This essay surveys 50 years of essays and books by art historian Terry Smith, arguing that his encounters with conceptual art and Australian Aboriginal art inform a concept of contemporaneity that has emerged in his writing in the twenty-first century as a description of the historical zeitgeist. The rise of contemporary art since the 1990s enables a thinking about a state of contemporaneity that describes a coevality of difference across geographies and states of duration. These durations correspond to the vast inequalities and irreconcilabilities of global life, the ontological and material strata by which capital implicates human beings across nations, times and spaces. While modernity and postmodernity were periodising concepts that emerged from combinations of economics, literary studies, sociology and geography, contemporaneity arises from art history. The discipline's phenomenal methods, its attention to sensual and visual experience, makes it ideal for thinking about the mediated experience of the twenty-first century

The ubiquity of the neoliberal counter-revolution , crystallized in the relentless drive to transform the welfare state into an austerity-driven state, has produced a series of paradoxes. As the welfare state sinks deeper into deadlock, tax resistance intensifies. Governments, however, in times of broken social contract, still have to stage ever new forms of consent-manufacturing to make taxation once again acceptable. Rather than painting a pessimistic picture, this paper attempts to reimagine taxes within Maussian gift theory to rupture ‘normal’ fiscal imaginaries. In doing so, I move beyond merely affirming the functional necessity of taxes and plunge into the fractured ontology of fiscal obligation itself, exposing the coercive and unreciprocated nature of the modern fiscal gift while seeking pathways to reverse the alienated hau . Through two dialectical thought experiments, this paper reconceptualizes taxation, proposing two models of taxation-as-gift: one within the state and one beyond the state's borders.

Despite active conversations around activist burnout, Domonkos Sik argues that burnout is a misinterpretation of the problem underlying activists’ loss of motivation, as it shifts our attention to a group of symptoms and therapy while ignoring the structural and existential dimensions of activism. This paper argues that this critique only loosely grasps burnout through the mainstream direction of framing and solving burnout, and misrepresents activist burnout research. While Sik argues that burnout is unfit to offer critical reflections on the toll activists face in struggling for emancipation, this paper argues that this is not the case. Instead, activist burnout has been approached from various perspectives, offering insights for interventions beyond therapy.

This article provides a psychoanalytic–materialist critique of liberal democracy. It argues that the failures of liberalism are structurally necessary, founded in property, ideology and affect. Liberalism survives through the ritualisation of deferral, where disappointment generates loyalty as dissatisfaction is domesticated through civic repetition. Deploying Freud's death drive, psychoanalysis is presented as a diagnostic tool for tracing how institutions structure desire through failed performance. This libidinal economy, consolidated by ideological apparatuses of reproduction and possessive individualism, secures subjects in stable attachments through its management of disappointment. Participation is rearticulated as attachment to process rather than outcome; melancholia operates as modality of governance. Against reformist and agonistic theories, the article contends that liberalism is beyond reform and that the challenge to respond to its crisis must work outside its grammar. It calls for an unbinding of political desire from the apparatuses that displace and defuse failure into fidelity.

The incorporation of China into the capitalist world-system required political, social and economic changes. Although existing studies on incorporation and comparative historical sociological research have provided numerous analyses of nineteenth-century Chinese social transformations, they lack a detailed, comprehensive account of the economic classes that emerged during the period of incorporation. This study categorizes the economic classes that emerged during China's long nineteenth-century incorporation into the capitalist world-system into domestic and international levels and analyses their impact on China's economic development. This study's contributions are as follows: first, unlike existing studies on China's incorporation or comparative historical research, this study considers the economic classes created by China's incorporation into the capitalist world-system in the nineteenth century; and second, this study enables an actor-based (or class-based) approach to China's economic changes and development path during and after its incorporation.

This paper develops an eco-Marxist interpretation of the discovery that Earth is an integrated system, a discovery we have made in grasping our own role in shaping it. It criticizes an idea pervasive among Earth system scientists that our disruption of Earth is a function of human power, while bringing out the truth in the thought from Paul Crutzen that our species has become a self-conscious manager of the Earth system. If labour encounters itself in the disrupted Earth system, it finds itself in an environment increasingly hostile to human life. Yet labour may still impart a lesson to itself, on its own domination and the disorder in our relation to nature this domination effects. To fully recognize ourselves in an Earth system we are actively reshaping would mean grasping our self-conscious relation with it as the form of our dependency on it.

In this article, I consider the idea of academic work as ‘emplaced’ activity. I contextualise myself as social theorist and sociologist by considering two parallel processes: my responses over time to Antipodean sociology, and my evolving relationship to landscape, geology and place. I offer exegeses of Beilharz's Imagining the Antipodes , Thinking the Antipodes , and the textbook Sociology: Place, Time and Division ; as well as the writings of novelist Tim Winton and landscape scholar George Seddon. My reading emphasises the importance of personal experience, landscape sensory experience, and place as relational, in such writings. My own complex and uneven relationship to Antipodean sociology is used to reflect on overcoming my own placeless-ness in modes of theorising; and why the landscapes I migrated to decades ago, and the local geology, proved decisive in my grasping the significance of place experiences, memories and materialities within scholarly thinking and writing.

This study analyses and compares three strands of critical inquiry into the autonarrative of modern Western civilization: Freud's theory of civilization; its reworkings by Marcuse and Brown; and Latour's assessment of the crisis of cosmology. According to Freud, civilization is based on drive repression and evolves through an increasing sense of guilt. Brown and Marcuse emphasize how this Freudian mechanism constitutes the psychic premise of continued functioning of domination. Latour, from an anthropological perspective, highlights modernity's epistemological rigidity − its inability to confront current crises due to a cosmology devoid of mediation between nature and culture. The current study argues that, despite following different approaches, Latour's conception of modern man perceiving himself as living in a desacralized apocalypse can be aligned with that of Brown and Marcuse, who trace the psychological conditions of domination in the historical metamorphosis of the sense of guilt.

In the early twentieth century, Karl Kautsky argued that explanations for world disorder stemmed from what bourgeois politics avoided - harmonizing class relations and making states more democratic. He characterized the capitalist bourgeois approach to politics and the world order as a form of exploitation through international cartels and monopolies. He theorized an ultra-imperialist world order where the great powers would work together to deepen their exploitation of the world's resources and working-class labour. In situating Kautsky in the context of the tumult of German politics, this article connects his ultra-imperialist theory with socialist republicanism, the avoidance of revolution, and aspirations for a Society of Nations. It argues that ultra-imperialism was a useful theory since it gave Kautsky a way to theorize how capitalism survives war and a strategy for the SPD to continue pursuing democracy and not revolution.