Capital Regime Research Articles

The Right to Deletion: Identity, Memory, and Surveillance Capitalism

This article considers “the right to deletion” enacted under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 and uses the right as a lens through which to contemplate (1) memory, identity, and forgetting in the digital age; (2) the erosion of the privacies of life and the notion of “home” in the context of ubiquitous technologies; and (3) a new form of instrumentarian power created by surveillance capitalist regimes that aims to make individuals into known and knowable entities for economic ends as well as the implications of this form of power for the values of dignity, democracy and privacy. It is suggested that the reclaiming of forgetting is necessary for human growth and agency and that the reclaiming of “home” is required as a shelter for the privacies of life, intimacy, and freedom. The argument is also made that the right to deletion should be understood within the context of the increasing loss of privacy within societies under techno-capitalist control.

Forex Mortgages and Housing Access in the Reconfiguration of Hungarian Politics after 2008

After a boom in foreign-currency denominated (forex) mortgage loans in the 2000s and the resulting debt crisis in 2008-2009, Hungary’s debt management came to be defined by a highly politicised combination of several phenomena: the existence of a large social base at risk of defaulting on their mortgages; the integration of debtors’ struggles into a shift from the post-socialist dominance of neoliberalism to a national conservative political hegemony during the crisis years; and the political foregrounding of forex debt management in the post-2010 Orbán governments’ construction of a new financial model as part of a post-neoliberal authoritarian capitalist regime. The article traces how two main aspects of the forex mortgage crisis, housing debt under dependent financialisation and the problem of limited housing access, became integrated into Hungary’s electoral politics and macroeconomic transformation in the last decade.

The New Regime of Free Trade and Transnational Capital in Turkey

ABSTRACT Based on the philosophy of internal relations, this study examines the dialectical relationship between internal and external factors, which shaped the emergence and transformation of transnational capital in Turkey. The study examines the expansion of global free trade through uneven and combined development, which derives its forms of existence and contradictions from historically specific social formations. This study uncovers how the expansion of global free trade with the so-called ‘emerging powers’ can be understood with specific reference to transnational capital in Turkey. It then argues that unevenness is always created at the global and regional level and shows how the state and transnational capital in Turkey have combined with global imperialism to produce the current phase of capitalism in Turkey. It suggests that global free trade deepened the time- and scale-based unevenness between the different fractions of capital in Turkey, which has given an uncontested hegemony to transnational capital over other capital fractions. In conclusion, it examines the impact of the global economic crisis, which started in 2018 and intensified with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 on the operations of the state and transnational capital in Turkey.

Rethinking the Political Economy of Development in Mao's China

AbstractThis article examines two theoretical frameworks used to evaluate Maoist development. The first is based on neoclassical economic theory, and the second is rooted in the idea that the Chinese Communist Party made China into a state capitalist regime. Both these theoretical frameworks presume to know what economic practices the CCP should have engaged in and fault the Party for not conforming to their standards of judgment. This article finds this normative approach to analyzing Maoist development to be wanting for four reasons. In its drive to depict China as acting anomalously, this normative standpoint insufficiently attends to the empirical specificities of economic activities of the Mao era. It does not take enough into account how China's socialist identity shaped the CCP's economic initiatives. Nor does it dig deep enough into how the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War influenced Chinese development. This way of writing the history of the Mao period also overlooks similarities between China and other developmental states in Cold War East Asia. This article calls on historians to adopt a different approach to the study of Chinese development and scour available documentation with the aim of comprehending the economic practices of Mao's China on their own terms.

Tweeting ourselves to death: the cultural logic of digital capitalism

Media scholarship has long argued that public discourse is a function of the architecture of the media by which it is carried. Media architecture is, as political economists have argued, in turn shaped by the capitalist regime of accumulation within which the media operate. This paper draws together these two strands of literature to ask: as the accumulation of data is coming to define contemporary capitalism, what cultural logic does this produce? The paper argues that, as media are shaped around the extracting user data, they become organized around personhood and the extension of commodification deeper into our sense of self. The lifestyle fragmentation and segmentation engendered by new media technologies carry over into public discourse, shaping a public, and political life defined by identity and difference. If, as Neil Postman suggested, a society’s way of knowing reflects its media technology, the emerging epistemology of the social media society is truth as identity, as our very ways of knowing are reduced to expressions of who we are.

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949–2017

This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary during the period 1949 to 2017, using surnames to measure social status. In those years, there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian People’s Republic (1949–1989), which was a communist regime with an avowed aim of favouring the working class. The second is the modern liberal democracy (1989–2017), which is a free-market economy. We find five surprising things. First, social mobility rates were low for both upper- and lower-class families during 1949–2017, with an underlying intergenerational status correlation of 0.6–0.8. Second, social mobility rates under communism were the same as in the subsequent capitalist regime. Third, the Romani minority throughout both periods showed even lower social mobility rates. Fourth, the descendants of the eighteenth-century noble class in Hungary were still significantly privileged in 1949 and later. And fifth, although social mobility rates did not change measurably during the transition, the composition of the political elite changed rapidly and sharply.

TINA and the Market Turn: Why Deindustrialization Proceeded under Democratic Capitalism but Not State Socialism

Deindustrialization was one of the most disruptive social transformations of the twentieth century. Why did democratic capitalist regimes permit and survive this process, while state socialist regimes did not? Drawing on historical evidence from the United Kingdom, Poland, and the United States, this article advances two mechanisms as explanation: first, enabled by the polity-economy distinction characteristic of capitalism, the belief that “there is no alternative” (TINA) could appear credible in the West but not the East. Second, the Western turn toward market-led deindustrialization reduced the economic costs of deindustrialization and, more important, deprived unrest in the West of focal points for protest, lowering political costs too. Strengthening the case for these two mechanisms, I rule out four alternative explanations: generic inefficiency in planned economies, differential elite views on the necessity of structural change, immediate acquiescence by Western electorates or unions, and a uniquely successful return to high growth rates in the West.

Six forms of hierarchy for a theoretical analysis of capitalism

The paper develops a conceptual analysis, which aims at refining the general concept of capitalism through an inquiry about the forms of hierarchy it involves. It is argued that the capitalist regime exhibits a series of specific attributes that have been so far underinvestigated together and are here comprehensively elucidated via the deepening of the concept of hierarchy. Qualitatively, the capitalist social structure is ambivalent, as it is neither the strict arborescent hierarchy exhibited by the feudal society, nor the flat partition displayed by the pure market economy; and the complex structure of the capitalist firm is an encompassing hierarchy, capital and labor being associated in a production process ruled by capital. Quantitatively, the capitalist pyramidal hierarchies of income and of wealth are essentially mobile, through the dynamics of market sanction and asset evaluation; and the relationship between capital bets and profit gains draws a tangled hierarchy as these returns are reinvested. All these capitalist hierarchies are typically economic, situational hierarchies arising when capitalists do not dominate the political order of power or in the social order of prestige. Finally, echoing post Keynesian perspectives, the conception of capitalism as a hierarchical phenomenon underlines its monetary structure and its self-transforming nature.

Practicing (State) Capitalism at Petrobras and Rosneft

ABSTRACT Why do state capitalist regimes, while aiming to increase control over the economy, introduce partial privatization and liberalization at their national oil companies (NOCs)? The article presents a case study and discourse analysis of liberalizing reforms to the management of “Health, Safety, and Environment” at the Russian and Brazilian NOCs. Employing a constructivist political economy approach emphasizing the co-constitution of state power and market power, it argues that adopting the practices of effective oil multinationals allows NOCs to represent themselves as capitalist corporations – not state bureaucracies – and thereby better fulfill their coordinating function in state-permeated market economies.

On the Interdependence of Liberal and Illiberal/Authoritarian Legal Forms in Racial Capitalist Regimes…The Case of the United States

Scholars conventionally distinguish between liberal and illiberal, or authoritarian, legal orders. Such distinctions are useful but often simplistic and misleading, as many regimes are governed by plural, dual, or hybrid legal institutions, principles, and practices. This is no less true for the United States, which often is misidentified as the paradigmatic liberal constitutional order. Historical and critical scholarship, including recent studies of law under racial capitalism, provide reason to identify American law as a dual state in which legal forms that govern property ownership, contract relations, and civil liberties of free citizens differ from the more illiberal, authoritarian legal forms that rule over subaltern populations, particularly racialized, low-wage workers, Indigenous populations, the poor, immigrants, and women. This dual state, we argue, did undergo changes to adopt more procedurally liberal, professional, overtly deracialized legal forms after World War II, but these changes masked more than tamed the continuing illiberal, authoritarian violence that targeted marginalized citizens. While constantly changing, the American legal system is best understood not as a singular liberal order but instead as a hybrid system of mutually constitutive liberal and illiberal and authoritarian legal practices.

Introduction: Urban Precarity

AbstractCities have long been associated with precarity. This link seems to have intensified under contemporary global regimes of capitalism, with both popular and academic discourses noting the risks that come with building and inhabiting urban environments. The introduction to this special issue reflects on the various ways in which anthropology has engaged with the relationship between “urbanity” and “precarity.” It argues that current work on precarity either favors the experiences of the Global North or sidelines the urban dimension. Studies that overcome these obstacles, moreover, are largely crystalizing around discussions of infrastructure and securitization. We offer the notion of “urban precarity” as a call for ethnography that cross‐germinates developments in urban studies with those made in our understanding of precarity. By foregrounding the urban, the ethnography collated here suggests that in the cities of late capitalism, precarity emerges as a multifaceted condition, encapsulating not only legal and economic deprivation but also moral, spiritual, political, and health‐related uncertainties. As the protagonists of our ethnography struggle to deal with the many threats bearing down upon them, precarity is also revealed as a condition conducive to world‐building and social transformation, although such forms of creative agency are highly experimental and liable to backfire.

The Beetle or the Bug? Multispecies Politics in a West Papuan Oil Palm Plantation

ABSTRACTThis article examines how Indigenous Marind communities in West Papua conceptualize interspecies relations in monocrop oil palm ecologies. Many villagers identify with native species that, like Marind, are displaced or dispossessed to make way for plantations and their primarily non‐Papuan labor force and operators. On the other hand, parasites that undermine oil palm's growth become figures of hope for Marind who conceive resistance to the state and corporations as the only legitimate path to self‐determination. Meanwhile, species that entertain mutualistic relations with oil palm point to cooperation and accommodation as an alternative strategy of survival. Oil palm's multispecies lifeworld thus complicates the characterization of industrial monocrops as ecologically impoverished landscapes engineered solely by and for humans. Attending to oil palm's biological allies and foes as material‐semiotic actors brings us instead to ask what species benefit from agribusiness expansion, which lives and deaths matter within plantation ecologies, and to whom. It also invites attention to the conflictual horizons of justice offered by interspecies resistance and collaboration in the Plantationocene for Indigenous communities as they strive to reconcile their aspirations for survival and self‐determination under entrenched regimes of race and capital. [collaboration, resistance, political ecology, pests, Indonesia]

Exploring the nexus between human capital and environmental degradation: The case of EU countries

Human capital investments have a vital role in economic growth. Therefore the effects of human capital on the environment should be analyzed for sustainable economic growth. This paper contributes to the debate on the nexus between human capital and environmental degradation. Based on 21 EU countries’ panel data over the period 1994–2018, this study aims to analyze the relationship between human capital and environmental pollution in different financial development levels. We employed the panel smooth transition regression model (PSTR) to assess the nexus between the variables. According to the estimation results, human capital decreases carbon emissions in the low growth regime whereas increases in the high growth regime. Besides, human capital increases carbon emissions in both low regimes of financial development and human capital, and decreases in high regimes. The analysis indicated that as human capital improves, there will be more innovation to protect the environment, and thus there is less environmental degradation.

Lenin’s ideas on revolution: Are they still relevant today?

Lenin provided the intellectual foundation of Bolshevik political practice. He combined political economy, geopolitics, political organisation and a sociology of social structure to form an innovative revolutionary praxis. The Bolshevik seizure of power and subsequent Soviet economic and political development became a model for revolutionary socialist parties, notably in China. The author contends that he had an over-optimistic prediction for the disintegration of monopoly capitalism and only a partial analysis of the working classes in the advanced capitalist countries. Consequently, expected socialist revolutions have not occurred in the advanced capitalist countries. When the preconditions for revolution are absent, a complementary dimension to Lenin is the endorsement of reform and participation in capitalist regimes. The dismantling of the Soviet Union and the eastern European communist regimes in the late twentieth century, and the reversion to private property and competitive market relations, delivered a mortal blow to the communist system. Today, Lenin’s political approach requires a redefinition of countervailing forces and class alliances and a shift of focus from the semi-periphery to the ‘strongest links’ in the capitalist chain. The author considers that a ‘return to Lenin’ is not to adopt his policies, but a prompt to reinvent a socialist political and economic vision derived from Marx’s analysis of capitalism.

Is archaeology conceivable within the degrowth movement?

AbstractSince the 1980s, archaeology has been further embedded in a reinforced and accelerating capitalist ideology, namely neo-liberalism. Most archaeologists had no alternative but to adapt to it through concessions to the free-market economy and to the so-called mitigations taking place within development. However, it is now apparent that the ongoing global socio-ecological disaster we are facing cannot be reversed with compromises but rather with a radical engagement against the injunctions of competition and growth. I suggest that we must anticipate the necessary transformations of archaeology in the coming decades, before archaeology becomes a technical avatar of the neo-liberal dogma, or before its complete annihilation for being deemed ‘superfluous’ (Wurst 2019, 171) by the capitalist regime. In this paper, I will use the idea of ‘degrowth’ to propose a new paradigm for archaeology by applying the concepts of civil disobedience, voluntary simplicity, redistribution of means and the ethics of no-growth.

Conceptual review of capital structure under risk-based capital regime, risk profile of insurer’s and performance

This paper evaluates capital structure under risk-based capital regime from the perspective of insurance firms and its performance. It also evaluates the moderating effect of insurer’s risk profile on capital-performance relationship. The authors aim to reveal ambiguities, gaps and omissions in the literature and to sketch avenues for future research. A conceptual framework for capital structure under risk-based capital era and its application is suggested focusing on equity, technical provision and required risk propensity for maximizing profit and wealth for all stakeholders. The research reviews that capital structure of insurers differs from non-insurance firms as such risk-based capital regulation must not only focus on the various types of risk but also recognized these differences. It is shown that insurers’ capital structure contains equity and technical provisions which comprises accruals and creditors, payable claims and insurance funds as an alternative of equity and financial debt as it is with conventional non insurance firms. This study thus stressed that for capital structure to best explain performance of insurers, it must be measured by equity ratio and technical provision ratio in place of debt ratio and corporate risk profile (quantitative and qualitative) must enter its sequence of performance relational analysis and effectiveness equations. We stressed further that only with the proposed conceptual framework would a holistic understanding of insurer’s capital structure be achieved while the observed contradictory and inconclusive empirical findings on capital structure and firm performance could be resolved.

Financialization and state capitalism in Hungary after the Global Financial Crisis

Whereas the active role of the state in steering financialization is consensual in advanced economies, the financialization of emerging market economies is usually examined through the prism of dependency: this downplays the domestic political functions of financialization and the agency of the state. With the consolidation of state capitalist regimes in the semi-periphery after the Global Financial Crisis, different interpretations emerged – some linking state capitalism with de-financialization, others with coercive projects deepening it. Preferring a more granular and multi-dimensional approach, I analyse how different facets of financialization might represent political risks or opportunities for state capitalist projects: Based on the Hungarian example, I first explain how the constitution of a ‘financial vertical’ after 2010 inaugurated a new mode of statecraft. Second, I show how the financial vertical enabled rentier bargains between state and society after 2015 by deepening the financialization of social policy and housing in response to a looming crisis of competitiveness.

Towards a comprehensive understanding of intercity cooperation in China’s city-regionalization: A comparative study of Shenzhen-Hong Kong and Guangzhou-Foshan city groups

Against the backdrop of city-regionalization of Chinese urban jurisdictions, both the integration of urban-rural land-use and the conservation of arable land resources are under unprecedented challenges. It calls for intensive and systematic intercity cooperation. To understand the intercity cooperation’s features and mechanisms, this article formulates a three-pronged conceptual framework composed of frequencies of cooperative activities, thematic areas of cooperation, and governance model. Empirically, we carried out a comparative analysis of the cooperation models of Shenzhen-Hong Kong and Guangzhou-Foshan in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area. We have unveiled, two prevalent typologies of China’s intercity cooperation, which are moulded by de facto (shared) geopolitical scale, divergent deepening mechanisms, and concrete politico-economic setting. Specifically, the geographical and administrative scale (level) helps elicit domestic market-induced cooperation and strong state commitments. Situated within different politico-economic settings, a high level of non-state involvements is forged under the confluence of the exported-oriented economy of Shenzhen and the capitalist regime of Hong Kong. In contrast, the Guangzhou-Foshan city group witnesses the “state-dominated model” under China’s developmental state context. In both cases, local non-state actors’ initiatives substantiate the core collaborative practices, while regional planning visions get drafted subsequently by the state bodies. The latter further broadens and intensifies the intercity cooperations.

Double Erasure Under 21st Century Virtual Capitalism

ABSTRACT This article traces the mechanism of social erasure under various regimes of global capitalism. It proposes that the current regime of virtual global capitalism has shifted the way that erasure functions in the 21st century. The article delineates new mechanisms of erasure called “double erasure.” The article then traces double erasure in the lives of Black men. Finally, proposals are made as to how social work and human services might respond to double erasure in ways that reaffirm the world of living material social relations.

A feminist manifesto of resistance against intellectual property regimes: reclaiming the public domain as an open-access information commons

This commentary article examines how the commodity form of knowledge – enclosed within the rigid structures of intellectual property (IP) – bears the imprint of Eurocentric, patriarchal, and capitalist forces which produced IP regimes. The commoditization of knowledge is a process mediated by historical asymmetries of power. This manifesto makes the argument that liberating knowledge production from oppressive histories and hierarchical structures – instead, locating it within a reclaimed public domain – is a necessarily feminist and decolonial enterprise. Knowledge producers everywhere are invited to interrupt the continued appropriation of knowledge by capitalism by refusing to participate in corporatized intellectual property regimes. Those who inhabit or are adjacent to dominant structures of power can affirm alternative mediations of intellectual value rooted in feminist and decolonial theories of community, commons, and exchange, rather than legalistic and capitalist property regimes that favour corporations and hyper-individualism.