Exiting Capitalist Globalisation: Westra’s Unoist Approach

Published in 2015, Richard Westra’s Exit from Globalization employs a variation of Kozo Uno’s levels of analysis approach to the comprehension of economic life under capitalism and beyond. The approach has three elements. First, a dialectical pure theory that simultaneously exposes both the logic that capital and its impersonal society-wide competitive market employed in its largely successful attempt to regulate and reproduce material/substantive/real economic life and capital-labour relations during liberal capitalism and the economic norms that all historical societies must observe by whatever means so as to continue to reproduce material economic life. Second, a stages theory (mercantilism, liberalism and capitalist imperialism) of capitalism’s historical development. Finally, empirical studies of aspects of historical capitalism, informed by the pure and stages theories and a knowledge of general economic norms, may be conducted. Following Albritton, Westra advances a theory of a final fourth stage of capitalism that Uno, who died in 1977, never contemplated. He theorises the ongoing disintegration of consumerism and capitalism itself in the present era. In fleshing out a model advanced by Sekine, Westra theorises the functioning of a vibrantly democratic, partially relocalised eco-socialism.     

唯物史观深化与社会主义市场经济历史定位

唯物史观提供了社会主义历史必然性证明,所擘画的未来蓝图是公有制计划经济。中国改革推出社会主义市场经济,表明生产力第一致动要素已经从物质生产力转移至劳动生产力,进而表明生产力发展重心已经从侧重生存需要转移至侧重发展需要;社会主义市场经济历史定位将经由唯物史观这一转变完成。     

韦伯中国命题与东亚资本主义的发展

韦伯一个世纪前提出的新教伦理与资本主义精神的关系在东亚资本主义发展过程中具有相当的关切性,它体现在韦伯中国命题的相关内容中.自从韦伯命题诞生以来,出现了大量研究东亚现代化的学者对韦伯命题的解释和回应,但这些观点却并不足以完全否证韦伯命题.韦伯命题中包含的合理内核依然是我们理解东亚传统文化与现代化之间关系的重要路径.     

沟口雄三对中日思想概念的比较

中国的思想、文化由朝鲜半岛辗转流传入日本,经由日本民族吸收改造,呈现出崭新的形态。在中日思想比较研究的领域中,日本学者沟口雄三以概念比较为切入点,结合两国文化、社会发展的客观史实,通过文献、语源、社会调查等多元化方法,对中日哲学思想中的"天""公私""理"等概念作出了比较。通过比较,探讨了中日思想概念在文化语境中的不同诠释方式,并以此为基础,试图重新建立起对中国和日本的文化认知,同时,也提供了跨学科、跨领域文化比较研究的新思路。     

Global Crisis and Latin America

This essay examines Latin America's experience in the crisis and restructuring of world capitalism from the 1970s into the twenty‐first century, with particular emphasis on the neo‐liberal model, social conflicts and institutional quagmires that have engulfed the region, and the rise of a new resistance politics. The empirical and analytical sections look at: Latin America's changing profile in the global division of labour; the domination of speculative finance capital; the continued debt crisis, its social effects and political implications; capital–labour restructuring, the spread of informalisation and the new inequality; the passage from social explosions to institutional crises; the new popular electoral politics and the fragility of the neo‐liberal state. These issues are approached through the lens of global capitalism theory. This theory sees the turn‐of‐century global system as a new epoch in the history of world capitalism, emphasising new patterns of power and social polarisation worldwide and such concepts as a transnational accumulation, transnational capitalists and a transnational state. Finally, the essay argues that global capitalism faces a twin crisis in the early twenty‐first century, of overaccumulation and of legitimacy, and explores the prospects for social change in Latin America and worldwide.     

Frontier Capitalism: Agrarian Expansion in Southern Chile,c. 1890–1930

This article argues that the agrarian expansion that took place in Chile's southern frontier region after the military occupation of the Mapuche territory (1862–1883) was the first phase of the development of agrarian capitalism in the region. This process was shaped by ecological conditions. In a territory covered by forests, sharecropping with tenant labourers was crucial for land clearance in the formation of the hacienda system, when landowners needed to create fields for commercial crops. As the domestic demand for agricultural products increased, mechanisation intensified, sharecropping declined, and wage labour became dominant. Frontier capitalist agriculture expanded dramatically, and consequently the region became the breadbasket of Chile.     

列宁对马克思主义国家治理理论的贡献及其当代启示

列宁在治理世界上第一个社会主义国家的实践中,捍卫并发展了马克思主义的国家治理学说。他将马克思主义国家治理由理论变为现实,并基于俄国现实探索东方社会主义国家治理道路,首创并完善苏维埃社会主义制度。列宁国家治理理论对中国特色社会主义国家治理现代化具有重要启示意义。当代中国应把握国家治理的科学内涵,实事求是地探索国家治理路径...     

“Correcting Capitalism”: Changing Metrics and Meanings of Work among Japanese Employees

What have been the processes of economic restructuring occurring inside many Japanese corporations, and what neo-liberal techniques have been used on the ground since the 2000s? By placing Japanese neo-liberalism within the broader historical and socio-cultural dynamics of the ideology of “companyism” since the end of World War II, this article analyses the specific deployment of neo-liberal techniques in the Japanese workplace, and the evolving responses by both employees and management. It argues that while profit margins and efficiency were clear targets for neo-liberal reformers, the human cost of neo-liberal economising was more difficult to calculate and triggered unforeseen frictions and tensions in the workplace. As a result, corporate reforms have been mediated by the challenges emerging from various structural reforms. This article shows how both employees and management became more self-reflexive and new permutations of neo-liberal governance have emerged, highlighting both the continuities and changes in the meaning of work under the global permeation of neo-liberalism.     

Alpine Masculinity: A Gendered Figuration of Capital in the Patagonian Andes

This article investigates the Patagonian ecotourism industry and the spatial production of gender privilege. The analysis attends to how the spatial practices of park rangers, tourism guides and climbers create a gendered space of capital accumulation that devalues and marginalises othered subjects – such as women and non-alpine men – within specific domains of nature. Developing the concept of a figuration of capital, this article argues that the ecotourism industry has facilitated the rise of an alpine masculine subject based upon key bodily values: robust physicality, a conservationist ethic and heroic narration about engaging wilderness.     

Asia’s Conservative Moment: Understanding the Rise of the Right

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship has identified a new era of post-democracy or democratic crisis in the West, characterised by the increasing resort to authoritarian measures and the erosion of mechanisms such as representative parties and unions that link citizens and social forces with the political process. Conservative political movements, right-wing governments and populism have also emerged in the democratic states of the Asia-Pacific. The existing literature, with its focus on the crisis of social democratic institutions and forms of representative politics, provides inadequate frameworks for explaining these trends in the region. This article suggests that a better way of understanding the emergence of these new forms of political regime in Asia is to locate the origins of democratic crises in processes of global capitalist transformation and political incorporation and disincorporation. The articles in this special issue show that previously dominant modes of incorporation are fracturing under the conditions of neo-liberal capitalist transformation. In the wake of this fracturing, political elites have struggled to created new forms of political incorporation. This has inadvertently resulted in the sharpening of the conditions that give rise to political crisis. The political responses to crises have predominantly been conservative and have led to attempts to restructure the state to limit dissent and electoral competition.     

Contradictions of India’s Right-wing Government and Growing Disenchantment

ABSTRACT

The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party won India’s 2014 general election by promising development for all. Such promises have generally turned out to be empty. A recent nationwide survey shows that there is widespread disenchantment with this government. This article briefly discusses the disappointing economic and social-political record of the government. Based on empirical information from the above-mentioned survey, it then discusses how the dismal development record is registering in the minds of people who are becoming disillusioned with the government. The article also provides some general reflections on the government, including on the internal connection between government’s pro-business nature and its Hindu nationalist-sectarian character spreading religious hatred and division.     

B.H.P.’s “Place in the Industrial Sun”: Whyalla in its Golden Age

Whyalla epitomised the promises of industrialism and consumerism during Australia’s Golden Age of capitalism, roughly 1945–1975. Located on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, Whyalla was a bustling industrial town (later a city) following the Second World War. It was home to the shipyard of Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited (BHP) and, from 1965, a steelworks. Before the war, Whyalla had been a company town, one planned and directed by BHP. Following the Second World War, it had morphed into a hybrid public–private town, albeit one that was heavily influenced by BHP, so much so that many still considered Whyalla to be a company town. Drawing from company materials, parliamentary records, oral histories, and the Whyalla News, this article argues that, together, BHP, the South Australian government, and residents conveyed and developed Whyalla to be an “Industrial Eden”. These actors forged postwar Whyalla to be a metaphor for what BHP, South Australia, and, ultimately, Australia had to offer. Whyalla represented progress, modernity, abundance, and stability. Moreover, it was presented and even accepted as a great place to live and work. For a moment, Whyalla was a capitalist utopia.     

新教伦理与新加坡文明

新加坡希冀通过倡导儒家思想复兴的行动去消除新教伦理的弊端 ,促进社会的和谐发展 ,经过十几年的努力 ,现今已取得初步成效。本文通过论述新加坡的独特文明 ,在肯定新加坡实行理性资本主义管理方式而经济实现繁荣的同时 ,对儒家思想为特征的东方文化与新教伦理在新加坡的相互影响提出了移植、兼容和趋同等观点 ,并对儒家复兴是否能引导新加坡社会走上和谐发展的道路阐述了个人的看法。