Crisis Of Capitalism Research Articles

‘Responsible investment’: ESG and the post-crisis ethical order

This paper looks at recent forms of ‘responsible investment’. It follows the use of ESG within a large global bank. ESG is a valuation technique that takes into account environmental, social and governance issues. Drawing on ethnographic data, the paper explores how ESG has become an accepted concept among financial analysts, and looks at how they implement it in their everyday calculations. It argues that ESG enables financial analysts to understand factors related to corporate responsibility as market signals and to use them to support their investment narratives. It concludes that the application of ESG has transformed ‘responsible investment’ from a normative attempt to increase the morality of investing into a speculative practice of valuation. This creates profit from current social contention and crises of capitalism.

Reflections on the Winnipeg General Strike and the future of workers’ struggles

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was a local working-class revolt that challenged the hegemony of capital in a moment of crisis for the ruling class in Canada. Although its particular scenario is unlikely to be repeated, the trajectories and consequences of capital accumulation and ecological crisis make a different historically-specific kind of class-wide upsurge a future possibility, and this affects the interpretation of the Winnipeg General Strike as a historical event.

(Re)Enter the Monster: COVID-19 and the Crisis of Capitalism. An Interview with Mike Davis

(Re)Enter the Monster: COVID-19 and the Crisis of Capitalism. An Interview with Mike Davis

On economic inequality and schools of economic thought

The question of inequality is not new in the history of economic thought; from the very birth of political economy as an independent discipline, the issues of the distribution of wealth, poverty and economic inequality were present. Obviously, the subject exceeds the disciplinary field of the economists because, as Piketty has pointed out at the beginning of his book: “... the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers. It is of interest to everyone, and that is a good thing”. However, among economists the issue has become more important in recent years because of the deepening of the level of inequality that has accompanied the process of growth and globalization of the world economy. Transformations that accompanied the emergence of capitalism since the nineteenth century raised the first questions, and its evolution throughout the twentieth century and in the current century have faced different responses from different economic schools. Some very relevant questions which political economy can help answer are: Does capitalism inevitably lead to greater inequality? Or does the market mechanism itself tend to reduce inequalities? Does greater inequality contribute to economic growth? Or does inequality just cause cyclical crises? This last two questions are very relevant for less developed (emerging?) countries. The history of economic thought shows us that economists have given different answers, at different times of the evolution of economic ideas. In this paper the vision that the main thinkers of political economy have had on this issue is reviewed. Among the latter are the classical school, the extreme optimism of Adam Smith and Jean B. Say, the doubts on the future of David Ricardo, the negative predictions of Malthus and the eclecticism of Mill. Marx and his ideas about the fall of capitalism. Neoclassical blind confidence in the markets and Keynes and the capitalist crises. Lastly, a final consideration is made about the reality of inequality in the 21st century, neoliberalism and the commitment of economists as intellectuals.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Mari Yoshihara, Editor For the first time in the history of the association, the ASA annual meeting, in November 2019, took place in Honolulu. For American Quarterly, it was fortuitous that the Honolulu meeting coincided with the midpoint of the Hawai‘i-based team’s ten-year tenure as the journal’s editorial home. In close collaboration with the program committee, ASA president Scott Kurashige conceived the meeting under the theme “Build as We Fight,” calling for resistance to the interlocked systems of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and neoliberal dispossession, and for the creation of alliances and communities from the ground up. The history of Hawaiian Renaissance and Indigenous resurgence, especially in the midst of the movement for protection of Mauna Kea, has offered humbling and inspiring lessons for ASA members and scholars, activists, and artists committed to Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, queer love and care, and alliance building across boundaries. Through over five hundred panels, workshops, and tours, the groundbreaking conference realized Kurashige’s and the association’s vision and commitment that we hope to practice in the pages of the journal. Kurashige’s presidential address published in this issue, “‘Unruly Subjects’: American Studies from Antidiscipline to Revolutionary Praxis,” traces the emergence of the ASA as home for those from outside the institutional history of the field, points to the crisis of liberal capitalism and ruptures it has created, and illustrates examples of scholar–activist work seeking to build the revolution toward a new social order, such as the work of Detroit-based Grace Lee Boggs. We have asked two such scholar–activists to respond to Kurashige’s address. Taking up Kurashige’s alternative genealogy of American Studies, Curtis Marez reflects on the recent history of Chicana/o studies and American studies. He discusses its significance for contemporary border fascism and the hope offered by student activism against deportation as an act of “building as we fight.” Noura Erakat takes Kurashige’s message and the inspiration of the Hawaiian liberation movement on and off Mauna Kea to Palestine, where conditions of surveillance, militarism, exclusion, and national supremacy portend an uncertain future that also overflow with promises of life and resurgence, partly through transnational solidarity, which she examines in an essay also included in this journal. This issue features six essays that coalesce and speak well with one another around a few themes: species, environment, and settler colonialism; racialization and othering in nation and empire building; race, solidarity, and anti-imperialism. [End Page v] In his ambitious and fascinating “Grizzly Country: Settler Worlding and the Politics of Species on the California Frontier,” Daniel Rivers traces the history of Native people and grizzlies that coexisted for fourteen thousand years until the genocide and eradication by settler colonial violence. Through interdisciplinary analysis of this history, Rivers examines how the slippages between the human and nonhuman in settler projects formed the underside of the violent remaking of California. In “The Bison and the Cow: Food, Empire, Extinction,” John Levi Barnard turns our attention to the interrelated symbolic and material values of two species within American exceptionalist historiography and neoliberal environmentalism. By demonstrating that the bison has symbolized the tragic but inevitable “vanishing” of Indigenous societies and ecosystems, whereas the cow has figured as a veneer of “sustainability” in the globalized economy, Barnard points to the dangers of conservation without decolonization. Jacob Crane tracks the long history of varied deployments of Article 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which declares that “the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” and argues that the article’s lasting influence lies in how Christian nationalists and emergent secularists alike used the text to articulate a national character in opposition to the perceived otherness of the Muslim world. Focusing on the life of Stephen Glori, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s first Filipino student who later joined an Indian show and identified as a Pueblo, Alyssa A. Hunziker situates the school in US colonial projects both at home and abroad, and also argues that schools like Carlisle inadvertently fostered alternative transnational kinship networks among Filipino and Native students. Through a reading of Mike Gold...

For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greece by CareNotes Collective

Reviewed by: For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greeceby CareNotes Collective Heath Cabot (bio) CareNotes Collective, For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greece. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions. 2020. Pp. 110. Paper $15.00. For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greeceis a collection of essays and interviews focused around radical healthcare [End Page 571]movements in Greece. Initiated by the CareNotes Collective, the book is grounded on the premise that—in the ongoing crisis of capitalism—there are crucial lessons to be learned from individuals and collectives in Greece that have responded to entrenched economic downturn, and the violence of austerity, by reconfiguring how care is conceptualized, organized, and (re)distributed. As the Collective notes in Chapter One, the book seeks to "illuminate the radical imaginings and creation of new care spaces that will allow us to build power to confront the systemic crises we face collectively" (12). As I write this review, the United States is closing in on 80,000 deaths from Covid-19. Who knows where we will be once it is published? Covid-19 has thrown into relief the extraordinary (if not unexpected) costs of privatized, profit-driven healthcare; the flows of people, goods, money, and contagions that accompany global capitalism; and the ways in which a constant focus on the health of markets renders lives expendable (Stuckler and Basu 2013)—even on a massive scale. In the past few weeks, municipalities and communities across the United States have responded in highly variable, often contradictory, ways. My own small neighborhood in Pittsburgh is a microcosm of these variations, as well as the entrenched individualism through which ideas of health and the good are almost always inflected in this country. I hear guidelines to "shelter in place" met with frustration as an infringement on freedom (individual freedom, of course—I cringe to think how my neighbors would respond to the lockdown measures that stereotypically noncompliant populations of the European South have followed with great self-sacrifice). Neighborly requests that people wear masks in businesses and on the street engender not just friendly compliance but also responses like, why don't you stay home? Or, if you don't like how we conduct things go somewhere else. Getting back to business is persistently framed as more urgent than cutting down on infections and deaths. But there has also been an explosion of networks of mutual aid, a term that I myself first encountered in Greece, in Greek, and which I heard increasingly frequently when I began research on the social solidarity initiatives that began to emerge in Greece in the early 2010s. These initiatives focus on horizontalized forms of redistribution (of medicines and care, food, education, and other crucial resources). While described as a form of mutual aid (αλληλοβοήθεια), solidarity in Greece has a much longer history—often cited as a core value in Greek rural life (Friedl 1964; Du Boulay 1972), which transferred later to urban contexts (Bakalaki 2008) and has been revivified and granted new meanings under austerity. Clearly, Covid-19, like many events codified as crises, is engendering forms of widescale critique and questioning ( krisi) challenging even us here in the United States, that bastion of individualism, to reimagine aspects [End Page 572]of health and community. Among those reimaginings are micropractices of commoning (such as those described in the preface to For Health Autonomyby Silvia Federici), either through more organized networks or informal modes of exchange and redistribution that groups of neighbors and friends have instituted. All this is to say that the premise of this collection—to learn from radical imaginings that challenge us to rethink health and care in terms of collective notions of human, multi-species, and planetary flourishing—is particularly relevant and even urgent now. This volume is quite short (just 110 pages), and the contributions are overall relatively free of jargon and engaging to read. Contributors range from engaged visitors to Greece (Cassie Thornton and Marta Perez) who seek to narrate what they learned from their meetings with local activists and stakeholders, to a variety of key figures (individual and collective) in the solidarity-based healthcare...

Whose protest? Post-capitalist transformation and antinomies of “grassroots” political struggle

The article raises the question of the role of protest activity in the formation of post-capitalist social relations. It is shown that today the intellectual discourse about post-capitalism is expanding, associated with the understanding of a number of socio-economic and technological transformations that indicate a deep crisis of capitalism and the formation of post-capitalist social relations. At the same time, the situation turns out to be contradictory, since it does not seem that the protest struggle in recent decades has acquired a distinctly class or concentrated anti-capitalist features. Protest movements increasingly clash with the interests of the “silent majority” or focus on local problems, ignoring ones that are more significant. Nevertheless, the author seeks to show that the contradictions of modern protest do not mean that capitalism is eternal, and the idea of post-capitalism has nothing to do with reality. Instead of capitalism, a new antagonistic socioeconomic formation appears, within which the pursuit of money is replaced by the “pursuit of personality”: for a bright individuality, popularity, public recognition, etc. People who predominantly adhere to post-materialist values are becoming the new dominant social stratum. Individuals who have lost their “traditional” class identity due to the rapid development of social media acquire new tools of political influence. This “class of popular persons” (the personaliat) is the main organizer and provocateur of street political activity today. However, as in the days of previous social revolutions, this does not mean that all representatives of society will benefit from the activities of the “new elites”.

O novo normal da covid-19: quando o emergencial se transforma em política educacional

This article analyzes the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on the Brazilian public school. We start from the understanding that this humanitarian tragedy is part of the framework of the organic crisis of capitalism that has been gradually destroying social policies, deteriorating the living conditions of the working class and devastating the natural world. The aim of this study is to analyze how the government has positioned itself in the face of the necessary closure of schools and how the strategy of remote education has become common sense and has been incorporated by state agencies and civil society organizations. As sources of reference in this article, the opinions and notes issued by international organizations were used, in addition to the studies of the All for Education Movement and the Innovation Center for Brazilian Education, on the situation of schools during the pandemic. The theoretical methodological framework developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci helped to problematize the performance of business fractions within the scope of the formulation of “remote teaching” as a strategy for maintaining classes during social isolation and in the defense of a return to school plan, even though the vaccine has not been created. It was concluded that both the remote education project and the plan to return to classes are part of a set of strategies promoted by the dominant fractions that aim to recover from the organic crisis of capitalism and at the same time deepen the capital offensive on public education in the country.

Crise do capital e os impactos no Serviço Social: a realidade dos/as Assistentes Sociais em Parintins- Amazonas ( Capital crisis and impacts on Social Work: the reality of Social Workers in Parintins-Amazonas)

The article analyzes some impacts of the ongoing capitalist crisis in the Social Work profession, placing it in the social and technical division of labor. Particularizes the debate in the reality of the Social Workers who work in the municipality of Parintins, state of Amazonas. The content is based on bibliographic review and documentary research which was conducted in eight Course Completion Papers - TCC of Social Work, from the last five years, presented to the Federal University of Amazonas - UFAM, Parintins campus. The analysis reveals the labor market, the socio-occupational spaces, the conditions and institutional demands (im) posed to the Social Assistants, the limitations and challenges that professionals face in the accomplishment of their actions, in addition to the tendencies towards positioning contrary to the current system, which requires the organization and collective movement of the working class in dark and capital crisis times.

Brain drain in Venezuela: the scope of the human capital crisis

ABSTRACTBrain drain, the exodus of highly skilled professionals, has a strong connection with Human Resource Development (HRD), as these experts are human capital for organizations, communities, and nations. In today’s global economy, HRD practitioners and scholars need to keep abreast of what circumstances trigger the migration of talented workers around the world and the implications for HRD. This article describes the brain drain in Venezuela. The magnitude of the talent crisis is the result of a complex combination of poor policy implementation, mismanagement, corruption, and socio-economic and political conflict. This article exposes the current realities and the repercussions the exodus of talent has had on Venezuela and the decline of a country that was once among the world’s richest, but is now an impoverished nation.

Neo-liberal Globalization, Crisis of Capitalism, and the Transformation of Korean Development Model

Neo-liberal Globalization, Crisis of Capitalism, and the Transformation of Korean Development Model

Neo-liberal Globalization, Crisis of Capitalism, and the Transformation of Korean Development Model

Neo-liberal Globalization, Crisis of Capitalism, and the Transformation of Korean Development Model

신자유주의적 전지구화(neoliberal globalization)와 자본주의의 위기, 그리고 한국 발전모델의 변화

신자유주의적 전지구화(neoliberal globalization)와 자본주의의 위기, 그리고 한국 발전모델의 변화

O mercado de trabalho formal em Bertioga sob a perspectiva de gênero

This article analyzes the formal labor market in the city of Bertioga - SP, relating the issues between population growth, work and gender, with the cut offered, year by year, since the emancipation of the municipality. The research is based on the dialectic in which it is practiced with the historicity about capitalism, and the neoliberal arrangements and finally, with the insertion of women in the labor market in the municipality of Bertioga - SP. We can analyze the contradictions of productive restructuring and raise consistent hypotheses: the structural crisis of capitalism directly interferes with the sexual division of labor and; the woman is inserted in informal and precarious jobs.

Counter-reform or Revolution: responses to capitalism in crisis

Debatedor

Darkness at Noon: Le Malheur of Capitalism in Bellow’s Later Novels

The crisis of capitalism, or what Saul Bellow dubs “the crisis of knowledge”, crystallizes the way he deconstructs and subverts the roots of modern American culture. The concepts of “darkness” and “Malheur” embody the tragic fate of capitalism and the end of history to recall Baudrillard and Fukuyama. Colin Davis relates this intellectual atmosphere to Lyotard’s theory of “after knowledge” and the postmodern condition, Lévinas’s “after ethics” and Althusser’s “after hope”. Fictionally, Bellow epitomizes this cultural backdrop in modern America by addressing the decline of civility, the agony of the artist, the end of humanism and morality in a society which is dominated by the crowd of low culture to cite Williams. Conceding that the novelist identifies “darkness”, “noon”, “Malheur” and “capitalism” with Derrida’s premises of deconstruction and Foucault’s insights about episteme theory and the archeology of knowledge, it becomes then fundamental to underpin how he gives theory and philosophy an overriding role in the purification of humanism from the burden of materialism and capitalistic democracy. Special focus is on Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and The Dean’s December (1982) as they illustrate Bellow’s gestures of deconstructing the negativity of capitalism.

As vontades, o dinheiro e o desencantamento: um ensaio sobre a tradição sociológica alemã

A atual crise estrutural do capitalismo deixa em crise também a sociologia. Tal crise nos impulsiona para uma análise dos clássicos da sociologia, sobretudo alemã, para compreendê-la. Este breve ensaio tem como objetivo a análise das concepções de modernidade presentes nas obras de Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936), Georg Simmel (1858-1918) e Max Weber (1864-1920). Deste modo, será exposto através da observação das obras dos autores, as diferenças e semelhanças entre suas formulações teóricas. A proposta é ressaltar a contribuição das matrizes teóricas desses autores para a sociologia de um modo geral.

Agents of Coloniality: Capitalism, the Market, and My Crisis with Archaeology

Recent experiences within the discipline and my fieldwork in the town of Portobelo, Panama, have left me questioning the epistemic genealogy of archaeology and the complicity between archaeological and capitalist ontologies. Observing the specter of dispossession that hangs over Portobelo as a result of Eurocentric archaeological discourses and heritage-management practices of conservation has directed me to analyze archaeological knowledge production within the coloniality of power. I contemplate how archaeology is implicated in the violence that allows capitalism to persist by examining processes of dispossession through an exploration of the relationship among archaeology, discourses of market development, and the logics of coloniality/modernity that inform them.

Authoritarian Liberalism in Contemporary Europe: methodological approaches and conceptual models

Abstract The author conducts a comparative analysis of authoritarian liberalism’s concepts in contemporary political theory. The paper deals with the main directions of interpretation of authoritarian liberalism in the framework of methodological approaches and conceptual models of neoliberalism, ordoliberalism, political liberalism, J.-W. Mueller’s ‘restrained democracy’, J. Habermas’ ‘legitimation crisis’, C. Crouch’s ‘post-democracy’, C. Macpherson’s ‘participatory democracy’, M. Wilkinson’s ‘dedemocratisation and delegalisation’, W. Streeck’s ‘democratic capitalism crisis’ and G. Majone’s ‘crypto-federalism’. The basic analytical concept is the idea of authoritarian economic liberalism, first proposed by H. Heller and K. Polanyi. This paper will sub-stantiate that in crisis and transformational periods the actualisation of authoritarian liberalism corresponds to the fundamental tension between market capitalism and representative democracy. The author conceptualises authoritarian liberalism as the practice of dedemocratisation and restrained democracy, which results in the regionalisation of radical protest against the supranational regime of political integration in Europe. Latent political authoritarianism strengthens economic liberalism, which, in turn, reinforces the further EU’s ‘liberal authoritarian transformation’. Authoritarian liberalism restricts traditional forms of representative democracy, contributing to the reanimation of populism and political radicalism. The authoritarian restriction of representative democracy can lead not only to the strengthening of market capitalism, but also to the revival of reactionary forms of ‘new nationalism’ and illiberalism. Today, the EU’s regime is transformed from a nominally rule-based structure supported by market discipline into a ‘discretionary order’ reinforced by bureaucratic power. The EU’s transnational solidarity can become a democratically legitimate tool for a de-escalation of tensions between market capitalism and representative democracy.

Introduction “Art and Technique: A Framework of Unaccomplished Promises”

I. Art and technique in the crisis of contemporary capitalism: an anthropological materialist point of view Thinking about the current relationship between art and technique implies considering the historical background of this relationship. For us today, it is the social, political and economic order that has been called advanced or late capitalism (Fredric Jameson, Ernest Mandel, Theodor W. Adorno). If art interrogates and problematizes this order intimately interrelated with modern tec...