Advanced Capitalist Research Articles

Contesting the Prescriptibility of Emotion through Affective Encounters in Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012)

This paper explores how Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012) dramatises the subversive potentialities of affective encounters as an antidote to the isolating, profit-minded forms of posthumanisation prescribed by modern psychiatry. It argues that the play poignantly unveils how the convergence of the psychopharmaceutical industry with advanced capitalism and neoliberal ideology shape popular discourse around mental illnesses and the necessity of medically induced (self-)regulation of emotion. It also investigates how Prebble mingles crisis with hope in the piece by portraying the autonomy and unpredictability of affective bodily responses, which evade being translated into bio-data and destabilise biopsychiatry’s totalizing view of emotions as utterly controllable through the brain. My analysis utilises Rosi Braidotti’s theorisation of the posthuman subject as both susceptible to exploitation and control and as the site of resistance and ongoing transformation, as presented in her work The Posthuman (2013). It also employs Stefan Herbechter’s theories, as expressed in his book Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (2013), on how biotechnological developments, advanced capitalism and ideology converge, facilitating new forms of self-governmentality. Finally, it refers to Brian Massumi’s conceptualisation of affect, prevalent in his work “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) as an intense autonomic bodily response which resists processes of control and manipulation. Ultimately, I argue that The Effect highlights the transformative potential of affective encounters and interconnectedness, functioning as resistance to modern psychiatry’s isolating prescription of emotional self-governance through self-medication.

Political Economy of Skill Formation and Gender Bias in Skills and Employment in Hierarchical Market Economies: The Case of Thailand

Abstract Skills are, in large part, the product of deliberate investment by various actors, including employers and states, rather than something coming into being spontaneously through individual choices and endeavors alone. The divergent political economy of skill formation has been rigorously examined, focusing mainly on advanced capitalist economies. However, both theoretical and empirical research on the political economy of skill formation of developing economies is surprisingly scarce. Examining the skill formation system of an emerging economy, Thailand, the author finds that the main actors, power distribution, and their dynamics for skill formation and governance are distinct from the economies outlined before but can be explained through the framework of the hierarchical market economy (hme) model. Drawing on recent studies highlighting gendered perspectives on skill regimes, this paper further examines whether and how Thailand’s hme-type skill formation system affects gender bias in skills and employment. The analysis shows that the dominance of conglomerates and multinationals intensifies the prioritization of general skills. The author claims that Thailand’s focus on promoting general skills that are portable and less vulnerable to intermittent labor market participation contributes to less occupational segregation by gender.

The erosion of democracy in an age of wealth inequality: Unravelling the impact of subjective socioeconomic stratification

Since the 1980s, the growing wealth disparity in advanced capitalist societies has drawn attention from political economy scholars due to its profound effects on political systems. This research explores the relationship between wealth inequality and the stability of democratic institutions, focusing on how subjective class perceptions shape support for democratic governance. The findings indicate that as wealth inequality intensifies, it significantly reshapes class identities, influencing attitudes towards democracy. Both the subjective lower and upper classes exhibit diminished support for democratic systems, albeit for different reasons, which may pose risks to democratic stability. In contrast, the subjective middle class, a stronghold of democratic values, is shrinking in both proportion and influence as wealth inequality widens, potentially weakening democratic institutions further. This study underscores the connection between increasing wealth inequality and challenges to democratic values, highlighting the importance of policy measures to protect democratic integrity in the face of rising economic disparities.

‘I want to go to the brink’: Cycling, the fold and men's sporting stories

This article tells the stories of three cyclists: Rob, Lucas and Cayden. For each, racing offers catharsis and emotional expression between riders deeply familiar with one another, riding together every day across years in Sydney, Australia. At Glenwood Cycle Club, the stories athletes tell of how to be a ‘hard’ racing man allows for the simultaneous denial of what is a core functioning of such sporting relationships, namely unspoken intimations of love and care. Cycling affords these riders an understanding where each can avoid speaking to the emotional difficulties that necessitate their being on road, where they share stories that gesture to personal difficulty, but rarely in detail. To explain such sporting practice, I rely on the ‘fold' as a methodological and theoretical framework to re-conceptualise dominant myths in both sport but also ‘masculinities’ studies. Rather, than ask ‘what kind of masculinity’ a person is, I ask what does a person do? What are the life-narratives men tell, interwoven with sporting movement, to fantastically augment their lives in advanced capitalist conditions specific to Sydney, Australia?

Taking the Right Lessons from Lenin and the Russian Revolution

Eric Blanc's article, “Taking the Right Lessons from Lenin and the Russian Revolution,” critically examines the enduring influence of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution on socialist movements, highlighting the challenges of applying revolutionary strategies in parliamentary contexts. Blanc argues that while Leninist parties have played significant roles in advancing working-class interests, their revolutionary approach has been less effective in advanced capitalist democracies. He emphasizes that the Russian Revolution demonstrated the potential to overthrow capitalism but warns against overgeneralizing its strategies. Blanc critiques the myth of Bolshevik exceptionalism and the rigid organizational discipline often associated with Leninism, proposing instead a more flexible and inclusive approach to building socialist movements. By analyzing the experiences of socialist parties across the Russian Empire, particularly in Finland and Latvia, Blanc illustrates the effectiveness of uniting radical and moderate socialists within broader workers' parties. He argues that a strategy rooted in democratic socialism, adaptable to varying political contexts, offers a more viable path to socialist transformation than the insurrectionary models promoted by early Leninists. Blanc concludes that the key to advancing socialism lies in scaling up working-class and socialist organization through transformative reforms and democratic engagement, rather than adhering to prescriptive revolutionary strategies.

Paul B. Preciado’s queer hospital: healthcare architectures for pleasure, transformation and subversion

ABSTRACT This article brings the contemporary philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s work on queer sexuality and embodiment into close contact with his work on architecture, asking how Preciado’s work can help us to reconceptualize the design of clinical spaces and environments to care more effectively for queer and non-normative bodies. In Testo Junkie (2013), Preciado explores how the body is constructed in advanced capitalism as a work of both social construction and bio-technological engineering. The focus of Pornotopia (2014), meanwhile, is the specific role played by architecture in the construction of modernity’s bodies, genders and sexualities. Across both works, Preciado dialogs closely with Michel Foucault, showing how normative genders and sexualities are actively produced and policed through the complex interplays between social, biomedical, technological and architectural forces and structures. Preciado, however, goes one step further, exploring how we might “hack” these same structures and use biomedical technologies and architectural concepts to emancipate the bodies and desire from normative constraints, thus liberating the body’s true capacities for pleasure and transformation. Reading Preciado alongside interdisciplinary scholarship on queer healthcare design, this article questions investigates how “hacking” clinical architecture through queer interventions can transform the sensory landscapes of healthcare.

Precarious Youthspaces of Work and Diverse Economies in the EU South: A Conceptualization Attempt

Youth disengagement is widespread in the less developed regions of advanced capitalism, and precarity is constantly (re)produced in the youth labour markets there. In this context, ‘diverse economies’ such as the social economy (SE) and the digital platform-induced sharing economy (DPSE) have emerged as policy solutions to pressing social, economic and environmental challenges, particularly in the south of the EU. However, most relevant studies examine labour in these new economies without considering the socio-spatial and political factors at play. This article proposes a spatially sensitive conceptualization of the relationship between youth disengagement and employment in the SE and DPSE. Drawing on key concepts from critical geography and geographical political economy, as well as recent research on the spatiality of youth, the article suggests that contemporary ‘precarious youthspaces of work’ are created by—and embedded in—‘dismantled techno-spatial fixes’ and discusses the reciprocal relationship between such youthspaces and diverse economies.

The politics of the minimum wage: Explaining introduction and levels

AbstractThere is much economics research on the effects of minimum wages, but little research on their politics. Yet, ever more advanced capitalist democracies have introduced minimum wages, and the setting of minimum wage levels has become increasingly politicized. This article is the first comprehensive study of the politics of the minimum wage: We analyse the determinants of adopting minimum wages as well as what explains variation in their levels over time, based on a dataset of 33 OECD countries from 1960 to 2017. We find that the decline in collective bargaining is the main driving force behind the introduction of ever more minimum wages. At the same time, left‐wing parties in government are most likely to adopt a minimum wage when bargaining coverage is low. Left governments are also associated with higher minimum wages, especially when the government has full control over level‐setting.

Challenging dominant education paradigms: posthuman feminist inspirations towards alternate pathways for decolonising the curriculum

AbstractSouth Africa’s curriculum, and education system at large, remains humanistic and dominated by Western Eurocentric ways of thinking, doing and being. The ongoing protest action in higher education has made explicit the inequalities that continue to keep epistemic violence, Eurocentrism, and human exceptionalism intact. Central to this protest action has been the need for curriculum inquiry to reinvent itself and go against the pedagogical grain by advocating for a decolonised curriculum. However, the decolonial turn has largely been a structural exercise of abstract and rhetoric intensity fueled by a language of critique that is entrapped in discursive tendencies that inhibit the type of radicalism needed for it to invigorate alternatives that can challenge dominant education paradigms. This article is inspired by posthuman feminist theory that troubles the logic of advanced capitalism, epistemic injustice and dominant education paradigms. Invoked by new materialism, intra-actions of our becoming within and as part of the world are the deep entanglements of ethics, knowing and being that can spur scholarly activism. Four curriculum studies scholar activists shared their narratives of how they are enacting their curriculum to challenge dominant education paradigms. Their lived experiences as material, relational, embodied and embedded incite posthuman tendencies of what it means to teach to transgress. Experimenting with transversal transgressions this article attempts at a non-anthropocentric, feminist inspired perspective for curriculum inquiry to find alternative pathways for decolonising the curriculum so that it can rise to the challenges of our time.

Health and equity impacts of global consultancy firms

BackgroundConcern is growing over the power, influence, and threats to health and equity from the operations of large global consultancy firms. Collectively, these firms support a neoliberal policy environment promoting business interests ahead of public health. Global consultancy firms act as commercial determinants of health, an evolving area of research over recent years. However, this research mainly focuses on specific corporations or industry sectors, especially those which produce harmful products, including ultra-processed food, alcohol, and fossil fuels. It is therefore important to expand the focus to include large global consultancy firms and place a public health and equity lens over their operations.Main bodyGlobal consultancy firms have wide-ranging conflicts of interest. These arise from the ‘revolving door’ employment strategies between their own staff and those from government and regulatory bodies. These firms also advise governments on taxation and other matters while concurrently advising corporate clients on ways to minimise taxation. They advise fossil fuel corporations while also advising governments on climate and health policies. These firms undermine the capabilities of the public sector through the outsourcing of traditional public sector roles to these private interests. Consultancy firms foster private interests through their engagement with the higher education sector, and thereby weaken the tradition of transparent management of university affairs by accountable university councils. While private consultancies cannot be blamed for all the negative consequences for health and equity caused by the problems associated with globalisation and advanced capitalism, they have played a role in amplifying them.ConclusionAddressing the negative impacts of global consultancy firms will require strengthening the public sector, enforcing greater transparency, accountability, and minimising conflicts of interest. It will also demand critical thought, counter discourses, and activism to reframe the narratives supporting neo-liberal ideas of governance that are promoted in both government and business arenas.

Sports Mega-Events as Foreign Policy: Sport Diplomacy, “Soft Power,” and “Sportswashing”

Sports mega-events (SMEs), such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup, have become a key part of state strategies to achieve a multitude of foreign policy goals. The literature attempting to explain this—often under the broad umbrella term of “sport diplomacy”—has recently been bolstered by the arrival of two very popular concepts in this area of research, “soft power” and “sportswashing,” leading to confusion and a general lack of consensus around the use of sport for non-sporting aims. This article makes two key contributions to the literature: first, it serves to clarify the conceptual relationship between sport diplomacy, soft power, and sportswashing. It does so by arguing that the latter two concepts are strategies at different stages of a similar process, that is, using sport to achieve specific foreign policy goals by states, state actors, and non-state actors. Our second contribution lies in the application of this conceptualization to two relevant, empirical cases of an advanced capitalist country (the United Kingdom) and an autocratic country (Qatar), both of which have hosted an SME. The results show that while a variety of states, state actors, politicians, and non-state actors use the same means (SMEs) to achieve different foreign policy goals, their geopolitics, different histories, regime types, economic systems, and levels of development influence their rationale for doing so and the strategies they choose.

Dissipative Structure Analysis and Ecological Disorganization: A Critique Drawn from Ecological Marxist and Treadmill-of-Production Approaches

Among environmental sociologists, ecological Marxists argue that there is an association between capitalism and ecological destruction/disorganization. This argument suggests that capitalism and nature are in contradiction with one another, so that the expansion of capitalism necessarily results in the destruction of nature. Green criminologists expand on this point and argue that ecological disorganization generates legal and illegal green crimes and injustice. This capitalism–nature association suggests that solving the current ecological crisis would require replacing capitalism. In contrast, the dissipative structure analysis (DSA) argues that capitalist nations pass through phases of development and that as advanced capitalist nations age, the level of ecological destruction they cause becomes attenuated. If true, this outcome suggests that capitalism might solve the problem of ecological destruction by aging. This article reviews these two theoretical arguments, exposes the limitation of the dissipative structure argument, and suggests that future research is required to completely address dissipative structure assumptions. A major limitation of the dissipative structure analysis is its failure to account for the effect of developing capitalist nations on the expansion of ecological disorganization. Trend charts are employed to illustrate the limitations of the DSA hypothesis concerning reduced ecological disorganization.

Tipping Point for Advanced Capitalism: Class, Class Consciousness and Activism in the "Knowledge Economy"

Tipping Point for Advanced Capitalism: Class, Class Consciousness and Activism in the "Knowledge Economy"

The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies

The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies

Unleashing a Monster? Causes and Consequences of the Knowledge Economy in Advanced Capitalist Democracies

Unleashing a Monster? Causes and Consequences of the Knowledge Economy in Advanced Capitalist Democracies

“The clock is ticking”: (dis)orientations to ageing and end-of-life care in advanced capitalism and care directives

This article engages Italian migrant experiences and enactments of futurity to problematize neoliberal anticipatory approaches to ageing and care. Stepping beyond the focus on atomized and agentic individuals and a singular imagined future defined by notions of advancement and progress, sistemazione (home, future, and security) offers ways of building alternative and relational futures within times and spaces of shared precarity. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Italian migrant families living in Adelaide, and a critical analysis of objects as “orienting devices,” to consider how a family heirloom, a 26-face handmade Italian clock made from the physical remnants of World War II, offers new ways of imagining care within spaces of ruin.

Eco-imperial Tensions: Decarbonization Strategies in Times of Geopolitical Upheaval

The neoliberal world order has given way to a geopolitical disorder, shaped by the climate crisis and increasing rivalries between dominant powers. This poses a challenge to the social sciences. Neither theories searching for the problem-solving potentials of ‘global governance’ nor critical notions of imperialism seem to be equipped to fully grasp the rapidly changing circumstances. Instead, we suggest to understand the recent upheavals as eco-imperial tensions. They result from the contradictions of what we have called the imperial mode of living, that is, resource- and emissions-intensive patterns of production and consumption, which produce enormous socioecological costs and externalize them in space and time. With the rise of China and other countries of the Global South, the imperial mode of living is generalized globally and threatened in its precondition, namely the unlimited access to nature and labor power on a world scale. This is intensified by the competition for the raw materials needed for decarbonizing the advanced capitalist economies.

Singapore’s Temasek Model and State Asset Management in China

Since the late 1970s, Singapore has been an important policy reference for China. Some Chinese policymakers viewed Temasek, its government holding company, as a model for state asset management. They studied Singapore’s approach, but ultimately chose a different institutional design when establishing the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) in 2003. China’s engagement with Temasek subsequently concentrated on corporate governance, specifically boards of directors in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Yet despite the Temasek model’s appeal, its influence in China was limited by the far greater size and indebtedness of the state sector; the weaker role of firm performance in asset and capital allocation; SOEs’ numerous social and welfare functions; lack of willingness to augment firm autonomy; and divergent interpretations of the Temasek model and its reference value. “Policy collage” by Chinese policymakers explains the existence of formal similarities between China and advanced capitalist economies without fundamental convergence in function.

Explaining Rural Conservatism: Political Consequences of Technological Change in the Great Plains

Rural areas are conservative electoral strongholds in the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. But this was not always the case. What explains the rise of rural conservatism? This paper argues that technological change transformed not only agriculture but rural political preferences during the twentieth century. It studies a natural experiment: the post-World War II introduction of new irrigation technologies, which enabled farmers to irrigate otherwise arid land in the Great Plains using groundwater. Difference-in-differences analyses exploiting the shock’s differential impact on counties overlying the Ogallala Aquifer—a pattern validated with remote-sensing data—show that technological change contributed significantly to the region’s long-term conservative electoral transformation. Additional analyses, including comparison of individual policy preferences inside/outside the Ogallala Aquifer boundary, suggest that this was due to the rise of capital-intensive agriculture and the growing power of agribusiness. The findings demonstrate how new technologies made new politics in rural America.

The middle-class base of European integration? New class divides and attitudes towards market integration in ten EU countries

ABSTRACT Highly educated ‘new’ middle classes have been identified as a fundamental constituency that, by supporting technological innovation and liberalisation, bolsters the stability of advanced capitalism. By contrast, less educated production workers are usually described as opponents of such policies. This article investigates the extent to which these class divides translate into different positions on support for EU integration, a key process in the liberalisation of European political economy. In addition to class-based positions, we take into consideration how the subjective perceptions of situations such as unemployment, income loss and job insecurity affect support for EU integration. By relying on an original 2019 survey conducted in ten member states, the analysis confirms that high-skilled middle classes overwhelmingly support European market integration, while ‘old’ middle classes appear more concerned about the welfare losses that integration could imply. Low-skilled service workers emerge as a critical cross-pressured group, taking a mid position between ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle classes.