Introduction to the Symposium: Socialism and Ecology

Okay if you are worried about the greenhouse effect, if you want us to be responsible corporate citizens of the world, you must also understand we are a Third World nation and need the money. Give us 200 million PGK a year for our budget and you can be in charge of our forests.     

Beyond the Limits of Nature: A Social-ecological Perspective on Degrowth as a Political Ideology

This article offers a critical analysis of the ideological position of degrowth from the perspective of social ecology. It agrees with Giorgios Kallis' call to abolish the growth imperative that capitalism embodies today, but it also presents a critique of the conceptual underpinnings of this notion. More precisely, I argue that degrowth as an ideological platform reproduces a binary conception of society and nature, an oppositional mentality which is a key concept to hierarchical epistemology. Degrowth as a political agenda is thus prone to appropriation to authoritarian ends. In order to temper this tendency and help degrowth as a tool of analysis reach its liberatory potential, I advocate its consideration alongside a social-ecological position.     

Assessing Integrity Systems: Introduction to the Symposium

The following Symposium on Australia's national integrity systems, drawn from an Australian Research Council‐funded project conducted in 2002‐2004 by researchers from Griffith University, Charles Sturt University, University of Sydney, RMIT University, Monash University and the Australian National University, together with Transparency International Australia. The first three papers examine the public integrity regimes at federal, state (NSW) and local levels. The remaining four papers develop three themes as a framework for assessing strengths and weaknesses in Australia's major integrity regimes: consequences, capacity and coherence. The papers were originally presented in sessions of the Australasian Political Studies Association (University of Adelaide, September 2004) and the 5th National Investigation Symposium (NSW Ombudsman, Independent Commission Against Corruption and Institute of Public Administration Australia NSW, Sydney, November 2004).     

National Institutions and the Globalized Political Economy of Technological Change: An Introduction

In the last three decades research across the social sciences has made great advances in the political economy of technological change. Nonetheless, many of these insights are solely tied to national, sometimes regional, explanations of industrial R&D and innovation rates. Meanwhile, the impacts of the international system, and of the actions of individual countries, on technological changes across many countries, are increasingly more pronounced. It is therefore imperative that we expand our theoretical conceptualizations. For these reasons we have gathered, in this special issue, economists, political scientists, geographers, and sociologists to explore in a comparative way what we view as some of the critical areas for research at two different level of analysis—business and nations. This introduction will outline their major research themes and provide a brief history of the debate.     

Competition,the Global Crisis,and Alternatives to Neoliberal Capitalism: A Critical Engagement with Anarchism

Since the mid-1980s, and particularly throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the imperative of capitalist competition has become a totalizing and all-pervasive logic expanding to ever more social domains and geographical areas around the world. Sustained by neoliberal competition regulation and other regulatory provisions, excessive competition (over-competition) in the process of capital accumulation has become a major global force with highly detrimental social and environmental downsides. From the vantage point of a historical materialist perspective, the article provides an explanatory critique of capitalist competition and the atomistic and reductionist social scientific precepts that serve to legitimize the neoliberal type of competition regulation. By critically engaging with principles and values central to anarchism, such as equity, solidarity, cooperation, mutual aid, and environmental sustainability, the article seeks to outline an alternative vision to the ideas and social practices that have sustained the existing competition order thus far.     

Capitalism,Technology and Work: Interrogating the Tipping Point Thesis

Post-work politics, with a focus on universal basic income, rather than an agenda of saving jobs and improving the quality of work, has been a growth area on the left. This article challenges the views of proponents that their claims are ‘on trend' with developments in markets and technology. It does so by examining two supposed ‘tipping points' concerning crises in the production of value in capitalism and in the availability of and attachment to work. Through a rigorous examination of available evidence, the article demonstrates that the stories contained in post-work discourses about business models, technologies, labour markets and workers are not empirically sustainable. Suggestions are then made about what more credible accounts of actually existing capital, technology and labour might look like, and what the direction of alternative, progressive policy agendas might be.     

Introduction: Social Media,Political Marketing and the 2016 U.S. Election

This essay introduces the contributions of the volume “Social Media, Political Marketing and the 2016 U. S. Election.” Using a variety of methodological approaches, the authors investigate the communication strategies of the Democratic and Republican candidates for president together with the responses of their audience. Collectively, this research offers insights into how new communication technologies are changing both political marketing and the ways candidates and voters interact.