Advanced Capitalist Societies Research Articles

Left Partisanship, Corporatism, and the Reorientation of the Knowledge Economy in Advanced Capitalist Societies

Abstract While the progress of the knowledge economy is inexorable, this paper argues that partisan politics and labor market institutions can affect the direction in which the knowledge economy progresses. In particular, a combination of corporatist industrial relations systems and left partisanship tends to foster greater wage restraint, and such a wage outcome tends to encourage the greater adoption of communications technology than information-processing technology in the economy. This reorientation of the knowledge economy toward communications technology, in turn, has egalitarian distributive implications. In particular, the greater adoption of communications technology reduces wage inequality across the board in lower 90–10, 50–10, as well as 90–50 wage ratios. These arguments are tested using data across 15–21 OECD countries (1970–2015).

Educação política, violência, resistência: a formação da consciência e o enfrentamento ao autoritarismo e à agressividade

ABSTRACT Essay with reflections on social violence and its manifestations at school. It is a relationship that can never be neglected, because education also contains the social tendencies that reproduce violence, aggressiveness, and barbarism. Based on texts by authors from the Frankfurt School, the theme of violence is discussed, highlighting its links with the social and economic system, which is reproduced exactly by promoting the destruction of people, cultures, and environment. Next, considerations are presented that show that such destructiveness affects the formation of subjectivities and the willingness of individuals to conform or resist this tendency. Finally, it discusses the historical possibility of concretizing the political dimension of education as a way of opposing and confronting the aggressiveness and violence inherent to advanced capitalist societies.

Is non-medical use normal? Normalisation, medicalisation and pharmaceutical consumption.

The theory of the normalisation of youth drug use in advanced capitalist societies has had an enduring legacy in contemporary drug scholarship. While the literature on the normalisation of 'illicit' drugs is well developed, less has been written about application of the theory to emerging discourse of pharmaceutical 'abuse', and how this might necessitate different thinking around what can be considered normal consumption. Pharmaceuticals are not directly associated with criminality, and their use does not traditionally attract stigma. In fact, social science scholarship has illustrated how many substances deemed illicit are normalised in the context of an ever-growing set of medical treatments. This paper explores the assumptions about legality, sociality and pleasure which sit behind the drug normalisation thesis, by reflecting on the relevance of drug normalisation in relation to pharmaceuticals, as well as examining scholarship on the medicalisation of society and qualitative research on non-medical use to illustrate the parallel processes of normalisation that apply to pharmaceuticals. The paper argues that questions of normalisation in relation to pharmaceutical use require a deeper engagement with the normative expectations we attach to pleasure, consumption and medicine, and the way this is structured by proximity to medical authority, whiteness and middle-classness.

Earnings, Cohort Effects, and Inter‐Generational Inequality: Evidence From the Luxembourg Income Study

AbstractResearch suggests that inequalities between generations are most pronounced in the conservative European welfare states. However, it is likely that across all advanced capitalist societies superior earnings opportunities and steady employment are pursued at a later age due to secular labor market trends. In this paper, I examine the variation in generational inequalities across different regimes using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). The repeated cross‐sectional data allow me to trace the generational changes in income for eight countries, using both Age Period Cohort (APC) and synthetic cohort models. My results suggest that for most countries, cohorts born after 1980 have experienced lower entry‐level earning opportunities, relative to cohorts born between 1960 and 1980. However, synthetic cohort models suggest that while recent generations have suffered from successively worse entry positions, they appear to be “catching up,” which suggests that permanent “scarring effects” to lifetime earnings may not be inevitable.

Animals squawking their mysteries

Abstract Scholarship on literature’s engagement with the climate crisis has frequently highlighted the limitations of the realist novel vis-à-vis the scale and wide-ranging ramifications of climate change. This article reads Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) as a powerful example of how the cross-fertilization of narrative and poetic forms can expand the imaginative reach of the novel. Through the plot device of a pandemic that enables human-nonhuman communication, McKay’s novel explores the fragility of nonhuman life in a world shaped by the violence of advanced capitalist societies. The poetic nature of the animals’ utterances complicates interpretation and draws attention to the complexities of human-nonhuman entanglement, echoing – and performing through literary form – the ethical position formulated by Deborah Bird Rose under the rubric of “ecological existentialism.”

The quiet side of debt: public debt management in advanced economies

Abstract Whilst both the level and the make-up of public debt are high salience issues, the management of public debt seldom commands public attention. This study examines the quiet politics of public debt management in advanced capitalist societies, comparing debt management reforms and the everyday practice of debt management in Germany and the UK. We present evidence of two factors contributing to the political quietude around public debt management: a persistent absence of partisan contestation and conflict; and the dominance of ‘market discipline’ as an interpretative frame, which prevents changes in interest rates and debt servicing costs to be seen as the product of faulty debt management. We also find that this quietude creates a space for the coordination and cooperation between contemporary capitalist states and large dealer banks, whose capacities effectively to act within their respective domains depend on each other.

How have secularisation and educational expansion affected support for the mainstream right in Western Europe?

While the electoral decline of Social democracy has received considerable attention in the literature, much less is known about how the structural changes experienced by advanced capitalist societies in the past decades have affected support for the mainstream right. In order to fill this gap, this article examines the relationship between secularisation, educational expansion and support for Conservative and Christian democratic parties in 18 West European democracies since the 1960s. The analysis reveals that secularisation is negatively associated with support for the mainstream right, but the effect is only significant for Christian democratic parties. Moreover, the findings support the expectation that social conservatism tends to damage the electoral prospects of mainstream right parties in highly educated societies. This suggests that, although engaging in cultural wars might sometimes seem like a winning strategy in the short term, it is unlikely to produce long-term positive electoral returns for the centre-right in post-industrial contexts.

We Refuse to Cope! The Vitruvian Nurse, the Code of Conduct, and Nurses’ Lived Knowledge

We, as nurses, refuse to cope. In this editorial style piece we discuss the ongoing crisis in nursing and the ways in which this situation is being produced. We discuss the metaphors with which nursing is produced in the UK and US and how these metaphors produce an idealized version of nurses and nursing that is impossible. We situate this metaphor in critical posthuman theory by drawing comparisons to Braidotti’s (2013) understanding of the idealised human as an axiom of social production under advanced capitalist societies. We make comparisons of this idealized person with the idealized nurses that are captured in nursing codes of conduct and practice. We then suggest ways in which we can resist and diffract metaphors in nursing to produce affirmative futures.

Legitimate Wealth? How Wealthy Business Owners are Portrayed in the Press

Germany has one of the highest levels of wealth concentration of any Western capitalist country. Research on the legitimization of economic inequality highlights that wealth elites tend to stress meritocratic arguments for legitimizing elite positions and wealth accumulation. However, whether this is also the case for wealthy business owners and how the media tends to portray those remains largely unknown. Drawing on a unique sample of 899 press articles from eight different media outlets between 2014 and 2018, we find a rather generous media debate. Based on descriptive evidence and a latent class analysis, we identify six latent frames illustrating how wealthy business owners are portrayed in the press. We show that the sources of wealth (inheritance, investment, entrepreneurship) are often used to highlight these owners’ deep economic relevance to the German economy, while the use of wealth is predominantly framed as a mean for profit-seeking. For wealthy business owners, moral evaluation of personal conduct is less present in the media and, when it is present, is rarely negative. Our study is the first analysis of press coverage of the wealthiest German business owners indicating a legitimizing media debate of high wealth concentration in an advanced capitalist society.

The Psychological Processes and Consequences of Playing the Role of Producer versus Consumer

In advanced capitalist societies, it is necessary for people to play the role of producer and consumer. That is, whether they like doing it or not, many people spend much time and energy each day directly or indirectly producing commodities (e.g., goods, services) for sale as producers (workers), and purchasing and using up commodities produced by others (e.g., workers, companies) as consumers. We propose that these two economic roles, the backbone of the capitalist economy, embody distinct logics and orientations, and thus prescribe different mindsets and behaviors for the participating agent. Drawing on research from various fields, including management, marketing, sociology, and psychology, we suggest that production is extrinsic-oriented (focused on pleasing others) and embraces “ethic of labor” (e.g., perseverance, duties), whereas consumption is intrinsic-oriented (focused on pleasing self) and embraces “aesthetic of play” (e.g., self-indulgence, comfort) (Baudrillard, 1975; Humphreys & Grayson, 2008). We then consider how these different logics and orientations might relate to and shape people’s attitudes and behaviors in domains of social power, motivation, well-being, social identity, and self-construal. Finally, we explore the implications of this framework for the study of justice. By exploring the psychological processes and consequences of people playing the role of producer versus consumer, the present paper seeks to extend the existing work that has paid relatively little attention to the psychological aspects of the two economic roles. More generally, by exploring this relatively understudied topic, the present paper aims to serve as a guidepost for future research.

Surrealist Nuance and Postcolonial Subjectivity

In its origins, surrealism transpired as a radical subversive culture within advanced capitalist societies in Europe during the first few decades of the twentieth century. In colonial and postcolonial societies, however, surrealism variously assumed a quintessence of a protracted struggle between, on the one hand, the old and neocolonial cultural hegemony and, on the other hand, the subversive resistance by the neocolonized, with all the paradoxical elements that are part and parcel of that struggle. One of the few manifestations of a surrealism-inspired cinematic work in the Arab world during the last century is Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Again and Forever (1990). This critically acclaimed film is a rich example of Arab cinema that celebrates non-normative personal identity while simultaneously rethinking traditional notions of nation under colonial rule. This third installment of Chahine’s autobiographical film quartet, which he intermittently drew over the course of his thirty-year career, indulges a complex exposé of Chahine the man, the artist, and the political activist. It also draws on mostly imagined, and partly real, episodes in the filmmaker’s life. As such, and rather than using a typically grand anticolonial metanarrative, the film favors the depiction of multiple surrealist proliferations of difference, juxtapositions, dislocation, and distortions seen not as embodiments of a single truth but rather as energized political and aesthetic forms of a collective project for revamping Egyptian and Arab identity and reality.

Hope for Our Technological Inheritance? From Substantive Critiques of Technology to Marcuse’s Post-Technological Rationality

This paper explores the promise that Herbert Marcuse found in late modernity’s technological inheritance—his “other side” to his critique of technological rationality. With the goal of beginning to recover Marcuse’s desire for technological reform and a more hopeful project for a contemporary critical philosophy of technology, the paper first situates and contrasts Marcuse’s double-sided critique of technological rationality with the mostly negative critiques of modern technology exemplified by Heidegger, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Rather than offer concrete possibilities for socio-technical transformation, Heidegger, Adorno, and Horkheimer’s pessimistic views of technology tend to lead towards resignation in our late-modern fate. The paper then meditates on Marcuse’s “ambivalence theory of technology”—the notion that technologies are neither neutral nor inherently deterministic but, rather, politically and socially inscribed and entangled within webs of social struggles where their designed intentions are worked out and often reappropriated in actual use by users. The paper then looks at how Marcuse’s ambivalence theory can help in understanding the possibilities for re-valuing the technological base of advanced capitalist society within re-materialized values of love, joy, refusal, and sensuousness. Illustrating the continued relevance of Marcuse’s analysis for today’s radical left, the final section of the paper presents six key historical-conjunctural moments in Marcuse’s writings on technology that could be seen as prefiguring contemporary examples of technological reform and liberation from exploitative and alienating modes of life. Some of the newest social movements against neoliberal global capital, this final section argues, touch on elements of Marcusean-like re-rationalized and re-sensualized technological and organizational transformations.

Urban Precarity: The Destructiveness of Neoliberalism and Possibilities for Transformation

AbstractAs neoliberalism has torn apart the policies of social and collective stability integral to the visions of welfare states post‐World War II, precarity has become central to the study of advanced capitalist societies. This contribution invokes literary explorations of urbanity to argue that the anthropological analysis of the “urban” is pivotal to the understanding of how contemporary precarity is made and experienced. It draws on my fieldwork with the French Gilets Jaunes movement. The study of the urban has a long history both outside Europe and the United States as well as within. By contrast, precarity has emerged as a key word in the historic centers of capital where states have abandoned aspirations for expanding wellbeing. The papers presented here explore the relevance of this concept to post‐colonial countries where life, as many have pointed out, has always been precarious.

The Rise and Fall of Marxist Perspectives: Eugene Genovese and the Fight for Hegemony in Radical American Historiography

In the spring of 1978, radical historians launched the academic journal Marxist Perspectives. Edited by the celebrated Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, the journal comprised one of the strongest collectives of radical historians that American academia has ever seen. However, Marxist Perspectives collapsed after only two years in print. This article charts the journal's origins and its premature demise as a lens to explore Genovese's intellectual career and examine how competing radical factions attempted to define the field. In analyzing how both personal academic rivalries and political divisions stunted and formed intellectual production, the article demonstrates that radical historiography was shaped by internal critiques over how to build a new American left within an advanced capitalist society.

The ghosts of progress: Contradictory materialities of the capitalist Golden Age

This theoretical contribution will examine the process of displacement of the constitutive contradictions of advanced capitalist societies from interior to exterior during the postwar era known as the ‘capitalist Golden Age’ (1945 to 1980). I ask the following question: what if this displacement is both an inherent and necessary process? In that case, the apparent stability or expansion gained in the core during this era was not only at the expense of externalized instability and destruction ‘elsewhere’; rather, this displacement was a precondition for growth in the centre. This has normative, political and methodological implications for current projects of socio-ecological transformation based on a proverbial Green New Deal. By examining theories of unequal ecological exchange and biophysically expanded versions of the labour process as developed by ecological anthropologists such as Hornborg or ecological economists such as Georgescu-Roegen, I will explore the possibility of understanding the material trajectory of advanced capitalism as a zero-sum game. This leads to a view of capitalist development in the 20th century where the accumulation process is no longer seen as progressive. To substantiate this argument, I will re-examine the energy flow patterns that sustained the growth of American capitalism during the Fordist period of accumulation, or so-called Golden Age of American capitalism. This revision of the American experience of growth from 1945 to 1980 can be considered a contribution to the wider study of the development of the dependence of capitalism on fossil fuels, or ‘fossil capital’.

We Cannot Say What the Human Is: The Problem of Anthropology in Adorno’s Philosophy of Art

Abstract This article investigates a problem in Theodor W. Adorno’s thought: how can Adorno critique advanced capitalist societies for their dehumanizing tendencies while also refusing the possibility of defining the human? Motivating this inquiry is a renewed investigation of philosophical anthropology by thinkers like Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas, who explore positive theories of human limits and needs as the basis of social critique. As Adorno consistently refused to define the human on philosophical and political grounds, this article asks whether his work offers an unexamined alternative to philosophical anthropology’s revival. A reconstruction of Adorno’s position shows how Adorno displaces anthropological problems into his philosophy of art, where the principle of mimesis offers a potentially nonanthropological model of human potential. Yet it also reveals how Adorno’s refusal to directly interrogate philosophical anthropology leads him to implicitly prescribe a certain figure of the human, undermining the value of his resistance to anthropological definitions.

Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right? Education, class, multiparty competition, and redistribution in Western Europe.

In this article, we revisit the main claims of Part Four of Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology and especially the changing support coalitions for parties of the left. Piketty's core argument in this part of the book is that the left now represents the highly educated and that, as a result, the redistributive preferences of the working class do not find representation in today's party systems. We address these claims building on existing political science research that has investigated the transformation of politics in advanced capitalist societies. We argue, first, that the educational divide cannot be adequately analyzed by looking at a left and a right bloc, but crucially needs to pay attention to the rise of green/left-libertarian and radical right parties. Second, we contend that the new middle classes that support parties of the left are largely in favor of economic redistribution. Analyzing data from the European Social Survey in 11 West European countries from 2002 to 2018, we show that the effect of education on voting left or right is indeed largely driven by green/left-libertarian and radical right parties, while there is little empirical evidence that social democratic parties represent the educational elite. We also find that redistributive preferences remain at the heart of voting behavior and that, especially for educated voters, these preferences determine whether someone votes for a party of the left rather than the right.

YUMUŞAK GÜÇ YANILGISI

Yumuşak güç kavramı sert güce alternatif olarak algılanır hale gelmiştir. Ancak yumuşak güç, sert gücün alternatifi olacak şekilde yumuşak bir güç olmayıp çoğu durumda ileri bir sanayi ülkesinin sert gücünün uzantısı olmaktadır. Uluslararası politikada güç bölünemez bir kavramdır. Yumuşak güçlerin tümünün aynı zamanda “sert güç” olması ve “sert güç” olmayan bir “yumuşak güç”ün bulunmaması günümüzdeki uluslararası sistemin gerçeklerini açık bir şekilde sergilemeye yeterli olmaktadır. Güç kavramında köklü bir değişim, ancak uluslararası sistemin de köklü bir değişimden geçmesi halinde mümkün olabilir. Kaldı ki, mevcut durumda yumuşak güç, gerçek anlamıyla güç kavramının gereklerini karşılayamamaktadır.

The Constitution of Non-Monetary Surplus Values

The article rebuts the primacy of economic profit in advanced capitalist societies, and submits that the imperative to extract surplus value governs also the law and other social domains and is not merely a product of economic forces. Not only the economy but also the law and other function systems force each of their operations to generate a specific surplus value – but now explicitly non-monetary – beyond its immediate production of meaning. The object of the surplus orientation is the system’s own communication medium – power, truth/reputation, money, and juridical authority. The success of surplus pressures is responsible for the immensely productive forces unleashed in capitalism. However, they demonstrate an excessive ambivalence: immense productivity and its destructive dark side. Similar to the monetary profit pressure in the economy, (auto- and hetero-) destructive tendencies of non-monetary surplus pressures have multiplied in the law and in other areas of life. Political-legal counterstrategies combating the negative side of diverse societal surplus productions could be inspired from Karl Polanyi’s famous concept of false commodities and their replacement by non-market institutions.

Breaking the Treadmill? Climate Change Policy Networks and the Prospects for Low Carbon Futures in Australia and Finland

The Treadmill of Production Theory (TPT) argues that in advanced capitalist societies, business organizations, trade unions, and state actors form a constellation that prioritizes economic growth over environmental concerns. We combine this perspective with the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and use methods of social network analysis, survey data on key organizations in Finland and Australia, and in-depth interviews to map the policy network structures that resist low carbon transitions, and identify potential for change in these structures. We find that a coalition of economic, labor, and governmental organizations resists a low carbon transition in both countries. However, we also find several possible avenues of incremental change through changes in the network structures and the beliefs held by actors in the networks. Theoretically, this suggests that the TPT is correct in its diagnosis of the current situation, but the ACF may be a more fruitful perspective for identifying potential for change.