exploitation of labour, the falling rate of profit, capitalist crisis, the shift of investment from the productive economy to the financial sector, and growing inequality that he does not explicitly formulate.

The eight essays in Ben Davis’ "Art in the After-Culture" are centered on the interchanges between cultural production and economic development in contemporary society. Largely told through the lens of leftist aesthetic theory, the book pushes against exploitative notions of capitalist systems and ambitions towards decentralization. Davis likens art to a “survival kit” and advocates for creative practitioners to strategically influence the direction of society.

This paper provides a reading of Jena Osman's poetry, specifically her volumes The Network (2010) and Corporate Relations (2014), as capitalist crisis poetry. Intertwining the self and the nation, the self and capitalism, and the self and the financial market's discourses of profit and profitability, Osman's writing shows that neoliberalism has taken over every dimension of life. Using the analogy of the conjugation, the analysis provided here discusses how Osman's explorative kind of poetry does not only generate a new "language" to talk about the ongoing financial crisis but, indeed, that it opens different ways of understanding capitalism's origins and forms on the national and international scales, including its unspoken and hidden histories, such as racial capitalism and the long-term consequences of colonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This introductory chapter explores the lyric's potential as an active agent of change and offers an overview of contemporary discourses on the status of poetry in late capitalist contexts. Our approach synthesizes recent theoretical, philosophical, and poetic scholarship to facilitate a more comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the numerous aesthetic and conceptual agendas of twenty-first-century lyric writing. We re-theorize the nexus between lyric poetry, politics, and neoliberal capitalism in order to think through the ways in which different poetic forms as well as lyric language and practices shape, transform, or resist political and capitalist discourses--but also to reflect on how the lyric and the theory of the lyric have themselves been shaped by these discourses. We propose lyricism as a compelling analytical tool with which to grasp effective and affective dynamics of poetic production and reception, and as a space where the poem can resist simple classification and straightforward commodification. In taking seriously interventionist strategies employed in poetry to tackle the crises triggered or exacerbated by neoliberal capitalism, this chapter is a springboard for contemporary poetics interested in readings of poetry beyond a reductive analysis that focuses either solely on formal features or on content. It is thus of immediate relevance to literary and cultural studies, as well as the social and political sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortly after the financial crisis of 2008, Wolfgang Streeck emerged as a highly influential and ambitious critical theorist of capitalism and crisis. Streeck's crisis theory of capitalism is built around an account of neoliberal policy reform as a family of responses to economic upheavals that first emerged during the 1970s. Based on an analysis of four major shocks all occurring in that decade, I argue that Streeck's crisis theory is excessively economistic in its understanding of the crisis tendencies that first propelled neoliberal reform and insufficiently attentive to the global context of their emergence. Theorising the significance of this pivotal historical moment requires more attention to the conflictual entanglements between societies of the Global South and North in the context of decolonisation, war and revolution, and a more nuanced appreciation of the political context of economic reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A partir de análises teóricas e estatísticas, objetivou-se apreender relações entre a política de assistência social e o processo de precarização da classe trabalhadora no atual contexto econômico e social brasileiro. Observa-se que o caráter compensatório das políticas de assistência social vem sendo acompanhado da precarização das condições de trabalho e da naturalização e da individualização do pauperismo, que mistificam os laços que conectam os usuários à sua classe social. Com isso, a aparente desconexão com a classe trabalhadora naturaliza a ausência de garantia do direito ao trabalho e potencializa a subsunção ao capital

This paper proposes a supplemental secular cycle formulation for a modern capitalist society that employs financial, economic, and political metrics in place of population and sociopolitical violence. It makes use of Thomas Piketty’s (2014) hypothesis that excess investment return relative to economic growth causes inequality. In a capitalist society, the investing class can be considered as a proxy for elites. Inequality as measured by the ratio of financial to wage gains over time agrees with other economic measures. Rising inequality led to a reduction in capital productivity (output per person per unit of capital). This created instability in financial markets that generated the 1929 stock market crash. Application of a simplified version of the demographic structural theory to inequality trends shows political stress peaking in 1929. The depression that began with the stock market crash in that year resulted in a devastating political defeat for the ruling party in 1932 which brought in the political coalition that engineered the inequality trend reversal. This series of events can be considered as a modern version of the state collapse and reconstitution that was typically a key feature of premodern secular cycles.