Advanced Capitalist Research Articles

Toward a critical posthuman geography

Geographical analyses of posthuman thought have called for the need to develop a critical form of posthumanism that neither rehashes the pitfalls of humanism, nor promulgates a universalized and ungrounded subject position. This article demonstrates how recent advances in critical posthumanism work to address the limitations of posthuman thought by offering a unified philosophical framework that situates knowledge claims and reimagines human subjectivity and human-nonhuman relations. Critical posthumanism not only synthesizes several of the political, methodological, and philosophical strands of posthuman thought that geographers and philosophers have drawn out, but it also foregrounds an affirmative ethico-political ethos toward a historical moment characterized by socioecological injustices, intersectional inequalities, and advanced capitalist economic systems. By separating itself from transhumanist and epochal forms of posthumanism, critical posthumanism offers cultural geographers concentrating on human-nature relations a more philosophically rigorous, socially accountable, and critical way of approaching the stakes involved in posthumanist discussions.

A future research agenda for transformational urban policy studies

There is a gap between the policy problems faced by twenty-first century cities and their proposed solutions, which are often small-scale, siloed and unsustainable. Cities face growing poverty, a rise in precarious work, unaffordable housing, decaying infrastructure, climate change, social polarisation and, most recently, a deadly infectious disease. The urban crisis is rooted in the failures of neoliberal policy characteristic of advanced capitalism, intersected with other systems of oppression. Turning the clock back to liberal urban policymaking will be insufficient. We propose a policy agenda that studies transformative urban movements, including local activism and movement building, policy agenda-setting and design, and policy implementation and evaluation. While these are the expertise of scholars of urban politics and policy studies, transformative urban movements have not been on their radar. In this article, we explore why and examine how urban politics and policy studies can ground and support transformative change.

Decent gig work in Sub Sahara Africa?

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) economies are entrenched in traditional economic and employment structures driven by the informal sector. There is a small and regulated formal sector, built upon public sector employment. Unlike the discussion of gig work in advanced capitalist economies, the development of gig work in SSA is within an environment where employment standards and labour regulations are largely absent. The concern in developed countries is that gig work erodes the norm of regulated employment; in developing economies gig work is part of the norm of informal and unregulated employment. Gig work in SSA offers the potential for formalisation of production and work, new forms of agency, and supporting decent work. However, the challenge is how to realise this potential. The role of platforms in developing and transmitting decent work protocols into gig contracts is discussed as a potential means for supporting decent work in SSA.

Coming out of Covid

The pandemic is not over. It is entering its third year with a new variant, Omicron, which has a high infection rate and uncertain damage to health. People are being forced to live (or die) with Covid. The pandemic has exposed the huge inequalities of wealth, income and health between countries globally. The ‘sugar rush’ recovery from the pandemic has driven up inflation rates everywhere, and there seems to be no evidence to justify the claim that the advanced capitalist world is about to experience a roaring 2020s as the US briefly did in the 1920s after the Spanish flu pandemic. Maybe the political and economic conditions for a new lease of life for capitalism could happen in the next decade, but only as a result of further slumps that drive up profitability significantly. More likely, the capitalist mode of production is getting closer to its use-by date in historical terms.

Mister Chips goes to Brussels: On the Pros and Cons of a Semiconductor Policy in theEU

AbstractIs making semiconductors in Europe a good idea? With the introduction of the European Chips Act in early 2022, this is no longer an academic question. In this article we evaluate these plans in light of a wider—but remarkably one‐sided—debate on industrial policy in advanced capitalist economies. Instead of focusing on policymakers, as most students of industrial policy have done, we draw attention to two first‐order conditions that determine the chances of policy success: the existence of (proto‐)competitive incumbents, and the alignment of the policy objectives with the prevailing institutional framework. We rely on that framework to evaluate the successes and failures in European aerospace, German biotech, and French computers, before using these insights to evaluate the European Chips Act. Investing in manufacturing of mature chips is, in that light, not a good idea. We suggest, instead, that the EU should concentrate on market segments that leverage its high‐skill workplaces and world‐class research system, and in which Europe has either already developed a comparative advantage or will not find itself at an initial disadvantage.

What does the state do in China’s state-led infrastructure financialisation?

Abstract China’s state-led financialisation of infrastructure is an alternative narrative to prevailing accounts of neoliberal financialisation in the advanced capitalist core, where the expansion of private market-based finance-led growth is theorised to transform traditional forms of public infrastructure development and production-based growth. Drawing on the case of Chinese state capital investment in Europe, we demonstrate empirically how the imperative to financialise infrastructure development is emergent from and contingent upon a productivist mode of capitalist development. We articulate two key transformations in which Chinese state capital is being used to leverage financial best practice and its network properties in service of the real economy.

German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism by Hester Baer

Reviewed by: German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism by Hester Baer Leila Mukhida German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism. By Hester Baer. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth €117.00. ISBN 978-9463727334. The iconic, red-haired protagonist of one of Germany's biggest international box-office successes of all time, Tom Tykwer's Lola rennt (1998), is an exemplary neoliberal subject according to Hester Baer. Not only is Lola flexible, entrepreneurial, and able to effectively self-optimize, carrying over skills she learns in one of her video-gamelike frenzied excursions through Berlin from one life to the next, she is also literally driven by her quest for money. Thus, the film, Baer argues in her new book German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism, embodies German state-funded cinema under neoliberalism on an intra- and extradiegetic level, whereby profit is the key motive of both the film industry as well as human activity. In Tykwer's film, Lola's efforts are futile as it is her boyfriend Manni who ultimately triumphs by delivering the money he owes to its recipient; Baer wryly observes that "Manni—a homophone for money and a metonym for man—prevails" (107). While Lola is indeed the ideal self-optimizing citizen, then, her behavior does not result in fulfillment, which Baer considers to reveal a specifically gendered kind of cruel optimism (via Berlant). I highlight this argument because it illustrates a key tenet of the book's thesis as well as its methodological approach: the films Baer considers explore how cinema can archive the neoliberal turn, exposing its cultural logic on the level of narrative, aesthetics, and production; at the same time, Baer employs a feminist lens in order to expose the representational politics at stake. A number of scholars have explored what constitutes political filmmaking in relation to recent German and European cinema. However, Hester Baer is unique in her insistence on analyzing films primarily through the lens of their conditions of production. Baer convincingly argues that the financialization of the state under neoliberalism has had wide-ranging effects which do not simply permeate the realm of cinema but rather which fundamentally reconfigure the relationship between politics and aesthetics. She turns to Christian Petzold to articulate what is at stake: "economic conditions are trying to annihilate films" (22). Petzold's polemic statement [End Page 390] underpins Baer's claim that Germany offers a particularly interesting case study for assessing filmmaking since the neoliberal turn, which she claims began around 1980. Crucially, a key conceit of the book is that while the effects of neoliberalism on the film industry can be observed all over the world, Germany has a "cinema of neoliberalism par excellence" on account of its history of division and unification (20). In postwar West Germany, neoliberalism offered an escape route out of postwar economic depression, with the Wirtschaftswunder representing a cornerstone in the neoliberal project. This was bolstered further by Helmut Kohl's widespread changes to economic policy that promoted, among other things, Leistung, mobility, and competitiveness. Baer also emphasizes the role of neoliberalism in shaping East Germany too, contributing indirectly to its demise through a build-up of external pressure on the state by market-driven forces, and directly after the fall of the wall, when the new German states were forced to rapidly adapt to a socioeconomic order. Indeed, the economic tabula rasa in East Germany meant that the neoliberal project was implemented in a more accelerated manner than in West Germany. Baer cogently charts these economic and political changes and links them to cinema—a key site of interrogating such changes due to its "dual nature as an industrial and aesthetic form" in order to make the well-founded and somewhat devastating argument that in Germany, a film's value is determined solely by its capacity to make a profit (30–31). So where does this leave German cinema? Baer argues that filmmakers who wish to comment on the machinations of the neoliberal present must necessarily navigate the fact that their mode of production is linked to representational choices, and search for new pictures and new stories to represent advanced capitalism. The films that she...

Rethinking Varieties of Capitalism and growth theory in the ICT era*

Going beyond the Varieties of Capitalism comparative analysis, a theory of advanced capitalism is developed to explain what has been driving advanced capitalism through the massive creative destruction of the information and communication technologies (ICT) revolution of recent decades. Second, it is argued – reconfiguring Varieties of Capitalism – that the advanced capitalist economies should be seen not just in terms of comparative capitalisms, but as an advanced world innovation system of interacting advanced economies. Critically, the dominant position in that system is the (hegemonic but also fragile, problematic and handicapped) United States as the world driver of radical innovation: this reflects the key role of its top research universities, their diasporas and associated deregulated high-risk-taking venture capitalist and investment banking ecosystems; its decentralised and business-porous political and legal systems; and its dominance ab initio of digitalisation. Problematic has been the major reduction since the early 1990s in Federal R&D, itself a consequence of the anti-public-expenditure Republican gridlock in Congress, and in turn the result of the political, geographical and socioeconomic polarisation associated with technological creative destruction more dramatically in the US than elsewhere. Third, it addresses the paradox – in the contemporary technologically revolutionary age – of productivity growth falling below that of the Fordist era. It is argued that Schumpeterian growth expectations play a much larger role in R&D investment in the high-sunk-cost and high-risk US-centred ICT era than in the relative stability of Fordism and Chandlerian corporations; the author sets out a simple Keynesian–Kaldorian expectations-based multiple equilibrium productivity growth model, where major crashes shift economies down to lower growth equilibria. The conclusion raises six areas of future work which stem from the approaches outlined above.

In search of varieties of capitalism: hardy perennial or troublesome weed?

Are varieties of capitalism real things in the world, or analytic artifacts that scholars project into the world? The first part of this essay considers the utility of sorting different capitalist economies into different types. We build upon Hay (2020) to argue that some varietals are both more real and more useful than others. Specifically, we argue that recent work on growth models (Baccaro and Pontusson 2016) marks a progressive extension of the Comparative Political Economy research program on advanced capitalist states. But from an International Political Economy perspective, this research program can only reach its potential by clearly determining whether the causal origins of variety lie in either unit or system-level characteristics. We argue for incorporating a more system-led explanation of variety that focuses upon fallacies of composition, power asymmetries, and credit cycles. To show this, we walk through four different arguments about system–unit relations – the ‘four Galtons’ – and add in Minsky’s argument about financial crisis cycles.

“Still not as Gay as Twilight”: Postmodern Affect, Nostalgia & Queer Twilight Renaissance during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Stephenie Meyer’s (2005) Twilight is a paranormal, young adult series chronicling the love story between 17-year-old high schooler, Bella Swan, and 104-year-old vampire, Edward Cullen. Despite Twilight’s blatant heterosexual canon, the franchise was met with widespread homophobic backlash and was seen as girly, uncool and, hence, ‘gay’. Over ten years have passed since the release of Twilight, yet thousands of former and new fans are unashamedly reclaiming the Twilight saga online. This revival began trending on various social media websites in 2018 and has continued to this day with a particular surge in popularity during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Widely known as “The Twilight Renaissance”, this unapologetic comeback is particularly prominent in online queer communities. In essence, the heart of this article traces queer affective representations by situating the Twilight Renaissance in the current pandemic state. Intertwining Raymond Williams’ (1977) structure of feelings and Frederic Jameson’s (1991) cognitive mapping, this article argues that this collective queer affect is inseparable from the neoliberal and advanced capitalist pandemic context in which it inhabits. Second, the Twilight Renaissance shall be conceptualized as an exemplar of Butt and Millner-Larsen’s (2018) queer commons, wherein queer Twihards construct a space or, in this case, fandom, in attempts to revive and repair a historically homophobic narrative. Finally, as the Twilight Renaissance is particularly informed by the current pandemic context, this article explores the ways in which this queer comeback is uniquely representative of a queer coping mechanism that directly responds to the stress and uncertainties that accompany the COVID-19 pandemic.

The antinomies of sovereigntism, statism and liberalism in European democratic responses to the COVID-19 crisis: a comparison of Britain and France

This paper argues that the current COVID-19 pandemic reveals and in a sense crystallizes a series of long-standing tensions about sovereignty that have become increasingly salient in the advanced capitalist democracies of the European Union. The spread of the pandemic led first to the activation of a conflict between a ‘sovereigntist reflex’ privileging the expression of national capacities and national self-reliance and a more ‘perforated’ understanding of sovereignty stressing the interdependence of peoples and states, both geographically and institutionally. As the response to COVID itself became more politicized we see the emergence of a second tension, between a libertarian ‘reflex’ supporting a residual state protecting liberties and facilitating individual choice and a sovereign-statist ‘instinct’, calling for an empowered guardian of the public good capable of ensuring collective security. A third tension relates to the seemingly growing opposition between a conception of sovereignty founded (and contingent) upon the will of the people and one in which the sovereign is, simultaneously, the discerner, defender and ultimate guarantor of the public good. After having mapped out these interwoven tensions and their main fault lines in general terms, the paper proceeds comparatively, tracking and tracing their (differential and specific) presence in governmental responses in two advanced capitalist democracies, France and Britain.

Evaluating the Unequal Economy: Poverty Risk, Economic Indicators, and the Perception Gap

How do citizens form evaluations of the economy? Defining features of advanced capitalism like income inequality and labor market dualization present a challenge for assessing the health of the economy based on a small set of macroeconomic indicators. This is particularly true for those whose proximity to poverty and precarious labor market position is not always reflected in the official unemployment rate. For those individuals, socio-economic segregation and the geographic concentration of poverty mean that information on poverty is more accessible and more salient than information on macroeconomic indicators which needs to be explicitly sought out. Poverty risk thus shapes how individuals evaluate the economy: at-risk individuals are less likely to rely on conventional indicators of growth and unemployment and more likely to allocate attention to the poverty rate. Analyses of public opinion data from 27 countries provide support for this argument. We further show that those at risk of poverty know less about economic performance by standard economic indicators but offer more accurate estimates of national poverty rates. These novel findings underline the need to depart from familiar indicators and address how unequal economies structure preferences and policy responses .

Global consumer society and trend of consumption in India

For sociologists and social scientists, contemporary global society has entered into the phase that is labelled as advanced capitalism, advanced industrialism, information era and post-modernity. Consumer society is a kind of characteristic feature of this phase and an ideological force underlies the global development trends. This paper has discussed the development of consumer society and its implication for social well-being. Social well-being is symbolically measured in consumer society; people’s manifested well-being is determined by consumption of industrial commodities or objects. Social well-being is again linked to the notion of ‘need’ and different standards of life define ‘need’ differently. Marcuse (1964) differentiated between true needs and false needs; false need causes variation of standard of life and objective well-being. Consumer society shows greater interest in mass production and freedom of consumption. Technological advancement particularly Web.20 (Advancement of WWW) during the beginning of 21st Century reshaped the service sectors of the world. India has become a part of global consumer society that is not a desired gain for its large weaker sections. Socio-historical inequalities like caste and class still remind us of the reality of social ill-being though affluent sections were able to attain objective well-being. Launching of Reliance Jio (Offering unlimited internet data plan at cheaper price) in 2007 marked the beginning of new digital life and mass consumption among Indian people, as it created a new service industry in the fields of food, cloth, aestheticism, entertainment and many more. But social well-being is not yet ensured; still there are large sections of the population striving for basic needs like quality education and quality healthcare. Until capability equality is achieved, social well-being in Indian society will be a utopia.

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

Habermas’ Colonization Thesis in the Digital Network: Pandemic Resistance in Advanced Capitalism

As scholars anticipate the structural reconfigurations arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, resistance to pandemic measures remains a site of rich discussion. While previous researchers have studied anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and anti-lockdown action, here called anti-restriction movements, as a series of actions informed by individual characteristics like psychological profiles, political leanings, or gender, this paper emphasizes how anti-restriction actions evolved into social movements articulating the antagonisms between state and subject. This paper applies Jürgen Habermas’s theory of New Social Movements (NSMs) to theorize anti-restriction movements as reactions to bureaucratic and economic regulation in cultural and private life. Habermas’s original theory assigned NSMs a radical potential in reinvigorating public political discourse and democratic processes which remains to be seen today. By contrasting the discourses of anti-restriction movements in Indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico and suburban communities in Orange County, California, this paper describes how profit-driven market algorithms steer social movements away from their radical potential towards sensationalism and misinformation. Not only do social media platforms “colonize” communication on the national level, but western countries’ control of social media platforms “digitally colonizes” peripheral countries by redirecting subaltern social movements with the hybridized discourses of imperial nations.

Reclaiming the knowledge society from “urban economization”: thinking with the Frankfurt School

Since the 1990s, much political capital has been invested to develop advanced capitalist states as knowledge-based societies. In this paper, we first discuss how this development has been characterized by knowledge-based economization, i. e. the generation of economic value through extracting knowledge and human capital more broadly. Such capital-centered development has marginalized alternative processes of building knowledge-based societies based on social value and progressive politics. We argue that the processes of knowledge-based economization are spatially polarizing and highlight the strategic value of large cities as laboratories of innovation and economic value generation more generally. This urban emphasis does not only produce hinterlands but also narrows down the idea of the urban as instrumental value. We further suggest that knowledge-based economization hinges on pervasive “spatial theories”, such as specific types of urban economics. Second, we discuss the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in order to rethink the ways in which the knowledge-based society can be re-worked spatially and socially on the basis of social values and related knowledge generation. Here, we explore Adorno’s thoughts on education as transmitter between theory and practice. In sum, we argue how Adorno’s take on education offers an approach for transforming the contemporary capitalist, often exclusive and polarizing, knowledge economy into a more inclusive knowledge-based society.

EMPOWERMENT OF BUSINESS SERVICE COOPERATIVES PASIR BATANG SEJAHTERA IN CREATIVE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE COFFEE SECTOR, KARANGSARI VILLAGE, KUNINGAN REGENCY

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Understandings of Food Insecurity in Aotearoa New Zealand: Considering Practitioners’ Perspectives in a Neoliberal Context Using Q Methodology

Food insecurity in advanced capitalist nations has persisted over decades despite excess food production, welfare systems, and charitable responses. This research examines the perspectives of practitioners who engage with food insecurity in Aotearoa New Zealand using a Q methodology study to synthesise and characterise three typical subjective positions. Consensus across the three positions includes the state’s responsibility for the food security of citizens, while points of contention include the role of poverty as a cause of food insecurity and the significance of a human right to food. The research contributes to research into food insecurity in advanced capitalist nations by identifying areas of consensus and contention among food insecurity practitioners, identifying the significance of children and moral failure in perceptions of food insecurity, and comparing practitioners’ perspectives to existing approaches to researching food insecurity in advanced capitalist nations.

Anke Hassel, Bruno Palier (ur.): Growth and Welfare in Advanced Capitalist Economies − How Have Growth Regimes Evolved?

This extensive book is the result of longer ones research that began in 2014 and considers the main economic challenges facing advanced industrial democracies faced since the early 1990s and government responses on them. There are three clearly defined goals of the book: First, expand our understanding of how political economy has changed since the 1970s; second, to analyze the contribution of governments to these changes, looking at their growth strategies and third, to shed light on and analyze the role of reforms social policy systems in these transformations. In short, this book also shows gives a general understanding of the evolution of the regime growth in the advanced capitalist OECD countries.

Languages for a pandemic: The case of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic not only affected the health of people across the world, but also triggered a multitude of different positions, ideas and conceptualisations that were disseminated via different communication media. This has given rise to an overabundance of communication, often referred to as an infodemic. The result has been the inception of a number of different (political) positions that resorted to different stories and storytelling techniques. These included traditional metaphors used with a different meaning, new narrative techniques and new terminology. The variety of stories contributed to the creation of a system of conceptualisations which, conversely, generated new linguistic forms, thus creating a type of circle of linguistic and cognitive innovation. The new conceptual systems can be represented as a system of frames à la Fillmore (1985) and are the basis for of an autonomous cultural perspective. In the light of this assumption, some aspects of this overwhelming wave of information are analysed, without any possibility of being exhaustive, bearing in mind that the pandemic is not yet over. An important phenomenon that can be already observed is the globalisation of stories, myths and language. Stories and words that originated in one country are transferred immediately to other countries, at least within a given area, the one with advanced capitalism. This is probably due not only to the vast use of social media, but also to a common culture that makes certain given conceptualisations acceptable by the societies involved. This is a good example of cultural globalisation.