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.     

Capitalism,workers organising and the shifting meanings of workplace democracy

This article explores the limits imposed by a capitalist system of industrial relations on the construction of workplace democracy. It does so by focusing on the experiences of two grass-roots organisations, from both the formal and informal sectors of the economy, in the context of contemporary Argentina. Against one-sided and abstract views of union democracy, the article argues that, for a critical engagement on the issue of democracy, we should go beyond analyses that consider this in isolation from the material, institutional and ideological capitalist context within which unions’ actions are inserted. Democracy permeates the life of unions as collective organisations, but the struggle for control in a context of unbalanced power shapes democracy as a practice. Questions about the right balance between democratic decision-making and delegation and between efficiency and accountability in unions remain open.     

当代资本主义新科技革命论要

二战结束以来发生于发达资本主义国家的新科技革命，是诸多社会历史条件综合作用的结果，表现了政府的主动性、进程的持续性、发展的加速性、内容的综合性、活动的国际性等特点，既推动了经济发展和社会进步，又暴露出它必然具有的局限性。     

Dispossession and disalienation: The fulfillment of life in Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed

For Caleb

In The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin imagines a non‐authoritarian society that privileges freedom and centers the individual's realization of her creative potentials in social context as the means to achieve the highest functioning, least repressive society. The concept central to this imagination of freedom and the ‘good life’ as expressed in her anarchic vision is that of disalienation, in the Marxist sense. In theorizing an anarchic society, whether or not a particular aspect of social organization is disalienating becomes for LeGuin the key criterion for assessing and determining the human efficacy of, in particular: the organization of work; the relationship between self, society, and nature; and the distribution of both social responsibilities and resources. This paper explores how LeGuin measures the alienating effects of a range of socio‐economic institutions, practices, and bodies of knowledge—from how we organize work, to how we establish the state and its governing power, to how we think about time—highlighting her critique of the alienating structures of our culture and the way they curtail human creativity and disarm individuals from developing freely and fully, that is, in a way that would benefit society as a whole and promote individual happiness.     

Deepening,and repairing,the metabolic rift

This paper critically assesses the metabolic rift as a social, ecological, and historical concept describing the disruption of natural cycles and processes and ruptures in material human-nature relations under capitalism. As a social concept, the metabolic rift presumes that metabolism is understood in relation to the labour process. This conception, however, privileges the organisation of labour to the exclusion of the practice of labour, which we argue challenges its utility for analysing contemporary socio-environmental crises. As an ecological concept, the metabolic rift is based on outmoded understandings of (agro) ecosystems and inadequately describes relations and interactions between labour and ecological processes. Historically, the metabolic rift is integral to debates about the definitions and relations of capitalism, industrialism, and modernity as historical concepts. At the same time, it gives rise to an epistemic rift, insofar as the separation of the natural and social worlds comes to be expressed in social thought and critical theory, which have one-sidedly focused on the social. We argue that a reunification of the social and the ecological, in historical practice and in historical thought, is the key to repairing the metabolic rift, both conceptually and practically. The food sovereignty movement in this respect is exemplary.     

The prospects of egalitarian capitalism in the global South: Turkish social neoliberalism in comparative perspective

Abstract

This paper studies the transformation of economic and social policy in Turkey during the 2000s. The policy mix that has emerged can be usefully conceptualized as social neoliberalism, combining relatively orthodox neoliberal economic policies and retrenchment of the protective welfare state (e.g. labour market institutions) with a significant expansion, both in terms of public spending and population coverage, of the productive welfare state (e.g. public health care). Therefore, social neoliberalism as a development model is distinct both from social democracy and orthodox neoliberalism. Its rise in Turkey during the 2000s is arguably best understood with reference to the interests of the AKP's support coalition, the salience of inequalities in access to public services, and the disconnect of social policy-making from civil society mobilization. Turkey's experience with social neoliberalism provides an important reference point for theorizing the ‘social turn’ that since the 2000s has occurred in many late-developing countries with now maturing welfare states, including Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and Chile.     

High-frequency trading: networks of wealth and the concentration of power

The development of high-frequency trading (HFT) – automated trading of stocks, as well as bonds, options, and other investment instruments – provides a signal example of the political effects of computerization on a discrete social sphere. Despite the widespread rhetoric that computerization inherently democratizes, the consequences of the introduction of HFT are widely acknowledged to be new concentrations of wealth and power, opacity rather than transparency of information flows, and structural resistance to democratic oversight and control. Even as computerized tools undoubtedly provide individual investors with more power relative to what they had before, they also provide powerful actors with relatively more power as well, in some cases effectively excluding the majority of individuals from insight or meaningful participation whatsoever, especially with regard to the political impacts of market activities. Reports on recent financial crises, and the 2011 film Margin Call provide narrow windows into the operations of HFT and the challenges it poses to democracy; these in turn raise significant problems for the view that computerization inherently democratizes.     

Deconstructing myth: low-carbon sustainability

Informed by a semiotics that directs attention to the context of the message, this paper contributes to work on the meanings of terms such as “low-carbon”, “green”, and “sustainability”. Interview-based evidence and printed material are used to assess the interest of hundreds of financial institutions in data on carbon emissions levels and environmental projects. The collection of such data is where for most interviewees its usefulness stopped. Such is typical of myth. By collecting carbon data, financial institutions can connote they are doing something about addressing the risks posed by global warming, without actually describing what it is they are doing.     

苏东剧变以来法国马克思主义研究综述

苏联和东欧解体后,社会主义的前途迷雾重重,对马克思主义的否定论调声声迭起.这样的背景使得法国的马克思主义研究呈现出新的特点.法国马克思主义理论界围绕着社会主义的模式、资本主义的新变化和马克思主义理论的解读展开了广泛的研究和讨论,召开了一系列的会议,形成了一些具有代表性的观点.     

正确认识"垂死的"资本主义--二十一世纪重读帝国主义论

历史规律是不可逆转的.当代资本主义的新发展,虽然使得资本主义"垂而不死",但没有改变列宁同志所揭示的帝国主义是腐朽的垂死的资本主义这一论断的正确性.而社会主义在经受磨难之后,定能实现悲壮的扬弃,并通过大力发展生产力,实现"共富村".